Are Transfusions Equivalent to Eating Blood?
The whole position of the Jehovah’s Witnesses hinges on the assertion that blood transfusions are just another form of eating blood. They contend straightforwardly that you are still sustaining yourself by putting another living thing’s blood in your body. The fact that you are not doing this through the digestive system is mere semantic quibbling. When someone cannot eat due to illness or injury, we feed them intravenously, so how is this really any different? They reinforce this with analogies like that of a man whose doctor tells him to abstain from alcohol. Would it be okay for the man to stop drinking, but to inject alcohol directly into his veins? In this way they attempt to show that, behind the apparent differences, eating blood and receiving a blood transfusion are in fact variations of the same thing.
Medically this is not at all the case. If you eat blood, you break it down into nutrients, which your body then uses. What makes it to your own bloodstream is not blood at all. It has been completely broken down like any other food. That is what eating something is. Jesus Himself speaks of eating in Mark 7:19 specifically and necessarily as “what goes into the stomach and is eliminated” (or literally, “passed out into the latrine”). A transfusion is quite different. The blood stays blood. It does not nourish you. It does what your blood does. It carries oxygen that your body receives from your lungs and nutrients that your body receives from food and takes them throughout your body, but the blood does not provide you anything from itself. In this way, it is different even from “feeding” through an IV, which puts simple nutrients straight into your blood to be carried about and used. Notice that even this kind of “feeding” is not actually food at all, but rather substitutes what food would normally provide for you. You could not liquefy chicken, spinach, or carrots and inject them into your veins. That would kill you. Food needs to be digested. That’s what it means to eat. Intravenous “feeding” is not really feeding at all, but a temporary substitute for feeding. How much less, then, can a blood transfusion be considered eating, which does not even so much as a substitute for eating at all! For all these reasons, medically speaking, eating blood, and transfusing blood are not remotely the same thing.
They are not the same thing by intent either. The alcoholic in the Jehovah’s Witness’s example, who tries to get around his doctor’s orders by injecting alcohol into his veins, is attempting to accomplish the same thing as drinking alcohol. The patient receiving a blood transfusion, however, is not seeking a meal. He is not satisfying his hunger. The situation is completely different. Yes, you could say very generally that both are using blood to sustain their body, but this is far too vague to be meaningful. If I go to a doctor for surgery, his hands will literally enter my body to cure me of some ailment. I am using the doctor to sustain my body. That, however, does not make surgery the same as cannibalism. I did not eat the doctor’s hands, even though his hands entered my body to sustain me. The situation is simply not comparable.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Scriptures root the command in the sacredness of life, not in the sacredness of blood in its own right. Genesis 9 allows animals’ blood to be shed, but we must not eat the blood. We can only eat the meat. Human blood, however, must not be shed at all, all of this is because life is in the blood. Now, let’s return again to the idea of surgery. If a doctor cuts a man open, causing him to bleed, but does so out of true necessity to save his life, is this a violation of Genesis 9? Is this what it means to sin by shedding a man’s blood? Of course not! The issue here has to do with violence and slaughter. If I slaughter an animal to eat it, one can argue that the command is still in force saying that I must not eat its blood. This command, however, is certainly not saying that I cannot freely give some of my own blood, at no harm or injury to myself, to save another man’s life. Neither life suffers violence, but rather one life is saved at no harm to the other. If we were killing men and draining their blood to save others, that would be another matter, but the process of some living men freely giving of their own lifeblood so that other men can stay alive does not equate to violence, slaughter, or the desecration of life. If anything, it upholds the sacredness of life and honors the great value of the dying person who is made in the image of God.
Conclusion
It is a noble thing to be willing to die rather than do evil; however, it is a tragic thing when false teaching and misrepresentation of Scripture causes lives to be needlessly lost. This is, unfortunately, the case with the Jehovah’s Witness doctrine on blood transfusions. Scripture, not to mention medical science and common sense, teaches us that eating blood and receiving a blood transfusion are not practically or morally equivalent; they are, in fact, opposite. It is a heavy thing to consider how those who have promoted this false teaching will have to give an account before a holy God of the lives it has needlessly cost if they do not repent.
https://carm.org/jehovahs-witnesses/are-blood-transfusions-sinful/