Woman Rejects Blood Transfusion, Dies

A hospital today stood by its decision to honor a pregnant woman’s dying wish to refuse a blood transfusion on religious grounds during surgery to save her baby after a shooting in a drug neighborhood.

Lysa Biffle, 26, gave birth to a healthy son by Cesarean section early Tuesday during three hours of surgery and died later in the afternoon, officials said.

Biffle, who was eight months pregnant, was a Jehovah’s Witness and refused blood transfusions, said a spokesman at Queens Hospital Center, where she was taken after the shooting in the waning hours of Christmas Day.

Members of the proselytizing Christian sect do not accept transfusions of blood or blood products.

Hospital spokesman Kevin Spiegel said doctors and hospital administrators did not believe that transfusions would save the woman.

“The hospital is taking the point that she was really in bad shape,” Spiegel said. “If the surgeon really believed that giving her the blood would have saved her life, he probably would have done it.”

Biffle’s husband was injured and Ebony Williams, 18, was killed in the random shooting late Monday, police said. The Biffles and Williams did not know each other, and police described all three as bystanders.

Investigators said the shootings occurred on 160th Street in front of the notorious, crack-infested South Jamaica Houses in an apparent “power play by some drug dealers.”