JW woman refuses blood, dies in childbirth

I have no problems with people dying sooner in accordance with their beliefs.

(This is not directed at you, Shoshana)
I have a big problem with people forcing these beliefs on someone else, especially infants. Apparently JWs don’t always refuse transfusions for infants, and that’s good, but I still think those kids would be better off growing up with parents that won’t effectively commit suicide by stupidity. What happens when the father gets in a car accident and dies because he refuses a treatment?

–FCOD

The JW’s in these parts refuse to give their children blood transfusions, as it is considered a disfellowable offense (If you do it, you get kicked out and ostracized from the group). They also believe if you get a blood transfusion and live, you would have lived without it and if you don’t get one and die, you would have died even if you got one–in short, they believe blood transfusions have no effect on the outcome of the medical condition. Furthermore, if a member is told to get a transfusion, refuses it, and lives, it proves that blood transfusions are unnecessary. If someone gets a blood transfusion and dies, it proves blood transfusions kill people.

Not to hijack, but do ultra-orthodox Jewish sects allow blood transfusions?

Well, I guess you can’t argue with that logic.

–FCOD

That’s hardly admirable when your beliefs are blatantly stupid. Would there be anything to admire about someone who died because he kept flinging himself off of drop-offs, because he had an unshakeable conviction that he was Superman ? Or how about the occasional cults that commit mass suicide ? Are they to be admired ?

Dying for somthing stupid is just that, stupid.

My answer to these types of arguments are:

“If God had wanted us to die from (whatever), he wouldn’t have given us the brains to figure out how to prevent (whatever.)”

So, I guess you can make the argument that God still wants us to die from cancer, because we haven’t quite figured out how to prevent it, but don’t use God as a reason not to give your kid a measles vaccine.

I didn’t say I admired them.

Most of my father’s relatives were JWs, his grandfather (but not his grandmother) and some (but not all) of his aunts and uncles having converted around the turn of the century when the group was still called Russelites. His grandfather had also considered Mormonism, but the polygamy aspect (still very current at the time) was the drawback.

When I was a boy, one of my father’s nieces (actually she was the daughter of his first a cousin, but she called him Uncle) gave birth to a baby boy who needed an immediate transfusion due to a competing Rh factor of some kind, and the family refused it due to their faith. The child would have died had not my father woken up a judge at midnight to have him sign an immediate order to conduct the procedure and had not the surgeon at the hospital immediately carried it out before the parents could challenge it. The child lived, but the family actually considered giving him up for adoption! (They didn’t, though my father- one of the least sentimental of humans- offered to adopt it if they did.)

Currently my 82 year old aunt (my father’s “twin cousin”- they were born a week apart and raised together) is battling a form of cancer that she’s battled off and on for 20 years. Several times she’s been told that a blood marrow transfusion could possibly do wonders, and that without it the condition is terminal, but she’s refused everytime due to her convictions, and at least twice when she was told she had weeks to live the condition went into remission instead. Consequently, until her most recent battle confined her to a hospital bed she was a popular speaker at a lot of Kingdom Halls as testimony to how God knows better than doctors and the value of keeping the faith and other such topics. I’m not close to her (in fact the last contact I had with her I blasted her out) but I’m told she’s relished in the attention.

And we saw first hand what some people who believe their religious beliefs are more important than life are capable of doing on September 11, 2001.

If you’d like a rancorous thread, request that it be moved to the Pit. I merely said that some people don’t believe that living as long as possible is better than living in accordance with their beliefs. I didn’t offer an opinion one way or another about this.

gag Holy shit that caught me off guard. I’m lucky I wasn’t taking a sip of something.

It’s probably better for the twins this way; if the mother had lived she would have just raised them to believe in the idiocy that an invisible sky god doesn’t want people to have medical treatment. People like that are no better than the Taliban when it comes to ruining other peoples’ lives because of their religion.

Oops, I thought this was the Pit- sorry if my post went too far for this forum.

Bah, that name is already taken? Guess I’ll have to come up with something else to call it when I start my own cult/religion. Back to the drawing board!

Russell

Unfortunately volume replacement does not compensate for lack of oxygen carrying red blood cells. Thats what the transfusions fix.

