Blood agency would turn us into stop ’n’ shops
What do you want from me, my blood? Well yes, now that you mention it. If you’re feeling a bit flush with the stuff, do spill us some. Here’s $25 for your trouble.
And this is how it might be, although I profoundly hope it won’t. Canadian Blood Services, the national agency that oversees blood and blood products, won’t rule out allowing the paying of donors, the CBC’s Kelly Crowe reports. The practice has already begun in Saskatoon. A private company called Canadian Plasma Resources is placing ads in University of Saskatchewan bathrooms (where one has time to stand and stare, presumably) and its bleak clinic is near places where the poor are offered services, she writes.
The CBC reports that the company tried to open clinics in Toronto in 2014, and when Ontario legally banned paying donors, it headed to Saskatchewan, where it was welcomed. It has hired lobbyists to try to persuade other provinces to let it in.
Plasma, the company explains, “is the strawcoloured liquid portion of blood.” Hey, it’s mostly water. No big deal. The ads are deliberately drab, with jugs of the urineish-looking fluid and packs of cheerful people in white coats awaiting things watery. If the place looked like the blood garage it actually is, you might be alarmed, but no.
What I object to is the intrusion of corporations into the body, and worse, the expectation that people shouldn’t mind. Blood is slippery. The logical extension of selling blood is selling everything else. We will slide into this.
As Crowe points out, Canadians already donate sperm, embryos, eggs and blood. After death, our bits are up for grabs if we volunteer as we should. Outside Canada, living people sell their organs (“Can we have your liver then?” “But I’m using it.” — Monty Python) and rent their uteruses to the infertile rich. This is a frontier smoking with danger. There is a point beyond which capitalism is not helpful, does not apply.
In an era of economic inequality, we are told to “share,” to Uberize our cars and Airbnb our homes while we move in with mom, check out our own groceries, take out cash, sort garbage, print out store receipts and bank statements, pick up our own mail, pump gas, print out luggage tags and loop them on, and assemble cheap furniture in a slapdash manner. At this point, do we distantly realize that if other people did this work, our economy might function better, with better pay and more taxes paid? Yet we volunteer.
Fine, go do the donkey work of scanning and bagging cheese lumps and diapers, doing the very job you did for pay in high school summers before you left town, desperate to escape the tedium. Well, look at you now, in the big city eyeing a bag of beets with a wild surmise, did it beep or not?
But now you are being asked to regard your own body as a passive income stream. Our governments are civilized; they won’t permit the commodification or privatization of the body unless you agree, and you can make a noise about this. Tell Health Minister Jane Philpott you don’t like it. Tell your provincial government.
It starts with your blood being extracted because you need $25. Do it twice a week and that’s $2,600 a year to help pay for baby formula and school supplies, for whatever are the necessaries of life. I’d quite like that money. It’s hard to turn it down; the government should be turning it down for you.
And again, the problem is not blood but principle. There will be blood, then there will be other less voluntary things. I am suspicious of any corporate intrusion that is literally internal, possibly abnormally so. Perhaps I overstate — I won’t even get flu shots at work — but I watch in awe as Americans consent to urine tests for office jobs without complaint.
What are we willing to do for money? In an era of inequality, more and more. Those who recall the tainted blood scandal adamantly oppose plasma sales, Crowe reports, and in one province at least, they have lost. For them, clean blood is the only ideal. Once inside the veins, money poisons and clogs.
I object to the intrusion of corporations into the body and the expectation that people shouldn’t mind