Gay men have had the right to donate blood since last year. On one condition: not to have sex for a year. Discriminatory for associations, the measure has just been validated by the Council of State.
It was not until July 2016, and the government of François Hollande, that homosexuals and bisexuals could donate their blood. They had been prohibited from doing so since 1983, when the AIDS epidemic was in full swing and they were the main group at risk.
By putting an end to an exclusion deemed discriminatory, Marisol Touraine, then Minister of Health, nevertheless sets a condition. And not least: not to have sex for a year. In reality a false excuse to exclude in fact without excluding in the law.
It is this rule that associations consider discriminatory. And it is for this reason that Mousse, Stop Homophobie, the Idaho France Committee or even local elected officials against AIDS have seized the Council of State.
Risky behaviors
Reason put forward at the time by Marisol Touraine: to avoid danger and reassure the receivers. Because statistically, homosexuals have more risky sex than heterosexuals.
“According to the work of the Institute for Public Health Surveillance, the prevalence of HIV carriers is approximately 70 times higher among men who have had sex with men. (…) The proportion of people newly infected during the year 2012 was 115 times higher among these men than in the heterosexual population ”, thus advances the Council of State when it rejects the request of the associations one year later.
Here too, they see it as discrimination. Because heterosexual people just have to fill out a questionnaire in which they assure that they have not had risky sex. While homosexual people are judged a priori, on statistics.
When the virus is undetectable
Another argument put forward to justify abstinence: for a short time, a person infected with HIV does not know it and there are not yet any antibodies in the blood detectable by the tests.
There is indeed a “window period”, ie a period during which the virus is undetectable, even with the most effective screening tests. This period is twelve days.
Not having sex at all therefore removes any risk of having the virus without knowing it. But people with exclusively heterosexual relationships are of course also affected.
The associations therefore see it as a judgment based on their sexual orientation. “Absurd. We are discriminated against because we make love, ”wrote Stop Homophobie on its website, after the Council of State’s decision to maintain the restriction. An appeal to the European Court of Human Rights is envisaged.
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