Carleton students bring back blood drives
Ends protest over agency’s ‘homophobic’ screening policy
Carleton University’s student government will once again co-operate with Canadian Blood Services after ending a protest against the agency’s “homophobic” screening process for donors.
The policy, on the books at Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) since 2003, said the screening process by the agency and regulator Health Canada was homophobic because it did not accept blood donations from any man who has had sex with another man since 1977, the date generally believed to mark the arrival of HIV in North America.
In a July 10 vote, 22 of 28 student councillors voted in favour of striking down the policy, which the association’s vice-president of student issues, Gina Parker, called outdated. A similar motion introduced by Parker last July failed by a margin of two votes.
The blanket ban on donations by gay men was instituted in the mid1980s by the Red Cross, which at the time was responsible for Canada’s blood-supply system. It was a response to the discovery that AIDS, at the time a new and untreatable disease, could be contracted through blood transfusions.
In May, Canadian Blood Services announced Health Canada had given approval for the service to lift the nearly 30-year-old ban on blood donations from gay men and implement a new policy allowing gay men to donate if they had been celibate for at least five years. While that new approach was also criticized for not going far enough, Canadian Blood Services called it part of a continuing effort to expand opportunities for would-be donors.
CUSA’s decision this week means the association can now support the agency’s events on campus, as long as the events also raise awareness about the remaining limits on donations.
Parker said the university’s more than 200 clubs and societies are now able to run blood drives as part of their philanthropic efforts. Cooperating with the agency will also provide support for students whose loved ones need blood transfusions, a scenario with which Parker is familiar: her little brother was diagnosed with leukemia in May 2011.
To help get the support she needed to lift CUSA’s non-co-operation policy, Parker said she added stipulations to her motion which will encourage CUSA to lobby Canadian Blood Services screening policies on their Donor Health Assessment Questionnaire, a forgotten aspect of the original policy.
“I’ve been a student at Carleton since 2009 and I’d never once seen any lobbying take place, or any kind of awareness being brought up about the blood ban. When I brought it up, it was the first time it made a splash at Carleton to my knowledge,” Parker said.
“At any time that Canadian Blood Services make a submission to Health Canada to change their policy, we’ll support them by means of petition and try to encourage Health Canada to accept the submission.”