Jehovah's Witnesses and their prohibition of blood transfusions

On January 9, 2007, Mark Ruge, spokesman of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Canada and the national spokesman for Jehovah's Witnesses said that he wanted B.C.'s recently born sextuplets to have the best medical treatment available --- without blood transfusions. Ruge said that the Bible makes it ''very clear that one is to abstain from blood, even if it is life-saving.” The parents of the babies, being Jehovah’s Witnesses, refused to authorize blood transfusions for their babies and two of them died.

The sextuplets were born in early January, almost four months premature. Babies born at that stage have an 80-per-cent chance of survival but could still face major health problems due to the immaturity of their organs and immune systems. The problems facing premature babies are that they are born with such immature organs and such difficulty absorbing things which are required to make red cells and for these reasons, they sometimes need help maintaining them and of course, they're being tested frequently which means that some of their blood is being drained off.

The British Columbia government seized three of the four surviving sextuplets on the 26th of January allowing doctors to give them blood transfusions before their Jehovah's Witness parents were able to challenge the move in court. The Supreme Court of Canada had already ruled in 1995 that a child's right to necessary medical care supersedes a parent's right to religious expression so the government had the right to act as it did. It is unfortunate that the government didn’t act sooner and save the other two babies who died before transfusions could have been given to them. A child's welfare trumps a family's religious beliefs so the government should have acted the moment the parents stated that they didn’t want their babies to be given blood transfusions.

Lawyer Shane Brady who represents the parents of the sextuplets also represented several Jehovah's Witness children in the courts in recent years, including 17-year-old Bethany Hughes of Calgary, who died of leukemia in 2002 after her father battled his daughter and her mother for the girl to have blood transfusions during her treatment.

The question that comes to the fore is; why do the Witnesses refuse to accept blood transfusions when their lives or the lives of their loved ones are in peril?

The Jehovah's Witnesses urges its members to refuse to accept blood transfusions and to not allow them to be given to their children. This is based upon four passages in the Bible which they interpret as prohibiting the consuming of blood:

Genesis 9:4 "But flesh (meat) with...blood...ye shall not eat"
Leviticus 17:12-14 "...No soul of you shall eat blood...whosoever eat it shall be cut off"
Acts 15:29 "That ye abstain...from blood..."
Acts 21:25 "...Gentiles...keep themselves from things offered to idols and from blood..."

Verse 3 of chapter 9 of Genesis says: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything” and verse 4 says “Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.”

What this clearly means is that no one is to eat fresh meat with its blood still inside it. Generally when animals are caught and butchered, the blood is drained out so verse 4 becomes rather academic.

12 of chapter 17 of Leviticus says “Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood.” Verse 13 says, “Any man also of the people of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, who takes in hunting any beast or bird that may be eaten shall pour out its blood and cover it with dust.” Verse 14 says, "For the life of every creature is the blood of it; therefore I have said to the people of Israel, You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off.

Again, these verses deal with the process of eating blood as a food.

Verse 28 of Chapter 15 of Acts says, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things, Verse 29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.”

Verse 26 of Chapter 21 of Acts says, “But as for the Gentiles who have believed, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity."

It is here that the Witnesses are confused. In both of the aforementioned verses it states that they shall abstain from blood. To them, it means abstaining from blood no matter how it is received, be it as food or by transfusion.

The trouble with their thinking is that nowhere in the Bible does it say that they can’t receive blood by transfusion. It merely states that it cannot be ingested through the process of eating it. In fact, the verses quoted in Genesis and Leviticus use the words ‘eat’. There is no way that that can be interpreted to mean ingesting blood by transfusion. I suppose the reason for that not being in the Bible is that the process of transfusing blood from one human being to another was not even in the minds of the Biblical scholars when the King James version of the Bible was written in the Sixteenth Century.

The Witnesses began to recognize this anomaly when in their Watchtower publication dated September 15th 1958 it said on page 575; “Each time the prohibition of blood is mentioned in the Scriptures it is in connection with taking it as food, and so it is as a nutrient that we are concerned with in its being forbidden.”

The Watchtower has tried to overcome this fact by arguing that a blood transfusion is no different than being fed intravenously with dextrose or alcohol. These comparisons are misleading, however, because sugar and alcohol can in fact be used by the body as food without digestion. Transfused blood cannot be used by your body as food anymore so than can a transplanted heart or kidney.

Clearly, doctors do not prescribe blood transfusions to treat malnutrition, but rather to replace something your body has lost, usually the red cells needed to transport oxygen and keep you alive. Since it cannot be established that a blood transfusion is a feeding on blood or the equivalent of eating blood, then the critical link necessary to Biblically support the Watchtower blood policy does not exist.

