Donor Ban Frightening in What Goes Unsaid

Last Updated on August 22, 2020

There’s a battle brewing in Washington to lift an FDA-imposed lifetime ban on blood donation for gay men. The ban, initiated in 1985, prevents a homosexual male from ever giving blood if he fesses up to having had sex with another man since 1977.

The presumption is that this type of behavior would put someone more at risk for having contracted HIV, the virus responsible for causing AIDS. But the scary part isn’t the ban itself, or what the specifics of the ban imply. The really scary part is what goes unaddressed in the ban: the fact that heterosexuals can contract AIDS from sex, too, yet they’re not facing any such ban.

Also banned are users of drugs not prescribed by a physician and “sex workers” because they are presumed to also be at high risk.

But surprisingly, sexual partners of these people are only advised to wait one year from their last contact with that permanently-banned donor.  (The link, just so we’re clear, takes you to the American Red Cross’s official website of eligibility requirements.)

The implication seems to be that HIV can’t be detected in a banned donor’s blood until it’s too late, but that everyone else’s is not a problem…even if they’ve been exposed to someone who, by the FDA definition, should never be able to give blood.

Yet the American Red Cross says all donated blood goes through the same screening process.

Something doesn’t add up here…unless you’re willing to accept “Double Standard” as the answer to the equation.

And it’s a double standard that could be putting lives on the line by not allowing potentially safe donors from helping blood banks keep their inventories up.  Depending, of course, on the apparently fluid definition of safe.

Look at it this way:  If the Red Cross is correct when it says that all blood is screened the same way, and if HIV can be detected before the blood is used in someone else, which, according to them, can be done, then what’s the ban about?

Ask yourself what the distinction is the next time your child has to be operated on or is involved in an accident serious enough to require a transfusion.

The gay community in particular is fighting to get this lifetime banned overturned, so let’s focus on that specific group for a moment.  The inevitable question any one opposed to lifting the ban might ask is this: “Would you be okay with getting blood donated by a gay man?”

The less-obvious answer must certainly be this: “How would you know?”

That blood wouldn’t turn into a nice shade of pink. And the donor who doesn’t want to admit being gay or having had a male-on-male encounter could just as easily have claimed never to have had such an encounter.  There’s no lie detector at a blood donation center.

It’s almost a mathematical certainty that somewhere by now, that’s already happened.  Not because there’s some HIV-positive man who intentionally wants to endanger the blood supply, but because there’s an HIV-negative man who has abstained from sex completely for a decade or longer out of fear of contracting HIV, has had multiple tests on his own to make sure he’s not a danger, and who has a sense of civic responsibility that makes him want to help strangers by giving that gift of life.

So how would anyone who’s had a blood transfusion since that ban was initiated but hasn’t contracted HIV know that the blood he received didn’t come from an HIV-negative gay man who just didn’t admit to having had sex with another man?

Would you be okay with your child getting a transfusion of blood that came from a gay donor?

If the proper safeguards are truly in place, the answer ought to be, “Why should it possibly matter?”

These points seem obvious to me:

1. All blood should be treated equally, as if it were donated by a gay man who is HIV-positive, with Hepatitis and every other known lethal contaminant thrown into the mix.

2. Testing should be able to catch all of these possibilities and eliminate blood that would affect the recipient with a failure rate of 0%.

3. If any of the aforementioned conditions in point one cannot effectively be screened with certainty, then a synthetic alternative to blood needs to be developed, mass produced and distributed universally, resulting in a complete suspension of all blood donation.

4. Until point 3 can be implemented, everyone who wishes to donate blood should be sequestered for one year, prevented from having all sexual contact, drug use and any other potential risky behavior of any kind, and be forced to undergo blood testing for that entire year. This should insure that their blood is acceptably safe for use in everyone else’s body.

The only alternative, it seems to me, is to require everyone to regularly donate enough blood to sustain only themselves (and update that inventory as necessary) in the event of an accident, so that they receive their blood and only their blood.

And if they need more than that, then doctors would just have to tell them they’re out of luck.

And time.