Solzhenitsyn: I wrote an essay several years ago that touched on your wife's answers. I called it the "doctrine du jour".
JWs & the Concept of Conscientious Objection
JWs have refined their point of view regarding blood transfusions over the past two and a half decades. Currently, JWs are permitted to accept practically any fractionated blood product, including immune globulins, clotting factors, albumin, and even products like Hemopure which is a hemoglobin extract derived from bovine erythrocytes. The decision is dependent on the individual JW's conscience. They cannot, however, accept infusions of packed red cell concentrate, plasma, or platelets without judicial action being taken against them by their church leaders. Consider also that up until 1980, Jehovah's Witnesses were forbidden to accept tissue and organ transplants, and then suddenly the issue became a "matter of conscience" for individual JWs.
The dilemma, it appears, is that while conscientious decisions by definition are firmly held convictions based on an individual's thought processes interacting with their belief system, Jehovah's Witnesses' "conscientious decisions" are the result of whatever happens to be the 'doctrine du jour' as published in the Watchtower Society's literature, meaning that someone who steadfastly refused to accept blood fractions or organ transplants one day because "Jehovah's Witnesses do not accept" them, will read "new light" in an up-to-date issue of the Watchtower and suddenly realize that they no longer need to refuse these treatments, because they will no longer be punished by their church for accepting them. So the question becomes, Are these "conscientious decisions" really the result of firmly held convictions? If they can so easily be cast aside, upon the reading of a sentence or two in a periodical, without any other thought process in the matter, it would appear that the concept of "firm convictions" and "deeply held beliefs" is over-ruled by convenience and the removal of any negative spiritual or social result for the person claiming the decision.