otter, 1 year ago (edited 5 months ago)

There’s a potential for abuse with paying for donations (not saying it should never be done):

• risk of unsafe blood supplies if people lie about their health history in order to be able to sell their blood
• ethical concerns around exploiting financially vulnerable people, and turning a life-saving act into another commercial transaction
  • In areas where those vulnerable people aren’t protected by the legal system, there’s also the potential of OTHER people “harvesting” and selling the blood

Voluntary and altruistic donations are best, and ideally those values are maintained all the way through the donation process. Hopefully technology continues to improve so that we can support those donations with synthesized alternatives

I believe we’ve had some discussion around this in Canada recently, specifically with donations for plasma. I’m not caught up on it to comment further about it