for lefties too stubborn to quit
RTÉ News has learned that the Irish Blood Transfusion Service has voted to end the lifetime ban on gay men donating blood, in favour of a one-year deferral period.
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A one year celibacy requirement also which seems both discriminatory and entirely unverifiable.
Meanwhile people such as myself who lived in GB during the 80s are still banned from donating blood due to BSE / CJD concerns. I wouldn’t mind but I was a vegetarian the whole time that I lived there!
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Agree entirely but it’s a step forward from a completely abysmal position. Snap re UK too, though I actually did eat some meat there, I was an off vegetarian at the time.
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I don’t share your view on this, WBS.
It’s introduced in the teeth of a legal challenge by a brave young journalist, Tomás Heneghan, and in my opinion this modification of the finer details of the current ban is designed to prevent any chance of an embarrassing defeat of the IBTS in the courts.
The one-year ban on is not grounded on science: tests enable the HIV status of a donor or potential to be revealed in a far shorter time than that; men who have sex with women and women who have sex with men, and women who have sex with women are also open to becoming HIV+, but the ban doesn’t apply to them.
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That’s absolutely true, and it’s hypocritical in the extreme of them, as LATC noted as well, but I guess the fact they’re having to do something indicates that soon it will be gone, or does it?
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I think both yes and not.
It’s a manoeuvre, but by conceding the point the current board had presented a future board with a problem.
It could turn out to be a Civil Partnership Act, which opens the debate that leads to real equality, or it could be the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993, which copper-fastens discrimination – (in that case, by confirming different ages of consent).
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I guess I was hopeful that this would be the first substantial change for the better.
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