Jehovah’s Witnesses issue "clarification" on blood transfusion ban after decades of suffering

A long-standing life-or-death doctrine has been softened... without apology or accountability

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The Jehovah’s Witnesses have suddenly modified one of their worst, most thoughtless policies—the one that bans all blood transfusions—in a way that could potentially save some members’ lives. But the change raises all kinds of questions about how religions really just pick and choose which rules to follow.

The Bad Blood rule has always been one of the most pernicious beliefs of a religion filled with them. The rule says members must refuse blood transfusions, even if they’re necessary to save their lives, because it’s considered a violation of biblical law. It’s a policy that was introduced in 1945 and has resulted in the deaths of an estimated tens of thousands of Witnesses.

The Associated Press explains the religious basis of this belief:

Jehovah’s Witnesses’ historic teachings on blood transfusions stem from biblical passages requiring believers to “abstain ... from blood,” which they interpret as applying not just to food but to transfusions. While they teach that many detailed dietary laws in the Old Testament portion of the Bible no longer apply, they say this prohibition on partaking of blood is upheld as a universal principle for believers in other Bible passages.

That religious belief has had real world consequences—often to children who never truly had a say in their faith. Those kids were forbidden by their JW parents from accepting a necessary transfusion—or brainwashed into saying they didn’t want one. After all, if you’re a Witness who dares to go through with a transfusion, you pay the price for it. You’re disfellowshipped by the rest of the JW community. You’re considered an apostate. It’s led to incredible situations where hospitals have had to go to court to demand the right to save children’s lives against their parents’ will. (In some cases, doctors have created clever scientific workarounds to save JW lives even when their religion would otherwise prohibit it.)

The policy is so ingrained in members that some Witnesses carry physical cards to let doctors know they don’t want a transfusion even if their life is on the line.

On October 15, 2000, the JW leadership even said in their official publication, The Watchtower, that there’s no way around this prohibition. That includes donating blood to others and storing your own blood for your own emergency use in the future.

Occasionally, a doctor will urge a patient to deposit his own blood weeks before surgery (preoperative autologous blood donation, or PAD) so that if the need arises, he could transfuse the patient with his own stored blood. However, such collecting, storing, and transfusing of blood directly contradicts what is said in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Blood is not to be stored; it is to be poured out​—returned to God, as it were. Granted, the Mosaic Law is not in force now. Nevertheless, Jehovah’s Witnesses respect the principles God included in it, and they are determined to ‘abstain from blood.’ Hence, we do not donate blood, nor do we store for transfusion our blood that should be ‘poured out.’ That practice conflicts with God’s law.

It’s about as clear-cut a rule as you’ll ever find in a religion.

So, naturally, JW leaders have announced they’re changing it.

On Friday, Governing Body member Gerrit Lösch announced that it was now perfectly fine to store your own blood for a future transfusion. He even cited the very same article that doubled down on the blood transfusion ban in 2000, reminding people that it also said, “A Christian must decide for himself how his own blood will be handled in the course of a surgical procedure, medical test, or current therapy” (emphasis theirs).

The Bible does not comment on the use of a person’s own blood in medical and surgical care.

Regarding the use of one’s own blood, our position has been, as is stated in the October 15, 2000 issue of The Watchtower. There, it says, “A Christian must decide for himself how his own blood will will be handled in the course of a surgical procedure, medical test, or current therapy.”

For that reason, many Christians accept simple procedures such as blood tests, as well as more complicated procedures involving their own blood, such as the use of heart-lung machines, cell salvage devices, and kidney dialysis treatments. However, the list of treatment options continues to grow.

Therefore, after much prayer and consideration of the scriptures, the Governing Body has decided to clarify our position on the use of a patient’s own blood in medical and surgical care.

The clarification is this: Each Christian must decide for himself how his own blood will be used in all medical and surgical care. This includes whether to allow his own blood to be removed, stored, and then given back to him.

Lösch makes it sound like this is merely a clarification on something the religion has always taught, but it’s very much a reversal of their past policy.

It’s also doesn’t go far enough. A lot of critics are saying the Bible doesn’t comment on blood transfusions at all, so what’s with the parsing that says it’s doesn’t comment on “the use of a person’s own blood in medical and surgical care”?

Also, who benefits from this? For medical emergencies involving blood loss, you won’t have your own blood sitting on a shelf, waiting to be given back to you. For patients who need actual blood transfusions (from donated blood), this doesn’t help them at all. The “clarification,” in other words, helps the fewest amount of people. The sort of people who know they will need their own blood in the future and have the ability to donate and store it somewhere. Many countries lack those kinds of facilities entirely.

Why are they making this change now? No one knows. It just came out of nowhere.

There are stories in a subreddit for ex-JWs sharing how they could have saved themselves a lot of pain and trauma if this “clarification” came earlier, like one woman who said she didn’t store her own blood in advance when she had a C-section precisely because of the ban despite her doctors’ advice.

So let’s just state the obvious: This isn’t a clarification of God’s Word. This is a man-made decision—literally approved by a group of men—that could have occurred at any time in the past. But instead of apologizing and admitting they fucked up, the Governing Body is pretending this is something everyone has always known but there was simply confusion about it.

All we’ve learned from this situation is that religious leaders can always rewrite their own rules when it’s convenient, and they will rationalize it any way they can. There’s no such thing as timeless biblical truth. Countless JWs suffered because their leaders insisted there was no moral ambiguity when it came to the blood can. Now that certainty has suddenly evaporated.

If an absolute moral command can be softened like this overnight, it just means the rule was never absolute to begin with.

What’s infuriating is how those same leaders refuse to acknowledge the harm done under previous interpretations of the same rule. Their inability to admit error tells you a lot about how little you can trust them. After all, if God’s will can be “clarified” only after decades of preventable suffering, then the problem isn’t our own misunderstanding. It’s the system that acted like the suffering was ever justified.

This is why you never obey first and question later.

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