An investigation published by ProPublica on October 1, 2026, found that at least fifteen babies and children in Idaho’s Followers of Christ sect died between 2015 and 2025 from conditions that doctors who reviewed the records said were treatable. The reporter, Audrey Dutton, gathered coroner and law enforcement records and shared them with more than a dozen pediatricians, cardiologists, epilepsy specialists and a labour and delivery nurse, asking each only whether the death could have been prevented with medical care. At least three professionals reviewed every case, and ProPublica sought additional opinions when reviewers disagreed, according to the original report.
The count is almost certainly an undercount. Reviewers could not assess six further deaths because coroner records were incomplete, and in four more cases they could not say with confidence that medical treatment would have changed the outcome, the same report states. Separately, the investigation documented stillbirths occurring very close to due dates that coroners had simply labelled as stillbirths without further scrutiny. Records also showed that at least five sets of parents had lost more than one child, a pattern ProPublica says had not previously been reported.
How the exemption came to exist
Idaho was not always permissive on this point. A companion piece from ProPublica traces how, from the 1880s through the early 1970s, Idaho law made it a crime for parents to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake, and the state prosecuted Followers of Christ members under that statute as early as the early twentieth century, according to that historical account. The shift came during a 1971 rewrite of the criminal code, when lawmakers added language shielding parents who choose prayer over treatment from endangerment charges, and a 1972 follow-up law extended that protection to other statutes. The federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 then encouraged states nationally to adopt similar exemptions, and Idaho widened its own in 1976 so that children could not be removed into foster care solely because their parents refused medical care, the report says.
Idaho lawmakers have repeatedly declined to narrow the exemption since a repeal bill was first introduced in 2014. Every subsequent attempt has been defeated before reaching the governor’s desk, and the legislature has instead moved in the opposite direction, codifying parental rights, banning school vaccine mandates and requiring parental consent for minors’ medical care, according to reporting from OPB, which collaborated with ProPublica on the investigation.
How the outlets framed it
ProPublica’s reporting frames the story primarily as an institutional failure, documenting a chain of legal decisions stretching back to 1971 that it says left law enforcement and child-welfare agencies powerless to intervene even after repeated deaths in the same families. OPB’s coverage of the same findings leans more heavily on the voices of Idaho officials and lawmakers, noting that supporters of the exemption argue it encourages parents to seek medical help voluntarily by avoiding prosecution, a claim state authorities have made to justify keeping the law unchanged. The contrast is instructive: one framing treats the exemption as a demonstrable cause of preventable deaths, while the other preserves space for the state’s own argument that the policy produces better outcomes than threatening parents with criminal charges, a claim the underlying death data appears to strain against.
The deeper question raised by the reporting is not simply whether Idaho’s law is unusual but whether any religious-liberty protection can be stretched to cover repeated, documented child deaths without triggering a reassessment. Idaho’s legislature has treated the matter as settled within a broader push for parental and medical-freedom rights, yet the accumulating coroner records suggest the policy’s human cost has not been seriously reckoned with by the state bodies that defend it.
