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"Context is everything," someone once said, and such is certainly the case with regard to this Press Release from Dr. Patricia Ford and the Center for Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital. Over the past six weeks, the WatchTower Society religion has been inundated with "bad press" due to public outrage over the needless deaths of two young Jehovah's Witnesses.

On October 25, 2007, 22 year-old Emma Gough died at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, in England, after delivering twins - a boy and a girl. Gough suffered excessive blood loss during and after the delivery, but she and her husband, who were Jehovah's Witnesses, refused to permit the administering of life-saving blood transfusions. Gough's death received frontpage attention in England's newspapers for almost a week as readers expressed their outrage that the new mother of twins would choose to die for the teachings of a religious cult rather than choose to live for her newborn son and daughter.

Then, on November 28, 2007, a 14 year-old Jehovah's Witness child, named Dennis Lindberg, died at Seattle's Children's Hospital after his Jehovah's Witness legal guardian, and apparently, the Hospital, his doctors, and eventually a local judge all agreed that, as a "mature minor", Lindberg would be allowed to refuse life-saving blood transfusions made necessary by the chemotherapy treatments Lindberg was receiving for his leukemia that was diagnosed only three weeks earlier.

Bloodless medicine and surgery is to be commended in the context of situations where such can be used and not put patients at risk of death. However, it appears like every time another Jehovah's Witness needlessly dies, articles about bloodless medicine and surgery are trotted out to act as possible "cover" for the beliefs of the WatchTower Society, and possibly to make the deaths of Jehovah's Witnesses look like the responsibility of their ill-informed and ill-prepared doctors and hospitals.