No reputable modern doctor or scientist would state that a blood transfusion is the process of using blood as food or the equivalent of eating blood. Instead, it is an organ or liquid tissue transplant as the Society itself now acknowledges. To overcome this fact, the Watchtower has created a new law for Witnesses by stating that it's wrong to sustain life by means of blood. The problem here is that nowhere in the Bible do we find such a restriction on blood stated in those terms. Is eating and sustaining life the same as what the Watchtower argues? Well, there are many things that we do to sustain our lives like drinking, breathing, sleeping, etc. Eating is just one of the things necessary to sustain life. This word shuffle is both dishonest and reckless on the Watchtower's part, and obscures what the Bible teaches, "going beyond the things that are written."(1 Cor. 4:6)

Witnesses are also urged to ‘discontinue their chemotherapy treatments when platelet transfusions are needed.’ Because Witnesses believe that any blood that leaves the body must be destroyed, they do not approve of an individual storing his own blood for a later auto-transfusion.

Back in the early 1980s when I was the producer and host of a television talk show, I invited one of the Canadian leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses to be a guest on my show. Near the end of the show, I asked him the following question. “If you were walking across a battlefield in Europe during the Second World War and heard the cry of a medical doctor asking for a blood donation to save the life of a Canadian soldier who was badly in need of a transfusion, and your blood type was the same as his, would you deny him some of your blood even if it meant that if he didn’t receive it, he would die?”

As the seconds went by, I could see that he was struggling for an answer. He knew that if he said he would donate his blood, it would go against the teachings of his church. On the other hand, if he said that he would refuse to donate his blood, he would come across as a unpatriotic creep. I spared him by saying, “Don’t answer that question because I know it is a very difficult question for you to answer. He replied, “It certainly is.”

What I was seeking from him and what I and my listeners got from him was an admission by a leader of the Jehovah's Witnesses that the issue facing them with respect to giving and receiving blood transfusions is not as cut and dried as they would have us believe.

The trend in recent years for the Witnesses has been to allow more and more blood products to be transfused into their member’s bodies. The June 15, 2000 Watchtower, (WTS) Questions From Readers article opened the door to the use of hemoglobin since it is fractionated from red blood cells. This coupled with the WTS statement to the European Commission on Human Rights that their are no "controls or sanctions" for a Witness who accepts blood and that minors may not carry "Advance Medical Directives" prohibiting blood transfusions are significant indications that the WTS may significantly modify their blood policy or abandon it altogether at some point in the future. Additionally, in April of 2000 the WTS admitted that it was no longer disfellowshipping members who accepted blood or prohibited blood components. That being the case, that sort of removes the sanction believed to apply to the Witnesses as stated in the end of verse 14 of chapter 17 of Leviticus that says; “whoever eats it shall be cut off.”

Current Watchtower teaching is that only certain allowed blood components are limited to those that pass through the placental barrier during pregnancy and that on this basis a Witness may accept them in good conscience. The reasoning is that since Jehovah God allows these blood components to pass from mother to child, it is logical to conclude that God wouldn't break his own law. This might seem reasonable were it not for the fact that medical science has shown that practically all blood components pass through the placental barrier.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal in its September 5, 2005 edition wrote;

“Until recently, it appeared that such artificial blood would be banned for Jehovah's Witnesses. For instance, consider the comments of Richard Bailey and Tomonori Ariga who, writing in an official capacity in 1998, explained Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society policy to the medical community: "Jehovah's Witnesses do not accept whole blood, or major components of blood, namely, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. Also they do not accept hemoglobin which is a major part of red blood cells ... According to these principles then, Jehovah's Witnesses do not accept a blood substitute which uses hemoglobin taken from a human or animal source." Recently, however, there has been an important but subtle change in Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society policy. Whereas the Society had previously permitted Jehovah's Witnesses to accept fractions of blood plasma, it appears that they may now accept fractions of all "primary" components. The Society defines primary components as red cells, white cells, platelets and plasma.”

Sometimes the Witnesses argue that the blood components allowed by the Watchtower Society are tiny fractions of blood. This line of argument seems impossible to sustain since albumin, which is found in blood plasma and is approved for use by the Watchtower Society, makes up a much greater percentage of the blood volume (2.2%) than forbidden blood components like white blood cells (1%), and platelets (0.17%), which Witnesses are expected to reject. Furthermore, hemoglobin is a huge blood product weighing in at 14.8% of blood volume. Additionally, hemophiliac treatments (which have been long permitted) require the collection and storage of massive quantities of blood (up to 2500 blood donors for a single treatment), yet the Watchtower Society forbids Witnesses from storing their own blood. Why does a double standard for them exist?

Featured on the cover of the May 22, 1994 Awake! magazine (another Jehovah's Witnesses tract) are the photos of 26 children, ages varying up to 17 years, with the caption: "Youths Who Put God First." They died when their parents and they themselves refused blood transfusions. Inside the magazine proclaims: "In former times thousands of youths died for putting God first.” Now many of their families are left wondering if their sacrifices were worth it after the Watchtower Society finally received ‘new light’ and reversed its previous position.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French author said; “A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.” unquote

It’s time for the Witnesses to look deeply into the futility of their logic they seem to accept and bring about an end to a tragic and misguided policy that has over many years, claimed thousands of lives, many of them, their own children.