IN MY SHOES: Another Liberal Gets Mugged By Reality
Kathy Gerus-Darbison is a self-described liberal, a college professor and “on the wrong side of what many experts consider a settled question of science,” reports the Los Angeles Times, because she is convinced that lifting the ban on gay men donating blood will compromise the safety of the nation’s blood supply:
[She] watch[ed] in helpless horror as her husband, a hemophiliac, received contaminated blood products and ultimately died of AIDS, growing so desperate he begged doctors to radiate his brain in hopes of gaining a little more time with his family. She contracted HIV from him before she knew he was sick; now she has AIDS and worries about her own survival.
And should the memory of those experiences fade, there are the searing words of her young daughter: "I wish I had HIV too, so I could die with you guys."
Today, Gerus-Darbison is caught in a trap set by history - forced by terrible experiences into taking a position that challenges some of her core beliefs.
Her plight and the public policy question at the heart of it have attracted little public notice. But the issue has turned Gerus-Darbison and others in the hemophilia community into an army of Davids standing in the path of political Goliaths -
Noting that as many as 15,000 of the 25,000 Americans with hemophilia contracted AIDS from HIV-tainted blood products in the late 1970s and early 1980s, James Curran, dean of the
I've had this discussion at work since I attempt to give blood as often as I can and some of my coworkers have been gay men. Our blood bank only bans gay men, not gay women. They do not ban a man who has been raped by another man. They ban him for 6 months. They ban prostitutes, IV drug users, and hemophiliacs over 13. Therefore, it is obvious their whole purpose is to eliminate the disease pool rather than to express disapproval of the so-called "gay lifestyle" per se. They also would have banned me for life if I had actually had the MS I was being tested for. As it was, I was exempted until after my followup MRI. So it's nothing personal. AIDS cannot be cured at present and at present it cannot be detected immediately. You can infect people before you know you have it. I absolutely insist that gays be treated like everyone else but gay men are in a high risk group and should not give blood. That said, I can't see why they cannot give directed donations to people who know them and are willing to take their blood or stock their own for their own use.
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