For Info on Jehovah's Witnesses and Blood Transfusions

[jschwehm]

Jeff there was a comment about the information the WT used was from 1909. Has that information been contradicted by medical professionals?

Hi Matt:

The issue is that in the early 1960’s through about 1980, the Watchtower leaders prohibited blood tranfusions primarily because they equated blood tranfusions with eating blood. The argument was that the Bible said to abstain from eating blood and that there was no difference between eating blood and receiving a blood transfusion. Because of this argument, the Watchtower needed to find some medical source that equated blood tranfusions with eating blood. They found such a source in the following:

It is of no consequence that the blood is taken into the body through the veins instead of the mouth. Nor does the claim by some that it is not the same as intravenous feeding carry weight. The fact is that it nourishes or sustains the life of the body. In harmony with this is a statement in the book
Hemorrhage and Transfusion, by George W. Crile, A.M., M.D., who quotes a letter from Denys, French physician and early researcher in the field of transfusions. It says: “In performing transfusion it is nothing else than nourishing by a shorter road than ordinary—that is to say, placing in the veins blood
all made in place of taking food which only turns to blood after several changes.”-September 15th 1961 Watchtower page 558

The problem is that no modern medical source views the taking of blood in the veins as taking the place of food but as a transplant. The Watchtower Society even admits this in the following quotes (I hope this is dispassionate enough for you):

“As cardiovascular surgeon Denton Cooley notes: ‘A blood transfusion is an organ transplant.’” (Awake! Oct. 22, 1990, p. 9)

“When doctors transplant a heart, a liver, or another organ, the recipient’s immune system may sense the foreign tissue and reject it. Yet, a transfusion is a tissue transplant.” (How Can Blood Save Your Life, 1990, p. 8)

In any case, modern medicine views blood transfusions as the equivalent of an organ transplant or tissue transplant. When someone receives a human kidney via a transplant operation do you really view that as the equivalent of eating a human kidney for dinner? Likewise, if someone receives a blood transfusion do you really view that as the equivalent of someone having blood for dinner? Even the Watchtower Society seems to have rejected this rationale in recent years.

Jeff S.