The ethics and practice of blood donation

We've one of those lovely Guardian discussions over the morality of commercial practices. You can guess the tone just from the headline:

Blood money: is it wrong to pay donors?

And we of course observe the comments section filling up with outraged screams that of course it's morally wrong.

Which isn't actually the point that should be under discussion. What we'd really like to know is whether paid blood donation is efficient. And the answer there is that no, it's not really. When offered a choice those who purchase blood place a higher price on blood that has been donated rather than that which has come from paid donors. Such pricing is because donations do tend to be og higher quality. So, if we could fulfill our requirements for blood and blood products purely from donations we would, by preference, do so.

But we can't so fill our preferences. So, for blood products specifically in the UK, we purchase from paid donors in other countries. Shrug. It's either that or simply don't offer the treatment and it's hardly moral to deny treatment because of some squeamishness that cash was involved in the process.

The important of this observation isn't confined just to blood of course. We tend to think that kidney transplants are better than he slow death which is dialysis. But many do die simply because there aren't enough kidneys available for transplant. And this would be true even if ever potentially usable organ was stripped from corpses, the wishes of their now deceased former owner be damned. To fill this gap we must therefore ask for live donations (much the same being true of liver and lung transplants, heart such cannot of course be carried out from a live donor). But there's a rather limited supply of people willing to live donate a kidney.

When, as we do from time to time, we suggest that the obvious answer is simply to pay donors, as they do in Iran, we're told that paying for kidneys would simply be immoral. As with those shouting about blood. Shrug: this means that people will die because of some squeamishness over cash having been involved.

Oh yes, most moral that outcome is.