Christian parents let their baby die while awaiting a miracle. They'll be in jail for a month.
Blair and Taylor Edwards’ 30-day sentence has reignited outrage over Followers of Christ Church’s deadly beliefs
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Blair and Taylor Edwards, two Christian parents who let their sick newborn baby die because they didn’t want to call a doctor, were just sentenced to 30 days in jail. The light punishment comes with a promise to seek out professional medical care for their three other children and a plea to members of their Christian anti-medicine cult to do the same.
The tragic story began on June 24, 2023, when Taylor gave birth to her son Hayden at home. Everything was fine until the morning of June 26, when Hayden stopped eating. His lips turned blue. Hours later, he stopped breathing, only to start again after his mother poured cold water on him. 30 minutes later, he was dead.
At no point in those five hours did the parents call doctors for help. Instead, they invited over family and friends to “pray and anoint the sick baby” with oil.
That’s because all these people belong to the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon, whose members are told prayers fix everything and medical interventions for children are unnecessary. Since 2011, when Oregon’s legislature finally removed “faith healing” as a legal defense for murder, three other couples from the same church have been prosecuted for killing their own kids. And that’s an improvement from the past. Over the last three decades, at least 21 children born to members of this church have been sacrificed because of their parents’ devotion to their religious delusions. Most of those parents were not sent to prison because the law treated their faith as immunity against prosecution.
So why did the Edwards receive such a light sentence? One expert testified that Hayden could have died even with medical intervention, but the judge and prosecutors agreed the parents still committed a crime by failing to get proper help:
[Senior Deputy District Attorney Rusty] Amos said the medical examiner ruled Hayden died from hyperbilirubinemia, an excessive amount of bilirubin in the blood, which leads to jaundice.
He said the medical examiner also said that she could not say “with medical and scientific certainty” that medical intervention would have saved the boy.
Untreated jaundice can lead to a potentially fatal condition known as kernicterus, a form of brain damage. The condition is rare in the U.S., Amos said.
He told the judge that even though “the statistics suggest strongly that there was a very, very high probability that by taking Hayden to the doctor, he could have survived,” prosecutors worried they could not prove the couple’s failure to call for medical help led to their son’s death.
The Edwards eventually pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal mistreatment. That felony charge could have landed them up to five years in prison each. But as part of a deal that will give them a shorter jail sentence, they will be on probation for five years and monitored to make sure their other children—including future ones—are getting regular medical care.
The probation terms require the couple to sign a release for the children’s medical documents to be seen by the probation officer or a Department of Human Services official and allow the probation officer and DHS to speak with the kids’ physician.
If the couple has another child or adopts a baby, they will have 72 hours to notify the probation officer and take the child to an accredited physician.
That’s a good start. As much as I want them to receive a harsher punishment for their negligence, it may be more problematic for their other children, including one who was born several months ago (after Hayden’s death), to have their parents away for so long. The plea deal makes some sense when you look at it that way.
The couple also issued a public statement acknowledging what they did wrong:
Under the terms of their agreement with prosecutors, the Edwards prepared a statement that Blair Edwards read aloud in court. In it, he said he and his wife “should have reached out for medical care when Hayden went into distress.”
He acknowledged the value of medical care.
“We do understand that medical intervention can be necessary to preserve and enhance life,” he said, reading from the statement. “We accept the need to have our children have the necessary medical care for their well-being and health.”
He said the couple cannot mandate that their fellow church members seek medical care, but he said he and his wife “ask the members of our church to take our loss as motivation and ask you to reach out for medical intervention and care for the physical wellbeing of your children.”
I would take that public statement a little more seriously, though, if another couple from the same church hadn’t said virtually the same damn things when they were sentenced for the same damn reason.
In 2018, Sarah Elaine Mitchell and Travis Lee Mitchell were both sentenced to over six years in prison. Their newborn daughter Ginnifer had been born premature and suffered from acute respiratory distress syndrome. She could have survived with medical intervention. But her parents chose to pray instead, so she died. After their sentencing, they also acknowledged their mistake:
In an unusual development, the Mitchells not only acknowledged their failure to provide necessary medical care for their newborn but also said in a statement read aloud by one of their lawyers that "everyone in the church should always seek adequate medical care for our children.''
What’s the point of statements like these when it’s clear the members of that church don’t take any of them seriously? The Edwards rejected medical care for their baby years after that statement was delivered. That means the church still isn’t telling members to take their sick babies to the doctor despite families urging them to do so as they’re being whisked away to jail.
Given how meaningless the statements are, there’s no reason to include them in any plea deal.
What happened with Hayden was not an isolated incident. It’s the predictable outcome of a toxic religious ideology that sacrifices children on the altar of superstition. When parents are led to believe that prayer is superior to medicine, their children can become collateral damage in their war against reality.
30 days in jail won’t undo the fact that Hayden’s likely died not because help was unavailable, but because his parents and their church chose to do nothing. And now, just as with the Mitchells, the Edwards are saying out loud something they know the people in their church won’t believe.
That right there is the problem with “faith healing.” It’s just negligence, not religion. It’s the deliberate rejection of knowledge that saves lives, replaced with performative rituals that too often end in child-sized coffins.
The Edwards’ case is just the latest in a long, grim history of preventable deaths among the Followers of Christ. Until the church decides that children are more precious than their own willful ignorance, more kids will suffer while their parents pray for miracles that are never going to come.
Meanwhile, the penalty for any abortion is 10 to life.
30 days in jail for killing an infant through neglect. If it had been any religious belief other than Christianity, they would have received the full five years. If the judge had allowed the plea deal. And when they said "everyone in the church should always seek adequate medical care for our children," they should have been required to define "adequate".
Christian Fucking Privilege needs to end.