Please reach out to Te New Yorker

by Jonathan Drake 23 Replies latest watchtower medical

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  problemaddict 2

  This bit was fascinating. I don't know what to make of it.

  In Ian McEwan’s novel “The Children Act,” a judge must decide whether to insist upon transfusion for a seventeen-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who has leukemia and who cannot receive two critical drugs without also accepting donor blood, according to his doctors. The judge visits the frail boy in the hospital, where he is writing poetry and learning to play violin. He is mature and articulate in his refusal of blood. Yet the judge concludes that he has experienced only an “uninterrupted monochrome” view of life, and that his welfare would be better served by not dying. (As the boy receives his transfusion, his parents, who have testified to their acceptance of religious dogma, weep openly, and he realizes they are weeping with joy.) Bloodless-medicine leaders at Penn Hospital and Englewood said that they had never faced a situation in which a Witness child needed a life-saving transfusion against the wishes of the parents. But if such a case arose, they would be obligated to get a court order, according to Pennsylvania and New Jersey state law.
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  talesin

  This writer has a long resume of articles, and this is the only one (in three parts) that focuses on JWS. It appears that she has been 'hooked' by their (hahaha) sincerity (PUKE).

  problemaddict2 - I found this story a bit taxing on my belief - a teen JW who is learning to play violin and writes poetry? His family must be spiritually weak to let him engage in such frivolous, non-scriptural activities. YET he is faithful enough to die for lack of a transfusion?

  And then she actually uses a JW 'urban legend' story? Very unprofessional, to my eyes. HUH?

  Watchtower leaders still talk about a case from the nineteen-seventies, in which a hospital in Canada collided with a witness family. In that case, a baby was born with severe jaundice resulting from a condition that causes the destruction of red blood cells. The treatment at the time was to exchange the child’s blood through transfusion. The parents, however, refused; they wanted to try light therapy, which was then experimental, though it has since become the standard of care. When it became clear that the doctors were going to get a court order to require transfusion, the parents, according to lore, smuggled the newborn out of the hospital and drove to another institution, where light therapy was available. Apparently, after the child was exposed to sunlight for several hours in the parents’ convertible, by the time the family reached the second hospital the jaundice had substantially subsided.
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  problemaddict 2

  Yeah I caught that as well. She didn't present it as fact, but it reads close to it.

  This part below got me too. the Australian case is the one where a woman cost her both her life and the life of her unborn child in refusing blood.

  When asked about the Australian case, she said, “Oh, honey, please don’t be sad for her. The two of them will be resurrected, and she’ll get to see her new baby, and neither one of them will have that leukemia.”

  “This sister has more of a hope to live in the new world than I do,” she added. “Because I still live here and I could make mistakes.”

  Yep....not only will god destroy 99.9% of people on earth, you may not make it because you could still make mistakes!
  
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  SimonSays

  It’s within the frame work of progress that she is relating to. The makeup of blood transfusions was never a cure all from a scientific perspective. Other fusion able material worked just as well in WW2. Now, science has enough insight to produce a reliable substitute or alternative. However, science has always maintained the risk with blood transfusions. So to say, JWs sign their lives away is no riskier when a doctor tells you to sign a document that underlines all those risks associated with a BT. So it becomes a CHOICE of the individual.