There is a new website, produced by (or so I have been told) by Mighty promoting organ donation http://recycleme.org/
While I like the site, it is visually interesting and just gruesome enough to captivate I can’t help but feel a little pissed off. Once again they start whining about organ donations while excluding a segment of the poplation. Take the guy in this picture. He’s cute, fit, and if he is gay then he is not able to donate organs in the same fashion as straight people.
One user commented,
Almost two years ago the government decided that my organs were no longer valid for donations. I am gay, but not diseased in any way. I am in a monogamous relationship. Please reverse this injustice.
The response was
Everyone is a potential donor regardless of age, medical condition or sexual orientation. Your decision to register should not be based on whether you think you would be eligible or not. A donor’s eligibility is determined by the health care team upon their death.
Health Canada’s Safety of Human Cells, Tissues, and Organs for Transplantation Regulations came into force on Dec. 7, 2007. The Regulations (and prior to that, the CSA Standards) include detailed requirements for screening donors. Donor screening requirements includes exclusionary criteria used to identify risk factors associated with HIV and HBV and HCV, and includes persons with IV drug use, history of incarceration and male-to-male sexual contact, among many other factors.
A potential donor with any of the exclusionary criteria for risk factors associated with HIV, HBV, and HCV including male-to-male sexual contact- may still be eligible to donate if organs are offered using exceptional distribution protocols. Exceptional distribution allows TGLN to offer organs to transplant programs with the appropriate information for the transplant physician to determine if the organ is safe for transplantation.
No one is excluded from donation of organs in Ontario.
Did you catch the not so subtle slight comparing gays to junkies and criminals? The funny thing is, they just don’t seem to understand why we get so bent out of shape about this so I will explain.
If you wish to exclude someone from a group, but don’t want to be considered prejudiced then base it on behavior. For example you can’t legally exclude women from a country club. but you could exclude anyone with a criminal record. We all have a choice in our behaviors so exclusion is in the control of the excluded.
Now you might be thinking if you want to donate then don’t have gay sex. I would ask, what exactly is “gay sex”?
If you are thinking of anal sex, then change the requirements to exclude all individuals who have had anal sex, not just the men. The justification for excluding gay men from blood donation and adding additional criteria for organ donation is that gay men represent a higher risk for HIV and Hepatitis. This is based off of a North American statistic in which gay men account for 50% of all new cases of HIV.
You might be thinking that this justifies the additional measures; you would be wrong. If you excluded blacks because of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, or because of the propensity for blacks in America to end up incarcerated then you are painting all of that group with the same brush without looking at root causes. So it is with the exclusions from blood donation and need for additional information in organ donation.
There are men who engage in high risk activity and men who don’t. By painting all gay men with the “high risk” brush you exclude a large group of potential donors and encourage bigotry and prejudice. It is as simple as that.