MONTREAL — A former Jehovah’s Witness, whose brother died after refusing blood transfusions, has collected 5,000 names on a petition which calls for doctors to be allowed to intervene medically regardless of the patient’s religious beliefs.
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Jonathan Lavoie, 32, says adults should be subject to the same rigorous judicial test that children go through before they can turn down a medical procedure based solely on religious beliefs.
“What I’d like to see is the laws changed so that doctors, when a person refuses a procedure for religious reasons —any religion —can still operate,” says Lavoie, who hasn’t decided when he’ll give his petition to Quebec and federal politicians.
What I object to when these situations involve children is that the religious parents are conducting an experiment in Faith on something (a person) that they do not own. You don't and should not have the right to offer your child in sacrifice to your God. Hence state intervention is acceptable.
But once you've come of age, as it were, then the choice as to whether and under what circumstances you wish to continue with your life is nobody else's business (as long as you meet the "sound of mind" test). What would happen if I refused a medical procedure and justified it as springing from my Atheism?
PS. Does anyone else refer to the Jehovah's Witnesses as The Jolly Ho-Hos? Or is it strictly a West Coast thing?
2 comments:
Bloodless medicine, where available, is almost always the treatment of choice over blood transfusions. Largely due to Jehovah's Witnesses, scores of medical centers exclusively devoted to bloodless surgery have cropped up in North America.
Everybody knows that blood is a foreign tissue, even when types match, and the body tries to reject foreign tissue. Suppress the immune system, and that creates other problems. Bloodless medicine avoids the issue, and is thus safer.
Several documentaries are out there on why bloodless is safer. In the interests of hearing both sides before deciding, which is usually thought to be the smart thing, you may want to see one of them. That's fair, isn't it? The doc highlighted below has won a few "film festival" awards. In other words, it is well done and not schlocky.
http://www.watchtower.org/e/vcae/article_01.htm
I'm surprised you haven't claimed that Jehovah's Witnesses are indicators of Global Warming.
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