News and primary-source research on the Watchtower organization
A Governing Body update made the storage and reinfusion of a patient's own blood a matter of personal conscience — one more move in an 80-year doctrine that keeps shifting in one direction. Updated 19 September 2026: six months later the Governing Body extended the same principle to the four primary components of another person's blood; whole-blood transfusions remain prohibited.
A “Questions From Readers” article released on 18 September 2026 leaves the use of red cells, white cells, plasma and platelets taken from another person — and the decision to donate blood so components or fractions can be made from it — to each member's conscience, and says the congregation “will not get involved in that decision.” Transfusions of whole blood, and donating blood for one, remain prohibited. It is the second change to the blood doctrine this year.
A second stipulation, filed on 25 August 2026, pushes the three Jehovah's Witness organizations' deadline to answer the complaint or ask the court to dismiss it from 31 August to 19 October 2026. All three have lawyers on the record, and an amended affirmation records a further service on one of them. The allegations remain unproven. Filed 16 June 2026 under a January 2026 amendment reviving decades-old claims and extending liability to institutions.
A judge paused this unproven $100 million case on 4 May 2026 at the Governing Body's request. The complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court on Nov. 12, 2025, alleges a Circuit Overseer abused Stella Cristina Gomes De Souza beginning at age 12 in Brazil and that Watchtower routed reports internally. The plaintiff asked the judge to reconsider on 18 May. A pause is not a dismissal. This account runs to the docket's last entry, 1 June 2026.
In sister Child Victims Act cases over Robert Warne, a ministerial servant at a Middleport, N.Y. congregation, a court denied Watchtower's bid to shield its nationwide reports of known abusers and pierced clergy privilege over his confession letter — before both suits settled in 2026. The Governing Body was dismissed from one case and kept in the other.
A federal complaint filed February 13, 2026, alleges the Governing Body and three Watchtower entities failed to protect a Cordele teenager from more than 100 acts of abuse by his Bible-study instructor, who is separately convicted. The organization's alleged liability is unproven; the case is pending.
In Governing Body Update #5, released on jw.org on August 22, 2025, David Splane addressed 'additional secular education' and, per ex-member transcriptions, presented it more as a personal choice than the spiritual risk decades of Watchtower literature had described.
A Governing Body Update dated December 15, 2023, and reportedly presented by Stephen Lett relaxed a decades-long grooming norm, reframing a neatly trimmed beard as a matter of personal conscience and local decision.
On February 22, 2023, the organization behind Jehovah's Witnesses announced in one sentence that Governing Body member Anthony Morris III 'no longer serves' — gave no reason — and then scrubbed his recorded talks from jw.org over the following weeks.
Geoffrey Jackson, a member of the Governing Body that runs Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide, gave sworn evidence to Australia's Royal Commission — on the group's claim to speak for God, the two-witness rule, and whether women could judge abuse cases.
Anthony Morris III, then on the Jehovah's Witnesses' Governing Body, condemned tight clothing in a recorded talk and tied the style to "homosexual" designers — remarks that circulated widely and drew criticism.
A 2024 change retired the word "disfellowshipping" for "removed from the congregation" and eased a single rule about greeting former members. But the announcement, the no-socializing, and the shunning of critics all remained — and the change arrived just as the practice faced its sharpest legal test in Europe.