Sarah Hershberger is the 10-year-old Ohio Amish girl with leukemia that made national news recently. She fled the U.S. in Sept. 2013 with her parents Andy and Anna Hershberger to avoid Akron Children’s Hospital (ACH) demands and court-ordered guardianship to force Sarah to continue exactly 27 months of an experimental chemotherapy research project against her will and the will of her parents. They say she is cancer free now after natural treatments. After many weeks away, the Hershbergers want to come home and just be left alone without any fear of being arrested and Sarah taken away.
More chemotherapy was not just against Sarah’s will since it was making her unable to walk and dreadfully sick, it was also against the will of the parents, and advice from health professionals outside the hospital. So the parents took her, along with their new baby, out of the country to a special clinic that uses natural biomedical treatments. The Hershbergers called me and told me the Spanish doctors say Sarah is now cancer free, as does Sarah’s grandfather, Isaac Keim, who is an Amish church bishop. In a rare occurrence, Isaac gave an amazing recorded interview (posted below) to expose the other side of the story. Here are ABC News two-minute sound bytes:
Gone for a couple months now, the Hershbergers are homesick and heartsick. They cannot return to Ohio or their farm and their other five children without fear of being arrested and Sarah taken away. They run an organic vegetable farm and roadside stand (which all but failed this year), a 10-minute buggy ride from the center of Homerville in Medina County. Andy suffered a severe stress disorder leaving him unable to function well for four weeks. Family and friends are pitching in to care and feed the children and animals and picked vegetables before they rotted in the fields. Medina County Children’s Services and Sheriff Department stop at the farm every three days to see if they can find Sarah. But, off the record, let they let family members know that they do not want to get involved but they are only doing their job as instructed….