"There is no nutritional benefit from a blood transfusion. You can give a starving man blood transfusions until the cows come home----it will not save his life. Or, you could feed someone who is hemorrhaging internally, blood through the mouth----it will not save them. No doctor would ever prescribe blood transfusions to treat malnutrition. When you eat something, it is taken into the stomach where it is digested and broken down into nutrients, which are then passed through the intestines into the blood vessels, where the blood carries them to the body for nourishment. This is accomplished by the digestive system.
During a transfusion however, the blood that is transfused travels through the blood stream, then goes to the intestines where it picks up the digested food passed through the intestines and carrying that food throughout the rest of the body. This is the circulatory system. The transfused blood is not food itself but the carrier of food. The food is broken down into its component parts whereas the blood remains whole. This is the medical definition proving that eating blood (such as blood pudding or blood sausage) through the mouth is a completely different procedure than a blood transfusion. A clear difference, that even those who are not familiar with medical terminology can understand.
What is incredible, is that the Society admits that blood fractions, which you are now allowed to accept, comes from donated blood:
".... many fractions are derived
from blood that has been donated for medical purposes . Each Christian should make a conscientious decision as to whether he or she will accept or will reject the medical use of these substances..Kingdom Ministry, November 2006 p. 3 While it does not use the words "stored blood", that is exactly where the fractions come from. Yet in the same article, it re-emphasizes the doctrine that Witnesses "...do not donate or store their own blood for transfusion..." It is difficult to believe that those who wrote this article cannot see the blatant hypocrisy and sheer insanity of telling members they can accept blood fractions from another donor (including Bovine, which is derived from cow’s blood), but that they cannot store their own blood.
Another point to consider is that the Watch Tower Society has at times acknowledged, a blood transfusion is not intravenous feeding; it is actually a transplantation (of a fluid tissue), not an infusion of a nutrient:
"...Dr. Ciril Godec, chairman of urology at Long Island College Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York. He wrote: "Today blood would probably not be approved as a medication, since it would not fulfill safety criteria of the Food and Drug Administration.
Blood is an organ of the body, and blood transfusion is nothing less than an organ transplant .-----Awake! August 22, 1999 p. 31 Are Blood Transfusions Really Necessary?"When doctors transplant
a heart, a liver, or another organ, the recipient's immune system may sense the foreign tissue and reject it. Yet, a transfusion is a tissue transplant. Even blood that has been 'properly' cross matched can suppress the immune system."------How Can Blood Save Your Life?, 1999, p. 8In a kidney or heart transplant, the transplanted organ is not eaten as food by the new body. It remains the same organ with the same form and function. The same is true of blood. It is not eaten and digested as food during a transfusion, but rather it remains the same fluid tissue, with the same form and function. The body simply cannot utilize transplanted blood as food. In order to be considered "food", the blood would first have to pass through the digestive system, (via the mouth) and broken down so that the body cells could absorb it. Therefore it would have to be literally eaten to be considered "food". When doctors want to administer a blood transfusion, it is not because the patient is in need of nourishment but rather oxygen, which is required to keep the person alive.
In the September 15, 1958 Watchtower on page 575, it says: "Each time the prohibition of blood is mentioned in the Scriptures it is in connection with taking it as food, and so it is as a nutrient that we are concerned with in its being forbidden."
Blood transfusions do not result from the deaths of blood donors . yet they fail to acknowledge this. Instead, they go to great lengths describing how someone's blood is supposed to be "poured out on the ground" the moment it leaves their body, despite the fact that they're not dead. Ironically, the Watchtower uses this same argument for why it is now acceptable for a Christian to accept an organ transplants: "...Regarding the transplantation of human tissue or bone from one human to another, this is a matter for conscientious decision by each one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Some Christians might feel that taking into their bodies any tissue or body part from another human is cannibalistic. . . . Other sincere Christians today may feel that the Bible does not definitely rule out medical transplants of human organs. . . .
It may be argued, too, that organ transplants are different from cannibalism since the "donor" is not killed to supply food..." The Watchtower, March 15, 1980, p. 31.
