Religious Sovereignty and Group Exemptions

Conflicts between religious or spiritual beliefs and pediatric care: informed refusal, exemptions, and public funding.

Although respect for parents' decision-making authority is an important principle, pediatricians should report suspected cases of medical neglect, and the state should, at times, intervene to require medical treatment of children. Some parents' reasons for refusing medical treatment are based on their religious or spiritual beliefs. In cases in which treatment is likely to prevent death or seri...

Religious exemptions to childhood immunization statutes: reaching for a more optimal balance between religious freedom and public health.

On religious and secular exemptions: A case study of childhood vaccination waivers

This paper analyses exemptions to general law through the prism of vaccine waivers in the United States. All US states legally require the vaccination of children prior to school or daycare entry; however, this obligation is accompanied with a system of medical, religious, and/or philosophical exemptions. Nonmedical exemptions became subject of discussion after the 2015 Disneyland measles outbr...

Neuromodulation of group prejudice and religious belief.

People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts. Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes,...

The Public Health Implications of Religious Exemptions: A Balance Between Public Safety and Personal Choice, or Religion Gone Too Far?

The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.