Abstinence From Blood

Jehovah's Witnesses hold, as a core and distinguishing doctrine, that scripture prohibits taking blood into the body in any form, a position drawn from a small set of biblical texts read together: God's command to Noah in Genesis 9:4 not to eat flesh with its blood still in it, the law given at Leviticus 17 prohibiting the eating of blood, and the decision of the apostles and elders recorded in Acts 15:29 instructing early gentile converts to abstain from blood alongside food sacrificed to idols and sexual immorality.

The Watch Tower Society, the organization's governing body, formalized this reading into an explicit prohibition on blood transfusion in 1945, extending a dietary prohibition most other Christian traditions read as applying narrowly to eating blood as food into a considerably broader medical prohibition covering transfusion of blood or its major components as a form of taking blood into the body regardless of the route. This position places Jehovah's Witnesses in a distinctive position among Christian denominations, since almost no other major Christian body reads the same biblical texts as extending to medical blood transfusion, a specific application the Witnesses' own theology treats as a direct and necessary extension of the scriptural principle rather than a separate, later addition to it.

The doctrine has driven the development of a genuine and medically significant bloodless medicine movement, since Jehovah's Witness patients' consistent refusal of transfusion created sustained clinical demand for alternative techniques, including cell salvage, volume expanders and surgical methods that minimize blood loss, approaches hospitals and surgeons have documented as often safely applicable to a much wider patient population than Jehovah's Witnesses alone, giving the doctrine an influence on broader medical practice beyond the community that holds it.

The organization maintains Hospital Liaison Committees in many countries specifically to help members and medical staff navigate treatment consistent with the doctrine, and has over recent decades revised and refined which specific blood fractions and medical procedures its members may accept, a body of guidance covering matters such as minor blood fractions and certain medical procedures involving a member's own blood, decisions the organization's leadership has adjusted over time even as the core prohibition on whole blood and its four primary components, red cells, white cells, platelets and plasma, has remained constant. The doctrine has also generated significant legal and bioethical discussion, particularly concerning minors whose parents refuse blood transfusion on their behalf, a distinct and separately documented body of case law and ethical debate this atlas does not adjudicate.