Wallin should not be messing with our blood supply
Senator ignores truth about plasma, says Marni Soupcoff.
Independent Senator Pamela Wallin introduced a bill in the spring that would ban compensation for blood plasma donation in Canada. It was a move that, like so many regulatory proposals, came almost out of the blue.
There was no new evidence of problems with or negative findings about compensating plasma donors, which happens in Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Manitoba. Shortly before Sen. Wallin put forward her bill, an expert panel released a report that concluded there is no credible indication that paid plasma donation is unsafe, or that it is harmful to the voluntary blood-collection system.
But the senator nonetheless says “(t)he point of this bill is better safe than sorry.” She’s worried about paid donations “undermin(ing) the precious voluntary ( blood donation) system”; about Canadian donors becoming “a revenue stream for private companies looking to make a profit”; and about paid donations “undermin(ing) our natural instincts to be altruistic.”
Finally, Wallin is concerned about the safety of the blood supply, writing: “A new virus could impact the blood supply in so many ways, so we need to ensure that our national blood authority is the gatekeeper.”
She apparently is unmoved by the fact that paid plasma donations are screened and regulated every bit as rigorously as unpaid plasma donations.
“We didn’t know the dangers of hepatitis C when it turned up, so we couldn’t test for it,” Wallin says. “We don’t know what the next blood-borne evil will be, so we can’t test for that either.”
She’s right. And it’s scary. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the compensation (or not) of donors. Wallin seems to find the idea of paid donation icky. But she isn’t able to offer rational arguments against it.
Last month, a group of ethicists and economists submitted a letter to the Senate (available online at donationethics.com) expressing their concern about Wallin’s bill and highlighting what they term the “weakness of the economic and ethical arguments” against paid donation.
Anyone who shares Wallin’s visceral reaction to paying for plasma should read the letter and consider the points it raises before settling in to an opinion on the subject.
“Despite a variety of efforts in various jurisdictions around the world,” the letter points out, “no jurisdiction has achieved self-sufficiency (in supplying its need for plasma products) without the use of the compensatory model.”
The letter also quotes Jane Philpott of the National Rare Blood Disorder Organizations, who has written: “More than 70 per cent of the plasma required by Canadian Blood Services ... is collected from compensated U.S. donors.”
In other words, the precious voluntary system Canada is so proud of really only works because we’re able to rely on paid donations from outside the country.
Wallin is free to imply that paid donations are both character-wrecking and unsafe. She is free to fret over their impact.
But she shouldn’t perpetuate the myth that this country would be freeing itself of all these supposed ills if it were to ban paid donations. We would still be using plenty of plasma products from financially compensated Americans and other donors, just as we do now; it would simply be more convenient to pretend we’re above the fray because we wouldn’t be reminded of what we’re doing by gauche billboards and signs offering cash for blood.
Denial is often more comfortable than facing difficult realities, and no one is better at leveraging and exploiting denial than politicians.
That’s why the last party we need defining and deciding the ethics of voluntary paid plasma donations is government. We do need a responsible and competent regulatory regime to screen blood products for safety — as well as to report objectively on the safety of frequent blood plasma donation for the donors — but that’s as far as the political involvement in the issue should go.
When politicians want to ban a useful and safe practice because it could eat away at our “altruistic instincts” — which is another way of saying it could allow people to hold personal values different from those politicians think are worthwhile and salutary — you know they’ve ventured too far.
This is not a no-brainer, but it’s certainly a far more nuanced issue than Wallin’s bill would imply. As I’ve written before, commodification of crucial resources may not give us a warm and fuzzy feeling; but contrary to our intuitions, it’s often the fairest and most effective way of parcelling them out.