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What's wrong with selling your blood? To me it seems like selling your time is a far more personal, unrecoverable injustice. And most people just call that 'wor
by darawk 10y ago
What's wrong with selling your blood? To me it seems like selling your time is a far more personal, unrecoverable injustice. And most people just call that 'work'.
If you want to make it out like these people are being 'exploited', then you can make the case just the same that all property is exploitation. Railing against poor people donating blood plasma, or organs for that matter, is profoundly misguided.
- amorphid 10y agoNot an expert on the subject, but I recall hearing somewhere that selling blood gives people an incentive to lie about their health history. "Do you shoot up illicit drugs with shared needles?" "Um... No. No I do not."
- timv 10y agoYes, but don't many job applications have equivalent incentives for lying? - Have you ever been charged with a criminal offence? - Do you use recreational drugs? Etc. I don't think that the blood donation questionare is especially problematic on that regards.
- CamelCaseName 10y agoThe difference is who is harmed. A company may have to fire and replace a lying employee, so the shareholders lose some money, but a person contracting HIV from a bad blood transfusion is substantially more devastating.
- timv 10y agoSure, but as darawk argued in a sibling thread, that's not evidence that the poor are being exploited. As far as the "Low-Income Americans" from the article are concerned, all sorts of jobs give them an incentive to lie, why should donating blood be considered more exploitative because of it? The question of whether buying blood has a net positive public health benefit is a very real one, but it's unrelated to darawk's ancestor post arguing that selling blood is just another form of work.
- darawk 10y agoTrue, but that is the system being exploited by those individuals, not the other way around.