Hi Lee...

long time no talk to... hope all is well

It's going to continue to be a tough battle to keep getting the news about the WT blood policies out there... but your efforts haven't been in vain.... I've admired your efforts and tenacity for over 4 years now, and I appreciate very much what your doing.
For my part, I keep informing area doctors of changes and refer them to articles in the medical journals and to your web site. They have remained very interested in anything new on the subject, and when they have time, they try to update themselves as best as possible. The one real problem we have is that unlike the doctors in my area, rank and file witnesses have a hard time understanding the scope of this problem. It is very hard for them, as it was for me at the time, to attribute anything wrong with the policies in place, even to understand the terminology involved, and the WT is always ready with a new spin on it. Keep on working at it...new opportunities will present themselves, and when they do, we will be ready.

your friend always,
Inquiry :)

Radar,
I hope the title appears on the cover of the Watchtower

Skipper

All great deeds and all great thoughts have ridiculous beginnings--Albert Camus

Hi, Pork Chop

Can’t speak for Lee Elder, but the following link forwards to a study in support of his contention.

http://www.moffitt.usf.edu/pubs/ccj/v2n6/article13.html

I don’t understand your amazement by Lee’s assertions. Here are two undeniable facts:

1. Watchtower policy requires JWs to refuse medical infusions of blood or blood parts (in certain forms) regardless of medical condition.

2. 100% of JWs die that suffer a medical condition that will cause death absent forbidden infusions of blood or certain blood parts, if Watchtower policy is adhered to.

With or without medical studies, numbers of JWs and the facts above support Lee’s assertion that the Watchtower’s policy is a great killer.

Lee,

Unfortunately no one really cares about loss of life. Osama bin Laden is being gone after mainly because his actions provided an excuse for politicians to do what they were unable to do prior to Sept. 11. bin Laden gave Bush the agenda he needed to make a mark in an otherwise certain to be lackluster presidency. The _only_ way to stop the WTS is to attack on all fronts. Single issue agendas are doomed to fail. What I mean by this is that all agencies for change have to unite behind a single anti-WTS banner. They love it when people say "if they'd just change their policy on, say, sex offenders then I'd kill my web site." Better to say, after they are forced to change x then I will press for y.

Lionel

I'd just like to see some hard numbers. As far as I know they haven't been produced yet.

Your 'statement' is meaningless. Put some definition to it.

Once again you try to use rhetoric to obscure the fact that you can't produce real numbers. I get real bored with assertions.

Pork,

Here's a site that briefly discusses the JW mortality rate due to intraoperative anemia and blood loss based upon a study conducted from 1983 to 1990.

http://www.medana.unibas.ch/eng/educ/blood.htm

That study is significant because it is cited in the 10/15/93 Watchtower, where a Dr. Kitchens is quoted from an article he authored stating the JW mortality rate appears to increase by .5% to 1.5% for refusing blood/red cells. The doctor cautions against the liberal use of blood in his article, however, saying the risks of blood transfusion may outweigh the benefits (although no specific numbers or estimates are given in the WT article).

I forget the exact calculations, but either Dave Reed or Lee Elder once figured that if you take that study average, 1% greater mortality rate, that means that for every hundred patients that require blood, an extra one dies. In the USA, 26 million units of blood are transfused in an average year. In the UK, it is about 2 million units. Canada, about 1 million. Figure 35 million where most Witnesses live and get surgery. Calculating the number of persons transfused based upon a number of units each, and figuring that an extra 1/100 does not survive due to anemia or low hemocrit levels, then some have guesstimated that over 1,000 JWs per year die. Some say that this figure might even be higher, since the above study only refers to anemic patients in a controlled setting with low hemocrit levels. It does not refer to trauma situations, or the various other uses of blood which JWs are to abstain from which results in or contributes to either sickness or death.

My own opinion is that the numbers of JWs having died to the blood policy over the years was probably rather significant twenty years ago, but not today. The WTS has done a good job educating doctors as to their wishes, and the internet alone is full of critical sites saying how overrated and even unnecessary most blood transfusions are today. I would say that maybe perhaps 100 Witnesses die each year. I simply don't see that many news reports of Witnesses dying from lack of blood, and one would think that if the figure were in the 1000s, we would see it all the time. You know Kent would advertise them. In my local area, I only know of one person who died from refusing blood, in 1990, a JW woman who bled to death during childbirth.

Greetings, Pork Chop,

You don’t have to look far to find this stuff. Following is a link to a news story about a medical retrospective review of 332 Jehovah's Witnesses who gave birth at Mount Sinai Medical Center (NY) from January 1988 through December 1999.

According to the article, 2 of the 332 JW women died from obstetric hemorrhage, corresponding to a rate of 521 deaths per 100,000 live births--a maternal death rate nearly 44 times higher than that among the general US population.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011108/hl/childbirth_1.html

Hi, Path,

I agree wholeheartedly. It is criminal to deliberately keep viable alternate scriptural views from the rank and file JW by not writing about them openly in the same journals they use to indoctrinate the masses with.

Hello, Cygnus,

JW deaths from adhering to the party line rarely make news beyond the local paper, if there. Also, hidden in the numbers are the JWs whose deaths were attributed to auto crashes, cancer, et all, when the real culprit was following an indoctrinated partial blood abstention. This really hits home when you are a congregation elder asked to comfort grieving parents or children knowing perfectly well that Brooklyn Bethel avoids answering tough and telling questions about their absurd doctrine. It leads to outrage, and action!

Unfortunately JWs are such a statistical "flea," and the Watchtower has done a pretty good job marketing themselves as decent, that crusaders do not embrace the fine fight of uncovering the partial blood abstention policy for what it is, a murderous act of organizational self-preservationism.