Argentine province advances an official registry of people who refuse blood transfusions

An Argentine province has voted, for the first of two times required, to create an official registry of people who refuse blood transfusions.

The Legislature of Río Negro, in northern Patagonia, approved the bill 28 votes to 15 on 6 August 2026 in what Argentine practice calls a primera vuelta, or first reading — the first of two separate votes the province's constitution requires before most bills become law.^[1] The measure would set up a provincial registry in which people can record, in advance, a refusal of blood on religious or conscience grounds, and would require every hospital and clinic in the province, public and private, to check that registry before transfusing anyone.^[1]

The operative articles of the bill do not mention Jehovah's Witnesses. The explanatory findings filed with it name them four times.

The bill, the debate and the reaction below are all in Spanish; quotations are translated.

What the bill would do

The bill is Proyecto de Ley Nº 462/2025, filed on 25 April 2025 by four legislators — Javier Acevedo, Fernando Frugoni, Daniela Agostino and Roberta Scavo. Three committees — social affairs, constitutional affairs and general legislation, and budget — each reported on it favourably before it reached the floor.^[2]

As approved at first reading, it runs to six short articles.^[1]

Article 2 creates the registry and puts the duty on hospitals: health establishments "public as well as private" must check it before performing a transfusion.

Article 3 covers the case the sponsors say drove the bill. Where there is an immediate risk to life, the patient cannot reliably make their wishes known, and there is no registration and no valid, accessible document recording a refusal, the medical team may proceed with "the indicated treatment."

Article 4 is the mirror image. Where an express, valid, written and current refusal does exist, staff must respect it — a duty the article ties to Argentina's national Law 26.529, the patients' rights statute that already lets a competent adult turn down treatment.

Article 5 makes the provincial Health Ministry responsible for running the scheme. It must train health staff, guarantee that alternatives to transfusion are available where they are medically workable, run public education campaigns about advance directives — instructions a person sets down ahead of time about treatment they do or do not want — and build a provincial register of advance directives for medical treatment generally, which is broader than the blood-specific registry in Article 2.

One passage was added between the version filed in 2025 and the version approved this month.^[1][3] Article 4 now carries a second paragraph on 16- and 17-year-olds: although Argentine civil law lets people that age make decisions about their own bodies, the new paragraph says that where a refusal puts survival at immediate risk the courts must be brought in straight away, and a judge keeps the power to order urgent medical treatment "where the conflict cannot be resolved through ordinary care channels."^[1]

That is the change legislator Ayelén Spósito told the chamber her bloc — a parliamentary grouping of legislators from the same party — had pushed for, so that doctors could act when a minor's life was at stake even over a family's objection.^[4]

The cases behind it

A bill filed in Argentina comes with its fundamentos, a public statement of the reasons for it, roughly an explanatory memorandum. This one describes the conflict the bill is meant to settle as one that arises "for religious reasons, as in the case of Jehovah's Witnesses for example."^[3]

Witnesses refuse transfusions on religious grounds, holding that blood represents life to God and that scripture in both the Old and New Testaments forbids taking it in.^[5]

The findings then recite three cases.

The first is Bahamondez, decided by Argentina's Supreme Court in 1993. According to the findings, the court recognised the right of a Jehovah's Witness patient to refuse a transfusion where the refusal was made freely, consciously and on an informed basis.^[3]

The second happened in San Carlos de Bariloche in December 2017. A family court judge, María Marcela Pájaro, authorised a transfusion for a six-year-old boy whose parents, Jehovah's Witnesses, objected on religious grounds. The findings say she relied on the child's rights to life and health under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, reasoning that no right is absolute where a minor's life is at stake, and that the parents accepted the ruling. The findings do not name the child.^[3]

The third is the most recent. On 12 April 2025 a motorcyclist suffered severe head trauma in a road crash and needed an urgent transfusion at the Hospital Zatti in Viedma, the provincial capital. His family said he was a Jehovah's Witness and opposed it. Judge Ana Carolina Scoccia authorised the transfusion, weighing religious freedom against the right to life and finding that the man had left no written instructions and was in immediate danger.^[3]

Acevedo put the point to the chamber directly.

