A Jehovah’s Witness follower who was diagnosed with treatable leukemia when she was seven months pregnant refused to have a transfusion due to her religious beliefs.

According to iol news, a local media reported that 28-year-old Australian mother’s baby needed to be treated which involved urgent blood transfusions which are forbidden in Jehovah’s Witness church.

Her treating doctor, hematologists Giselle Kidson-Gerber and colleague Amber Biscoe believed she and her unborn baby would would have survived if she had accepted transfusion. The baby needed urgent caesarean birth but the doctors feared the mother would die from blood loss if they carried one out.

The baby died in her womb, and shortly after the woman suffered a stroke and multiple organ failure and died as well.