Dying to Believe

When I first met Lawrence Hughes a little more than a decade ago, Bethany was already dead.  And he was still making headlines across Canada.

I sought him out over his decision to ask the Court to have his daughter transfused against her own, her mother’s and their church’s wishes. He was the only person ever to take the church to court over their blood doctrine and teaching. To me, he was an unlikely warrior, that guy you just don’t imagine will take up a cause or wage a fight against forces larger than him.

Lawrence won the first round of the battle when the Court ordered the transfusions and 24/7 supervision of Bethany to shield her from religious pressure.

But, in the end, he lost everything else including, as I said, Bethany herself

This is his backstory...

Lawrence Hughes had a wife, three healthy kids, a job, a house, and lots of friends from church. An unremarkable life, it was nonetheless a good and comfortable one. 

That is, until that day when his middle daughter Bethany left their breakfast table to get a doctor’s help for a persistent flu. Instead, she was rushed to hospital, diagnosed with acute leukaemia. That’s the day Lawrence did what he never imagined he could or would. He stood up to his church, his family and his friends to try to save his daughter’s life.  

Bethany needed blood transfusions, a treatment not allowed by their church.  But as he thumbed through his Bible in desperate need of words of comfort, Lawrence came to believe that the Book was telling him something else altogether … that it would be a much greater sin to let his daughter die than to let her be transfused. As she was just sixteen and a half, and in the face of Bethany’s own furious opposition, he gave permission for the treatment to begin.

The decision has cost him. His church shunned him, his wife divorced him and his other children no longer speak to him. He has never seen his only grandchild.  And when Bethany died, Lawrence wasn’t there.  She’d been taken by her mother to a then undisclosed location for alternative treatment.

"I was Bethany's father. I had a right to see my dying daughter. I had a right to know what her treatment was. I had a right to tell her I loved her. If I had been with her, she might still be alive today."

So, the grieving father turned to the courts in search, he says, of justice.

I think he was perhaps looking for a little solace and maybe even a measure of vindication.

Lawrence launched a lawsuit that alleged that the Watch Tower Society, its lawyers and religious leaders had misled his daughter about her medical treatment when they urged her to refuse the transfusions. He kept up the fight for nearly a decade. That cost him too.  In time certainly, emotionally without doubt, and he has twice had to declare bankruptcy in pursuit of a goal that, even after all those years of trying has so far eluded him.

Or has it?  “Think about it,” says Hughes.  There hasn’t been a blood case involving children in North America in almost six years.  Not one! There should have been at least four, five, six or more cases in that time. So even if I lost, maybe I won.”

We think he has.

We want to tell the untold story of Lawrence’s lonely campaign for his brand of justice that started in all those years ago in a hospital room … this story of courage and persistence of determination and courage in the face of overwhelming odds

We’re starting off strong.  We have extraordinary access to the court records. There are already 30 boxes of legal documents to wade through and we’ve started that process, but there are more documents to be purchased and much more research to be done before we can even begin to write the script.

Your Giving & Our Gratitude

We are looking to raise $20,000 that, in addition to the $6,000 we currently have, will go toward development of a documentary on Lawrence Hughes’ Bethany and Lawrence Hughes. We will be able to leverage this money with other funds available to Canadian producers. This will allow us to develop a script and create a short video demo. With a script and demo we are confident we can raise the rest of the money to make the documentary a reality.