California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco)
(photo: Dan Aiello)

Dan Aiello, writing at California Progress Report, provides a status update on AJR 13 — a measure that would put California on the record as opposing the ban on blood donations by gay and bisexual men. In addition, Aiello has extensive background information on how the policy came into being and why it needs to be revoked.

Ending the Federal Ban on Gay Blood Donations

by Dan Aiello

On Tuesday the Assembly Judiciary Committee passed AJR 13, the U.S. Blood Donor Nondiscrimination Resolution (Ammiano-D), leapfrogging the legislation over the heads of Republican committee members’ who were united in opposition.

If approved, AJR 13 would call upon the nation’s Food and Drug Administration to end its more than quarter century ban on gay men donating blood to the nation’s blood banks.

The decades-old federal blood donor ban was introduced as a way to assure the U.S. public that the nation’s blood banks were safe at the genesis of the AIDS epidemic here, according to author Randy Shilts pioneering chronicle of the health crisis, And The Band Played On. But according to Shilts research, medical experts have argued since its inception the ban did little more than discriminate and for more than two decades mandatory blood screening has rendered the ban useless.

Freshman assembly member Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has decided 26 years of discrimination is long enough.

“Blood has no sexual orientation and the FDA should have no discrimination,” Ammiano explained. “I hope President Obama hears our call to change this shameful and discriminatory practice immediately so we can save more lives.”

Sponsored by Equality California, the bill could lead to the elimination of the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on donations of blood by healthy gay and bisexual men:

“No healthy and willing donor should ever be turned away,” said EQCA Executive Director Geoff Kors. “This policy unnecessarily discriminates against gay and bisexual men as it provides zero additional protection to our blood supply. To the contrary, the result of this discrimination is fewer units of medically necessary blood.”

Under existing federal rules, any man who has had a sexual relationship with another man in the past 31 years is automatically prevented from donating blood at any facility, regardless of personal health. The law prevents innumerable gay and bisexual men who are otherwise healthy from contributing to the nation’s blood supply, which faces chronic shortfalls due to a lack of donations.

I asked Aiello exactly how this clearly discriminatory policy came into being and what, ultimately, the consquences were. He told me:

The FDA banned gay donors fully aware the measure would not make the U.S. blood supply any safer, but at the same time would appear to the public as action while appealing to the moral majority coalition that was the core of the Reagan coalition. Blood, almost always donated, had a production cost of $10 dollars in 1983. The Stanford University Hospital test employed and proven effective at the time of the ban, would have added $6 dollars to the cost of every donation. At a time when the total number of reported AIDS cases was less than the total number of Americans who died in plane crashes, the administration saw the public concern as unwarranted and the cost of screening too high given the relatively few reported AIDS cases. In fact, the June, 1983 ban was announced only a month after the nation’s first reported transmission of the virus contracted by transfusion.

Although the Reagan administration chose cost over safety, the public was not as trusting. And once Stanford Hospital began screening all blood for AIDS and Hepatitis, other bay area hospitals found it increasingly difficult to attract surgery patients when the safer alternative nearby. In the end, it was the consumer who directed policy, and Reagan’s feeble blood ban law was forgotten. But it has remained on the books continuing to remind us who was blamed for the epidemic. Americans came to believe gay men, regardless of lifestyle or health status, were the rats who carried this plague. It is a belief many Americans still have, one supported by this 26 year old edict.

(emphasis: mine)

Now, over a quarter of a century later, Aiello notes:

The American Association for Blood Banks, America’s Blood Centers and American Red Cross support the repeal of the ban some of their members helped to enact, calling the current lifetime deferral for gay and bisexual men “medically and scientifically unwarranted.”