He also rejected the suggestion that the problem was borrowed from somewhere else: "This is not an abstract debate imported from another reality. It is a conflict that comes up relatively frequently in the emergency rooms of our hospitals."^[4]

The bind he says the bill would relieve runs both ways for a doctor. Transfuse over a family's objection when there is no registration, he told the Viedma newspaper NoticiasNet, and "the medical teams can end up facing a court case themselves." Withhold it and let the patient die, and "they can also end up facing a criminal complaint, for malpractice, because there is nothing that sets out the order of things."^[6]

The case against

Fifteen legislators voted no.^[1] The objections voiced on the floor were practical as much as legal.^[4]

Patricia Mc Kidd — "MC KIDD María P." in the chamber's own record — argued the province was legislating on ground national law already occupies. Law 26.529, she said, already sets out how to proceed in situations involving minors, and already fixes both patients' rights and what health professionals may do in cases of extreme gravity. The bill, she argued, "sows procedural doubts and exposes doctors to future litigation." She also pressed what happens in a province with heavy tourism when the patient comes from elsewhere: "What do we do? Are we going to go and ask for a registry from every province the people involved in the incident come from? How do you resolve that quickly? That is where the life of the injured person is at risk."^[4]

Yolanda Mansilla — "MANSILLA Elba Y." in the record — pressed a practical objection: that a mandatory check costs time a patient in an emergency does not have.

She pressed the point further. Even where relatives say they know what the patient wanted, she argued, the doctor would still have to consult the registry, because the patient may have changed their mind: "The doctor has to check anyway, because maybe I changed my opinion and you did not find out. And meanwhile, I die."^[4]

In her summary, what the bill does is "create a registry so the doctor can find out whether or not I gave my consent for a blood transfusion." She drew a line between that and informed consent under the existing national statute — the process by which a patient who is awake is told what a treatment involves, including the consequences of accepting or refusing it, and then decides: "It is I, conscious, of full will and without defects of will, who can decide whether to undergo a treatment or not."^[4]

Mansilla said she agreed that protecting life should prevail where minors are concerned, and she closed on the province's capacity to run the scheme at all: "Are we prepared in Río Negro to have this registry? We do not have connectivity, the roads are destroyed, and we may end up legislating something that turns out to be more harmful than helpful."^[4]

Spósito, arguing the other way, said the registry would "make the work easier in an emergency, when a person is unconscious." She accepted that one of the challenges would be writing the implementing regulations and setting the registry up, and raised folding the information into digital medical records so staff could see quickly whether a patient had recorded a refusal.^[4]

What "first reading" means, and what happens next

Río Negro's constitution requires most bills to pass the same chamber twice, with a gap in between. Article 141 says that once a bill is approved it is published to the population through the media "for the purpose of learning popular opinion." Article 142 says that once fifteen days have elapsed from that approval it goes to a fresh vote, in general and article by article; if it again gets the required majority, it is enacted as law.^[7]

The bulletin carrying the approved text is itself that constitutional step. It is published under Article 141 and says on its face that it is informing the public.^[1]

The constitution does not say whether those fifteen days are calendar days or working days. Counted as calendar days, they run out on 21 August 2026 — and Article 142 sets a floor rather than a deadline: it says when the second vote may be taken, not by when it must be.^[7] The bill's stage in the legislature's own records still read "Approved, first reading" on 14 August.^[2]

A short list of bills is exempt from the two-vote process altogether — the budget, bills ratifying agreements signed by the executive, and urgent bills sent by the executive. This is none of them.^[7]

Reaction

The newest entries on jw.org's Spanish-language news index run to 6 August 2026 and include nothing on the bill; the organisation's English-language legal-news index carried no item on it either. Both were read on 14 August 2026.^[8]

In the coverage reviewed for this article, one Jehovah's Witness has spoken publicly about it — a single member.

Jorge Peralta, a Jehovah's Witness, told the Viedma newspaper NoticiasNet that he approved: "Yes, we read it and it seems good to me for those who for various reasons do not accept blood transfusions." He said Witnesses already use a power of attorney certified by a notary — a legal document, signed before an official, appointing someone to speak for you — naming two representatives to answer for them if they are unconscious, a document whose stated purpose is to release the doctor from any liability. A provincial law, he said, "would be like a reinforcement" of the national one.^[5]

He added a caution of his own: "We have to wait for the full enactment, for it to come out of the Legislature. It may have changes, or not. We will see."^[5]

The newspaper presented his answer as the community's position. Nothing in the report says he was speaking for any Witness body.