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Jehovah's Witnesses, Pregnancy, and Blood Transfusions: A Paradigm for the Autonomy Rights of All Pregnant Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Joelyn Knopf Levy
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Extract

The liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist that she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role ….

For years, Jehovah's Witnesses have posed a challenge to the medical profession. Bound by religious belief to refuse blood and blood products, they can frustrate physicians who, since World War II, have utilized transfusions when indicated in the course of treatment.

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Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 171 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1999

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References

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See Brief of Amicus Curiae Watchtower Bible and Tract Society at 2–3, In re Fetus Brown, 689 N.E.2d 397 (Ill. App. Ct. 1997) (No. 96–2316). For an excellent discussion of the analysis offered by Judge Skelly Wright, see Davis, D., “Does ‘No’ Mean ‘Yes’? The Continuing Problem of Jehovah's Witnesses and Refusal of Blood Products,” Second Opinion, 19, no. 3 (1994): 35–43. Deena Davis points out that there is no official position of the Jehovah's Witnesses that distinguishes the consequences of transfusions that are willingly accepted from transfusions that are forced; both are considered forbidden. She determines that there may be a number of Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse blood but hope to be forced to accept it. They fear that they will die without a transfusion, but worry about the consequences in the afterlife as well as the stigma during this life if they agree to be transfused. Davis concludes that it is dangerous as a policy matter for physicians and hospitals to assume that every Jehovah's Witness who refuses blood is not sincere, even though this approach will save some lives. She warns that encouraging such assumptions will lead to the belief that physicians can ignore the express wishes of other patients. Therefore, Davis argues, to accord individual autonomy the respect it deserves, physicians must place on the individual patient the responsibility to say what she means, for “only she can weigh her religious convictions against the possibility of death.” Id. at 42.Google Scholar
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Even though it is the patient's duty to inform the physician of any religious beliefs that may bear on treatment modalities, the careful physician will ask patients in order to avoid the situation that occurred in Brown, where the physician was unaware that his patient was a Jehovah's Witness until a blood transfusion became necessary.Google Scholar
See Shinkman, R., “More Going Bloodless,” Modern Healthcare, Nov. 9, 1998, at 57–58.Google Scholar
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