Killing for Blood

Hospitals and donor centers are not the only ones that recognize the urgency of having blood available when someone needs it. As the last American combat troops leave Iraq, the insurgents in the country have been conducting raids,  not at American troops but instead at local blood banks so that they can take care of their wounded.

I assume that it would be very difficult for insurgents to host a blood drive. After all, if they gave out t-shirts, what would they put on them that wouldn’t make the donors suspicious? Nonetheless, their followers die due to a lack of blood, just as would anyone else. They can’t store it, as they don’t have their own hospitals, and rely on sympathetic doctors to provide the care they need (after stealing the blood from Iraqi hospitals). Think of Dr. Samuel Mudd and John Wilkes Booth.

The most horrible aspect of this reality has to be that the insurgents occasionally kill hospital staff in order to get the blood they need for transfusions. Killing for blood, the most precious commodity on earth, is precisely what they’re doing. Such occurrences are almost oxymoronic or Orwellian “newspeak.”

The fact that it is happening around the world should not surprise you, but instead make you question the ethics behind spilling blood in the search for it. We need to make sure that our peaceful society never reaches such a level of chaos. Isn’t this motivation enough to ensure adequate blood supplies? You might be saving the life of one our first responders who have been wounded trying to protect us.

What ideas do you have on how we can prevent this from becoming our future?