Former Jehovah’s Witnesses reflect on changes to blood transfusion bans After decades of strict restrictions around blood transfusion, an updated policy allows Witnesses to receive parts of blood

Lee Elder will never forget when a friend asked him to be one of her pallbearers. At 16 years old, he carried her casket. Elder and his friends were members of the Tucson Mountain Congregation in Arizona. After Elder’s friend was diagnosed with leukemia, chemotherapy and radiation made her anemic; as a Witness, she refused the standard treatment of a blood transfusion. Combined with her cancer, she only got sicker until she died in 1976 as a teenager. Elder, the executive director and founder of the Alliance for Jehovah’s Witness Research and Bioethics, stopped being an active Witness in the...