After being born with a heart defect and denied medical care by her religious parents – Mariah Walton is now suffering a life-threatening illness and awaiting a heart and lung transplant.
The 20-year-old was diagnosed with a tiny hole in her heart as an infant, which reportedly could have been fixed there and then in the hospital at the time of her birth.
Instead, her Mormon parents decided to reject the surgery and instead prayed to god for her recovery.
“My lungs burn because I can’t get the oxygen I need. They used to pray over me. They’d say, ‘God’s going to heal you, just have faith’ and all kinds of stuff”, said Mariah, who is now bedridden and is permanently hooked up to an oxygen tank.
After suffering immense pain and medical problems due to pulmonary hypertension, Mariah has now decided to take legal action against her parents for denying her medical care.
“They deserve it” she told The Guardian, “and it might stop others.”
According to The Guardian, Mariah’s parents were fundamentalist Mormons who went off the grid in northern Idaho in the 1990s and refused to take their children to doctors, believing that illnesses could be healed through faith and the power of prayer.
Mariah is now campaigning for the law to be changed in Idaho to prosecute other parents who choose “faith healing” rather than medicine.
Mariah, who has nine siblings that were all raised in the Mormon church is now estranged from her parents and cared for by her older sister Emily – who recently set up a Go Fund Me page to raise funds for her to visit Paris whilst “they still can”.
“Mariah was born with a hole in her heart, it was never treated because our parents wouldn’t let her go to the doctor. So for many years she lived on only about 60% of the oxygen that she needed, while severe pulmonary hypertension ruined her lungs”, wrote Emily.
“She found out what was wrong after she turned 18 and several of us sisters started taking care of her. Right now she’s on medicine to help her get enough oxygen, but someday the medicines will stop working.”
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