Eight Dollars a Pint

IN HIS book The Tarnished Door, John Crewdson examines the subject of the waves of immigrants, legal and illegal, that are pouring into the United States, especially from Mexico. In it he also sheds some light on the source of some of the blood that goes into U.S. blood banks.

He describes how the U.S. Border Patrol tracks down some of the illegal immigrants in El Paso, Texas, by means of their blood: “First stop for the ‘city patrol’ is a blood plasma center a short distance from the bridges, one of nine centers in South El Paso that buy blood from Mexican border crossers for $8 a pint​—the equivalent in Juárez [in Mexico] of a good day’s wages—​then sell it for $20 to hospitals and research labs. The centers advertise in their windows that a regular donor can earn up to $81 a month, and for not a few in Juárez the blood banks are their sole source of income.

“Williams [a Border Patrol officer] frequently finds donors at the centers who have been coming over from Juárez twice a week for years to sell their blood.” What quality of blood is going into the blood banks is therefore anyone’s guess.

For Christians, who respect the sanctity of blood from God’s viewpoint, this commerce in blood is unacceptable. The leaders of the early Christian congregation wrote: “For the holy spirit and we ourselves have favored adding no further burden to you, except these necessary things, to keep abstaining . . . from blood . . . If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper. Good health to you!”​—Acts 15:28, 29.