To: President Donald Trump, The United States House of Representatives, and The United States Senate
Gay Men Should be Allowed to Donate Blood
Honorable Sir/Madam:
I am writing to implore you to overturn the outdated law regarding not allowing men who have had sex with men during the past thirty-four years to have the opportunity to donate blood.
Instead of having such a rigid approach to determining whether a potential donor should be allowed to donate blood, the health care worker should be given more discretion based on the type of sex engaged in, whether such sex was within the "window period" for detecting HIV, whether the person engaged in needle sharing and the number of partners that this person has had and what their partners' risky behaviors were, if known. The questions should be about type of sex, rather than whether it was man to man, and whether the potential donor has been tested for HIV and other STD's.
There are far more accurate and less expensive tests for detection of HIV and other STD's than there were when this law was written and these tests were used on every donor during the blood drives that I worked on. There is also a significant percentage of HIV positive people who contracted it through heterosexual sex, as no unprotected sex is risk free. Plus, there is a shortage of blood in many areas.
I ask you to introduce a bill to allow for all healthy individuals to donate blood if they have taken sufficent precauations. I feel that this would both end the discrimination that those in the Gay community have felt in this regard and would benefit the overall health of the community.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
Why is this important?
There is an FDA rule instituted during the 1980s, during the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, that prohibits men who have had sex with men since 1977 from donating blood. This rule made sense then, but almost thirty years later there are far more sophisticated and rapid tests that are administered to all prospective blood donors. As the "window period" regarding HIV infection is weeks or months, rather than 34 years, this rule both unnecessarily limits the supply of blood from healthy donors and is discriminatory. I urge the United States to follow the lead of Great Britain, which changed a similar rule there earlier this year.