“The Battle of the Blood”: R v Cyrenne , Rights, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada

In 1980, a young girl died from a rare blood disease. Her parents, devout Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused her a blood transfusion, were soon criminally charged in her death. This article examines the subsequent trial, which attracted widespread attention, in the context of the Witnesses’ decades of legal troubles in Canada before the advent of the Charter. Jehovah’s Witnesses contributed to a series of landmark Canadian court decisions on civil liberties in Quebec but soon became involved in a more controversial series of incidents, in which adherents and the state fought over whether parents could refuse their children blood transfusions. Although the Jehovah’s Witnesses used rights language, their conception of rights (linked to the “first generation” of rights activism) was out of step with mainstream human rights culture (then in its “second generation”). During the parents’ trial, which occurred near the end of the pre-Charter period, mainstream media focused on the possibility of a legal resolution to the blood debate and the question of religious rights, but the eventual acquittal hinged on medical details. For Witnesses and their lawyers, the religious and medical issues were linked, and their previous legal success gave them hope for a decisive victory. Although such a landmark decision failed to materialize, the case was still a showcase for the Witnesses’ combination of religious conviction and medical doubt.