We Have the RIght to Choose - RATHER THAN THE COURTS

Many people agree that a court is no place for personal medicine issues.  H0w would you feel if you chose antibiotic therapy but someone went to court to force a tonsillectomy on your?  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  puts abstaining  from blood on the same moral level as avoiding fornication, to force blood on a Christian would be equivalent of forcible sex-rape. -Acts 15:28,29. 

Yet, 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 fictions, if you will-to allow a transfusion to occur."  They might try to excuse it by saying that a pregnancy is involved or there are children to be supported.  "Those are legal fictions," the book says.  "Competent adults are entitled to refuse treatment."

Some who insist on transfusion blood ignore the fact that Witnesses do not decline all therapies.  They reject just 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 interest"?  You are the one to judge that.  Jehovah's Witnesses  are firm that they do not want someone else to decide fro them; it it their personal responsibility before God.

If a court forced an 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 to force a patient to accept a given therapy, overruling his conscience,  so as to treat him physically but dealing his psyche a mortal blow." - Der Praktische Arzt, July 1978. 

Next time: We Have the Right to Choose - LOVING CARE FOR CHILDREN

From the jw.org publications