HOW CAN BLOOD SAVE YOUR LIFE?

RATHER THAN THE COURTS

Many people agree that a court is no place for personal medical issues. How would you feel if you chose antibiotic therapy but someone went to court to force a tonsillectomy on you? A doctor may want to provide what he thinks is the best care, but he has no duty to seek legal justification to trample on your basic rights. And since the Bible put abstaining from blood on  the same moral level as avoiding fornication, to force blood on a Christian would equivalent of forcible sex-rape. -Acts 15:28, 29. 

Yes, Informed consent for Blood Transfusion (1989)  reports  that some courts are so distressed when a patient is willing  to accept a certain risk because of his religious rights "that they make up some legal exceptions-legal frictions,m if you will-to allow a transfusion to occur"  They try to excuse it by saying that a pregnancy is involved or that there are children to be supported.  "Those are legal frictions," the book says: "Competent adults are entitled to refuse treatment." 

Some who insist on transfusing blood ignore the fact that Witnesses do not decline all therapies. They reject one therapy, which even experts say is fraught with danger.  Usually a medical problem can be managed in a variety of ways. One has this risk, another that risk. Can a court or a doctor paternalistically know which risk is "in your best interests"?  You are the one to judge that.  Jehovah's Witnesses are firm in that they do not want someone else to decide for them; it is their personal responsibility before God. 

If a court forced and abhorrent treatment on you, how might this affect your conscience and the vital element of your will to live?  Dr. Konrad Drebinger wrote:  "It would certainly be a misguided form of medical ambition that would lead one to force a patient to accept a given therapy, overruling his conscience, so as to treat him physically but dealing with his psyche a mortal blow." -Der Praktische Arzt, July 1978. 

Next time: HOW CAN BLOOD SAVE YOUR LIFE?/LOVING CARE FOR CHILDREN

From the Watchtower magazine