Blood for Sale! Lowest Price of the Season!

In a long recession like this one, low-wage workers and unemployed people sometimes resort to selling whatever they can to make ends meet. Often, that means selling their bodies in one form or another. Turning to prostitution out of financial desperation is not uncommon for women struggling to survive, but increasingly these women are selling something else -- their blood. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that allows the sale of blood plasma. But is the system of plasma sales in the U.S. set up to exploit poor workers?

Take the story of Esmeralda Delgado. Esmeralda lives in a small town on the U.S.-Mexico border. To help make ends meet and prevent her children from having to drop out of school and go work, Esmerelda sells her blood to a pharmaceutical company for $60 a week. They remove large portions of her blood, strip out her plasma, and pump it back into her veins. The filter chills the blood, so its freezing when it re-enters her body. Esmerelda sells her plasma as often as is legal, and her family relies on the money she brings home. However, neither Esmerelda nor her family have health insurance in case she gets sick from these frequent blood sales.

Esmerelda is choosing to sell her plasma, but it's out of a very, very limited panel of choices. And this door, like the others, might lead to exploitation. As more and more workers like Esmerelda turn to selling plasma in the recession, companies are cutting the amount they pay for plasma. Talecris Biotherapeutics, for example, recently reduced their fee from $80 to $60, a huge hit for workers who rely on this income. More and more companies have also been setting up shop along the U.S.-Mexico border, where high concentrations of low-wage workers live. If these trends continue, companies will be able to pay more vulnerable and desperate workers less and less for their blood. Are we setting up a system that will be inevitably exploitative?

On one hand, I haven't heard any reports of people being forced to sell their plasma against their will. But even assuming that there has never been any coercion in this burgeoning industry, the set-up is a recipe for human trafficking and exploitation. Desperate people + falling wages + unscrupulous company = trouble. Part of addressing human trafficking is knowing what factors are usually present in situations where trafficking thrives, and they are all here.

Plasma sales industry, I've got my eye on you. So don't try and pull anything, like tipping over from a worrisome situation to one of full-out exploitation. Cause if you want to traffic people, this blogger has no qualms about (metaphorically) bleeding you dry.

Photo credit: digiom