CSL Plasma, a blood plasma collection center, in the Olney neighborhood of Philadelphia.
CreditCreditMichelle Gustafson for The New York Times
PHILADELPHIA — Jacqueline Watson needed money. Her son had called her that morning from prison, where he is serving a life sentence, to ask her to make a deposit in his phone account. She didn’t have cash, but she did have something she could sell quickly and legally — her blood.
So, on a crisp Monday morning in November, she traveled 40 minutes by bus to CSL Plasma, a blood plasma collection center wedged between a Dollar Tree and a Wells Fargo bank in a strip mall in North Philadelphia.
“What always brings me here is money,” Ms. Watson, 46, said, as she waited in line to get her vitals taken. “I’m doing it for him, I guess you could say.” She earns about $30 each time she donates.
The plasma business is booming in the United States, with the number of collection centers like this one more than […]
This isn’t new. In the early-to-mid 1970s I, like many I knew (and many I didn’t), donated our blood plasma for money at a collection center in Lancaster, PA. We could donate twice a week. I got a little more for my platelets the second donation of the week because I have a relatively rare blood type. I relied on the income, as did all who used the facility, I assume. We were glad for it, frankly. Note that this was in the Nixon years and immediately after, a time not so different from now, though we’re much worse off now in terms of institutional corruption. But selling one’s blood for money is hardly as low as things can go, believe me.
I have donated blood several times over the years, but that’s not the same thing as making a living as a blood cow.
I think your designation of us as “blood cows” is insensitive and demeaning. Selling my plasma was a way to scrape up enough for a sack of brown rice, beans, and a bag of dog food for the furries and put enough gas in the car to get back home to the country. I for one appreciated that. I also appreciated that my plasma most likely went to hemophiliacs. I had a student with hemophilia in a Waldorf school where I’d once taught, so I related to the service on that personal level, as well. As to whether such a service should exist in a so-called civilized society, I’m afraid such distinctions are above my pay grade. We all have to make a living. For many, the opportunity to sell one’s blood for cash on the spot is a pretty good deal. To judge it as in some way deplorable seems rather effete to me, plebeian that I am.
I understand and sympathize with your experience, did not mean to give offense, nor was I in any way demeaning what you have done. You have misinterpreted what I said.
To the blood industry poor people are exactly as I described. Why do you think so many blood banks are near low income neighborhoods? It is a multi-billion dollar business that depends on poverty, because poor people are the ones who donate. They rely on it. You could never run such an industry on people like me who donate two or three times in their lives to help a friend. Amongst the thousands of people I have known not one who was not in poverty donated 104 times a year, or even 10, and they never think of it in terms of money. It is something you do when they call an emergency or a friend or family member is in need.
In my opinion, we need much less poverty and a culture where a very large number of people donate a few times a year because it is considered the appropriate thing to do. And the whole process needs to be taken out of the profit business. It should be a part of a wellness-oriented universal health care system.
— Stephan
Hi, Stephan, thanks for your reply. I don’t think I misinterpreted you, though. I understand that you’re coming at it from an overview, and your experience inside the system is much different from mine, Unlike you, I didn’t make the most of my privilege. I concluded from the events of the 1960s, beginning with the assassination of JFK, that something was rotten in America, and by 1970 I realized that the only real crime in America is to be poor. Nevertheless, I became a committed minimalist.
But here’s my point. There is a freedom in poverty which doesn’t exist in middle-class America, and plasma banks actually facilitate that freedom. Now you’ll get no argument from me that the profit system is devised by the Devil to turn us all against each other. That was as true then as it is now. But when you knock poverty–the state of being poor–it tends to come across as a shaming of those who depend on the plasma bank as part of their cobbled-together livelihood. I know you don’t mean that, but it comes across that way because of the context of misfortune with which we as a society regard the poor. The very word implies something pitiable. I argue for the dignity of poverty and the creativity and vitality it engenders to survive in its omni-present shadow..
D.D. — Thanks for the clarification. I understand your idea of the freedom poverty bestows. But that is not my point either. Most people are poor, not out of choice as in your case, but because the system is rigged against them from birth. And this enforced poverty makes them exploitable in a number of ways — blood banks being one. Read the piece of mine I just posted to SR about wealth inequality, and you will get a better idea of my thinking. Wealth inequity to the degree it is experienced in the U.S. is a manifestation of Neoliberalism.
Stephan: Sorry to keep pecking away at this, but wealth inequality doesn’t much concern me. The idea that wealth is a measure of quality of life does. Our models for success and happiness all seem to portray the fabulously rich. But in the U.S. especially one can live quite comfortably at the so-called poverty level or below simply by ditching the idea that this is poverty but more like luxury when we compare it to a huge majority of the world’s population. I’m sure you know the old saying, “To promote the common good, live as you would have all others live.” It’s possible here in the USA because of things like these predatory blood plasma banks. The left hand gives what the right denies. But is it possible for all to live at a responsible level for all if we talk only about lifting the poor out of poverty to . . . what? A house in the suburbs? Multiple cars? I’m sure you don’t favor that vision! No, I think the debate about wealth inequality doesn’t go deep enough into the real issue, which to me is not a question of wealth distribution or even money but a question of values. What constitutes the common good? I don’t think it’s simply more money in more people’s pockets. It’s more like a complete reversal of the present mass consciousness so “what’s in your wallet” has no special relevance. Ergo: The honor in poverty, the wealth for all in owning less.
DD —
If you read SR regularly you know that what concerns me is wellbeing at every level. So I don’t disagree with you. But when you can’t pay your rent, or buy food for your children, money matters. And that people are forced to sell their blood to do those things I think is the sign of a failed society. No question though that we need to abandon christofascist Neoliberalism and replace it with a society based on wellbeing.