Debates over paid plasma donation tend to cycle through familiar frames: altruistic gift, moral corruption, or exploitation of the vulnerable. This post steps back and asks a different question: what happens if we take seriously how plasma donors themselves describe the activity—as compensated, time-intensive, and comparable to other forms of paid work?
Using recent Canadian controversies as a starting point, the piece traces how the dominance of the gift model continues to shape law and policy, even as altruism alone has never supplied enough plasma anywhere. The result is a system that relies on paid donors while resisting the implications of calling what they do “work.”