Julie,
I'm sorry. I don't understand your last post. You said " if parents refuse medical treatment for their child that is necessary to prevent death ". We are not talking about that. We are not talking about refusing medical treatment, period. What we are talking about is chosing bloodles medicine because the persons who have that right to choose find the use of blood to be unethical based on their understanding of the Bible and their personal decision to live by that understanding. If, as you say, they were refusing medical treatment that is necessary to prevent death, then in the case which I posted above the baby would have died. From what I have read online bloodless centers do say that they have to have blood on hand only as a last resort. I also, though, have heard of very serious operations where blood was not even on hand. Jehovah's Witnesses are willing to sign legal forms which absolve doctors of any legal libility as long as those doctors do the best they can, which is really all one can ask under any circunstance. I wonder how many times I will have to repeat this point before you will acknowledge it: the parents in this case were not refusing medical treatment, and other Jehovah's Witnesses do not refuse medical treatment. Why do you think that we go to a doctor or a hospital if we are going to refuse medical treatment. What we are talking about here is the right to exersize the principle of "informed consent" in order to choose what type of medical treatment that they will recieve, and since as we have seen bloodless surgery is reffered to by doctors as the "gold standard" by doctors, then the request not to have a blood transfusion is not an unreasonable one. I thought about your comment made earlier about "not experimenting on children". Anything which is done now was not done before at some point in time. Before 1975 very little was done to try and save preemies as I pointed out in an earlier post. Where did doctors get the ideas from that they use now? I would think that a lot of it came from their experiance with adult patients which were then adapted to children according to thier circunstances. Do you remember the case of the preemiewhich I quoted from a little earlier? I gave the link to where I found it. How did the doctors know how to treat that baby? Were they experimenting? Did the fact that they didn't give the preemie a transfusion fail to prevent it's death, or did the baby survive, and that without complications. This is not an isolated case and to me it prove the falseness of your statement as to what is essetial treatment to prevent death.
In your last statement you said "This will be the case until a time comes when blood transfusion therapy does not represent essential treatment for some conditions".
That time is now. That is not just my opinion. The cases where preemies have recieved an alternative bloodless treatment and have survived are the evidence which substantiates the above assertion.
Please stop saying that people who refuse a blood transfusion are refusing medical treatment. There are religions which do not believe in doctors, in medicine, or hospitals. I believe that Christian Scientists are one of those religions, but this does not apply to Jehovah's Witnesses.
Julie, so far in this discussion you haven't backed up anything you said. I have to go with the facts. It just really sounds irrational for someone to take a specific request (i.e. bloodless medicine) and then to generalize to the point of distortion by saying that this stated request is synymonous with "no medicine". Are you just ignoring the cases we've mentioned, or is it that you think we are just making them up?
Julie, there is something I would like to ask you, if you don't mind. Do you work for a blood bank? I know that sounds like a silly question but it's the only reason why I can think of for your inability to see anything at all that is pointed out to you. All I can think of is that you must have either a very strong prejudice, or you must have an ulterior motive. There must be some reason why you equate blood with medicine and keep asserting that if someone refuses blood then they are refusing medicine, or medical treatment. Otherwise why would you keep saying that?