No Blood, In Any Form

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.