LuckyLadyLily

Ah yes. My favorite baseball team.

I mean kind of? Its a bit more complicated than that but like. The doctor who gives the transfusion gets paid. The administrative staff of the hospital gets paid. The person who draws the blood gets paid. The patient who gets to blood is charged for the blood transfusion, and it isn't charged "at cost" and no one is donating their time and expertise to the process (talking about the US here, but I think the point stands even in other healthcare systems)

By any coherent definition, the person receiving blood is being sold the blood as part of the medical procedure that is not free. Which is fine! People should get paid. But it is very odd to me that the only person in the entire process who does not get paid is the person who actually made the blood.

And its not like donating blood is free. There is the time investment, of course, but there are also some risks involved (which is by definition an economic cost) and the blood a person makes comes directly out of their food budget in a very real way. Your body converts food into blood, which you then donate. Which means you have to eat more food.

People say it is unethical, but I think that is bullshit.

The fact is blood donation is extremely well understood and the costs and risks easily quantifiable. Whatever else it may or may not be, it is a routine form of labor. There is absolutely no reason we could not provide compensation for donating blood safely and ethically.

The logical fallacy at play here is that it could lead to things like selling kidneys or whatever, which is honestly silly. The risks involved in things like major surgery or medical experimentation is a completely different problem than providing compensation for something so routine it barely counts as a medical procedure. It is absurd to equate these on an ethical level or to say that one will lead to the other. It is a slippery slope fallacy at its most obvious.

Now I don't think you are wrong to bring that up because it is the widely accepted ethical position and we don't learn anything if we don't talk about these things. I don't think the accepted position is well reasoned or free of bias. Many, many widely accepted "ethical" positions are the result of bias or irrationality and are actually deeply unethical. I mean we (talking about the USA here) live in a society where months or years of slavery is a widely accepted ethical punishment for minor crimes. That alone should tell you that conventional ethics can be unethical.

Medical ethics are no more free from this bias and irrationality than anything else. We like to put up hard ethical walls to pretend that medicine is free from ethical violations, but that simply isn't true. The reality is that "ethics" are often used to justify horrible ethical violations. Consider that the most common justification given for denying hormones to trans people is medical ethics - pretending that denying life saving medications is ethical because there is a tiny chance that someone might regret it later.

I could name dozens of cases where accepted ethics are used to justify actual ethical violations. And I believe that the treatment of the poor is one of the most common areas where this occurs. Having literally been poor enough to have sold my blood to make rent (plasma, specifically, but its ethically the same thing) I would submit that the argument that we can't compensate for blood donations has more to do with well off people being uncomfortable than what is actually good for poor people.

It's a lot like the arguments for banning sex work. Sex work makes people very uncomfortable for several reasons, but one you often see is that people don't like the idea of a woman being forced to turn to sex work to cover cost of living. The irrational, unethical response is to make it illegal, which of course does does far more harm to women forced into that position making the entire thing far more dangerous. Banning sex work isn't about protecting women, it is about soothing the upset feelings of people who don't actually have to make difficult decisions about survival. If you actually want to help women financially forced into sex work the answer is to solve the circumstances that force women into sex work, not punish them further for being in those circumstances.

I mean kind of? Its a bit more complicated than that but like. The doctor who gives the transfusion gets paid. The administrative staff of the hospital gets paid. The person who draws the blood gets paid. The patient who gets to blood is charged for the blood transfusion, and it isn't charged "at cost" and no one is donating their time and expertise to the process (talking about the US here, but I think the point stands even in other healthcare systems)

By any coherent definition, the person receiving blood is being sold the blood as part of the medical procedure that is not free. Which is fine! People should get paid. But it is very odd to me that the only person in the entire process who does not get paid is the person who actually made the blood.

And its not like donating blood is free. There is the time investment, of course, but there are also some risks involved (which is by definition an economic cost) and the blood a person makes comes directly out of their food budget in a very real way. Your body converts food into blood, which you then donate. Which means you have to eat more food.