Well written piece, BS.
Based on what my wife told me helped her, perhaps you could go a step further and pressure your wife to put herself in an uncomfortable or difficult situation that tests her faith. It needs to reach her heart! I'd do that by expanding a bit on the organ transplant issue:
Ask her how she'd feel if you guys were alive and had kids back in the 70s, and one of them needed a liver transplant in, say, 1979.
Use a specific child and make sure she puts your suffering child's face in this hypothetical. She must visualize it for the effect.
Suppose both of you upheld the Society's perspective that it would constitute cannibalism and so you rejected the transplant and your child died. Get her to think about the funeral and the pain she would feel at burying her own kid.
Then ask how she would feel when the Society shared their “new light” regarding transplants in The Watchtower, March 15, 1980, p.31?
If you can, get her to read it in front of you, out loud. She has to really connect on this. (Interestingly, the WT warns that apostates will try to appeal to the emotions. Um, yeah, it's called reaching someone's heart, dumbasses.)
Here's what should happen: If she has a heart and puts herself in that situation, she should realise that article was a crude, disgusting attempt to pawn off responsibility for the deaths of innocent transplant objectors by insinuating it was always, more or less, a conscience matter. In explaining why some may have refused transplants in the past, it said in part, “Some Christians might feel that taking into their bodies any tissue or body part from another human is cannibalistic.”
Yes, they “might” feel that way because THAT IS WHAT THE WATCHTOWER ARTICLE FLAT-OUT TOLD THEM. (Interestingly, the articles written to smooth over the 1975 fiasco – WT July 16, 1976 and March 15, 1980 - were similarly evasive in taking full responsibility, using very passive sentence structure to redirect attention.)
Today, a reasoning person should be able to read that March 15, 1980 Questions From Readers and compare with the view on blood transfusions: like organ transplants, blood transfusions should be a personal decision, not a doctrinal decision.
I reasoned this with my wife and, while it took much more for her to break free, she's said that it helped her quite a bit. But she'd always had a weak spot for the kids and worried that her faith wasn't strong enough for the blood issue when it came to them.
