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It noted: "On the contrary, it appears that many Jehovah's Witnesses have made a deliberate choice to refuse blood transfusions in advance, free from time constraints of an emergency situation." The court said: "The freedom to accept or refuse specific medical treatment, or to select an alternative form of treatment, is vital to the principles ...
Jehovah's Witnesses are taught that the Bible prohibits the consumption, storage and transfusion of blood, based on their understanding of scriptures such as Leviticus 17:10, 11: "I will certainly set my face against the one who is eating the blood" and Acts 15:29: "abstain from … blood." This standpoint is applied even in emergencies.
In all, Jehovah's Witnesses brought 23 separate First Amendment actions before the U.S. Supreme Court between 1938 and 1946. [36] [37] Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone once quipped, "I think the Jehovah's Witnesses ought to have an endowment in view of the aid which they give in solving the legal problems of civil liberties." [38]
Jeevanandam's program has hired bloodless coordinators to oversee the bloodless heart transplants and other procedures and verify to the Jehovah's Witnesses community that surgeries are done this way.
As a result, some in the global medical community have moved from allogeneic blood (blood collected from another person) towards autologous transfusion, in which patients receive their own blood. Another impetus for autologous transfusion is the position of Jehovah's Witnesses on blood transfusions.
During the early 1960s, American heart surgeon Denton Cooley successfully performed numerous bloodless open-heart surgeries on Jehovah's Witness patients. Fifteen years later, he and his associate published a report of more than 500 cardiac surgeries in this population, documenting that cardiac surgery could be safely performed without blood transfusion.
Since Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to accept external blood products, their view on organ donation is complicated by the medical procedure itself. [8] Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that organ donation with no transfusion of blood is an individual decision. [2] [10]
[279] [280] Their literature implies that there is a blood alternative for every medical situation and misleadingly "emphasizes the danger of blood transfusions". [137] Jehovah's Witnesses do not accept the transfusion of "whole blood, packed red cells, platelets, white cells or plasma".