Carl Brent Worthington and Raylene Marie Worthington are the first parents prosecuted since Oregon cracked down on faith-healing deaths nine years ago, according to legislators and legal experts. If convicted, they could spend more than six years in prison.
Until the faith-healing death of an Oregon City girl this month, members of the Followers of Christ Church appear to have lost just one child to sickness since 1999, when Oregon banned parents from treating gravely ill children solely with prayer.
Carl and Raylene Worthingon are members of the “Followers of Christ Church” in Oregon City. It’s a church with a long history of child deaths., a history that led lawmakers to eliminate legal protections for parents who practice to faith healing.
An Oregon City couple whose 15-month-old daughter died this month of medically treatable conditions surrendered to police tonight hours after a grand jury indicted them.
If prosecuted, Ava Worthington’s parents would be the first members of Oregon City’s Followers of Christ, a fundamentalist Christian denomination, to face criminal charges for failing to seek medical treatment for a gravely ill child. Of dozens of children buried since the 1950s in the Followers of Christ Church cemetery south of Oregon City, at least 21 could have been saved by medical intervention, according to a 1998 analysis by The Oregonian.
The child’s parents are members of Followers of Christ, an Oregon City church that practices spiritual healing rather than seeking medical treatment, even when children become gravely ill.