Very timely thread. I’m going to a funeral on Friday for a lovely young girl who died way too soon.
She was a co-worker, and the nicest person you’d ever meet. She suffered from sickle cell, but all the doctors said she was the healthiest sickle cell patient they ever had.
She landed in the hospital a few weeks ago after a botched operation nicked her intestines and liver. She desperately needed a transfusion, but her mother wouldn’t allow it.
My friend was not a devout JW - in fact, she once told me she only followed some of its tenets to please her mom. She didn’t attend their meetings, and was as lapsed as they come.

I have another friend who’s a nurse in the hospital where my co-worker ended up - she begged me to get someone to convince the mom to allow the transfusion. People tried, but the mom held firm.

My friend died last week - for no reason.

The JW’s were founded by Bro. Charles Taze Russell. His first unhappy convert wrote a tell-all about him entitled Don’t Charles Taze Me, Bro. Russell. Unfortunately he was shot while attempting to deliver it to the door of a sleeping Mormon polygamist.

Apparently God doesn’t want us to die from cancer as much as he used to. Doesn’t that reasoning apply to anything, though? If God didn’t want us to kill people, he wouldn’t have given us the brains to invent guns. What’s the use of a moral code if everything we are able to do is sanctioned as OK?

I see nothing wrong with this woman’s decision, assuming she knew what she was up against, and she made an informed choice. If the JW organization teaches that blood transfusions don’t really help medically, then her death should be on their conscience.

It’s sad that those children will grow up without their mother, but I absolutely disagree that we should force people to undergo medical treatments they don’t want. Intervene on behalf of children with stupid parents, yes. But we should not force an adult in possession of her wits to do something she believes wrong. Where do you draw the line? There are lots of things that people do or believe that are likely to shorten their lives. Probably shorten them much more than refusing blood does (in aggregate).

And, obviously, the comparison to terrorists is foolish. Yeah, they both value a particular belief system above human life, but this woman didn’t inflict her beliefs on anyone else. Call me when gangs of JWs start breaking into blood banks to keep anyone from receiving donated blood.

Yet JWs do (or did; has the official line really changed?) all the time, as they refuse transfusions not only for themselves, but their children.

I came in here just to say that I get what **Shoshana’s ** saying here, as it was my thought, too.

And while I can’t speak for her, I’d like to say, c’mon, guys, there’s no need to pile on her. She has not, after all, offered an endorsement of this woman’s choice.

And while I think that this woman had the right to refuse specific medical intervention in accordance with her beliefs (a choice which, let me be clear, I believe to be head-bangingly stupid), I wouldn’t compare it to the 9/11 hijackers. You have the right to cause harm to yourself, not to others, and this woman chose to harm *only * herself.

Yeah, an argument can be made that, by depriving her children of a mother, her husband of a wife, etc., she’s harmed others, but…well, they didn’t die as a result of her refusal of medical intervention–she did.

I must say also that I’m somewhat troubled at the suggestion that the children should be removed from the father, solely by dint of his being a JW. Why? I mean, we allow children to be reared in religious beliefs with which we disagree–sometimes vehemently disagree–all the time. The best we can hope is that the children somehow grow up to be rational thinkers or, at the very least, not endeavor to shove their beliefs down the throats of us non-believers.

So what makes this any different?

Now, if a situation arose where the children required medical intervention that the father wouldn’t allow due to his beliefs, then yes, since the children aren’t of the recognized age of consent, I wouldn’t have a problem with the court stepping in. We are, after all, (supposed to be) a nation of laws, and not of religion (though we fail quite miserably and quite often in this regard). But absent such a situation? Leave it be.

Me? I couldn’t imagine belonging to a faith system/ethical sytem/whatever that required me to cause harm to myself (or to others), and I can’t imagine why people freely choose to do so. I mean, damn, if I, as a mostly kosher Jew (for another thread–I won’t explain here) were given a choice between eating swine (which I normally don’t eat) or starving to death, Judaism wouldn’t even blink if I chose to eat the swine.

But, y’know, people do really strange things in the names of their strange religions.
ETA: I see that **iamthewalrus(:3= ** has already addressed some of this.