It was this “overwhelming pressure” that prompted Jones to ultimately turn down the transfusion.
“Would I lose my family? Would I lose my chance of entering the promised paradise?” she had wondered.
“No one person was pressuring me, but you hear of what happens to other people who get transfusions. It was ingrained,” she said.
Despite her doctor’s concerns, Jones, who now works in insurance and has left the religion, survived without the transfusion.
But the experience has stayed with her.
“Any mention of transfusions brings me back to being that frightened child, sitting alone in my room, trying to make sense of a choice that felt impossible,” she said.
On the recent policy change, she said: “It’s diabolical. I don’t even have the words. I was so angry when I saw it.
“I was just, like, ‘How dare you?’ You know, all those people that have suffered and now you’re just suddenly, like, ‘Oh, actually, no, it’s a personal choice and actually we’re going to change.’ But actually, nothing has really changed and it won’t make a difference.”
Jones contacted BBC News after reading how North West Cambridgeshire MP Sam Carling had criticised her former religion in Parliament.
Carling, himself an ex-Jehovah’s Witness, claimed its teachings had regularly equated homosexuality with paedophilia and that it had covered up child abuse “on a catastrophic level”.
Basoo told the BBC that Carling’s claims were “demonstrably false.”