About a year ago, even though we had not been issued with No Blood Cards, there was some talk about filling in and signing the Health Care Advanced Directive.
For those who havent seen this document, it is quite detailed and specific about what blood fractions an individual will accept. So basically, it states the individual will under no circumstances accept whole blood or its major components, but may accept what could be quite a long list of minor blood fractions.
So here is the tricky question(s) I asked one of our local elders.
Q. You understand that these so called minor components are extracted from donated human blood and often it takes many pints of this human blood to produce just a small amount of these fractions?
A. Yes
Q. Is it acceptable for a witness to donate blood?
A. No
Q. But what if a brother or sister is dying and needs one of these minor fractions and whose conscience allows him/her to accept these but there is a shortage of blood, then is it wrong for me to donate blood? If it is, isnt it an extremely selfish stand to make that says we will accept something we would not give ourselves?
A. Dont know the answer to that one
Has anyone here also asked this, especially to someone on a HLC? If so what was the answer?