The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is drawing up a proposal to put an end to the rule that bans men who have had sex with other men from donating sperm.
The FDA is planning on trading the full ban for a set of carefully curated screening questions that will evaluate an individual’s risk for transiting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The current ban on MSM was put into place at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and intended to block high risk sperm donors from spreading diseases like HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. Since the introduction of this rule, men who had sex with another man in the past five years were considered ineligible to donate sperm, blood and other tissues.
Since then, though a cure to AIDS has not been found, new successful treatments have made it a non-life-threatening illness, changing what it means to be diagnosed with or come into contact with someone carrying the disease.
According to LGBTQ Nation, the new blood donation guidelines would require a “three-month pre-donation celibacy period for anyone regardless of gender, who has had sex with a new sexual partner, more than one sexual partner, or anal sex.”
The new assessment questions may look similar to those established by the FDA in August when restrictions for MSM on blood donations were loosened. The ban on blood donations was also established during the AIDS epidemic. Those who engaged in MSM activity were banned from donating blood for life, as a preventive measure to stop the spread of the deadly disease.
According to Them, both LGBTQ+ rights organizations and sperm banks are celebrating this win. The Sperm Bank of California released a statement saying they had been working toward this goal for more than 20 years.
Because the ban completely ruled out men who have sex with men from consideration for sperm donations, many raised eyebrows at whether the ban was truly preventive or just plain discriminatory. For decades, rights groups have been making this point.
In 2005, the Human Rights Campaign released a statement in which then President Joe Solmonese, said “It’s unsafe and unfair to allow a straight man who regularly has unprotected sex with multiple partners to donate sperm, but not a gay man who practices safe sex within a monogamous relationship.”
It is suspected that the loosening of restrictions on both blood and sperm donations for MSM will lead to more progress in dismantling these discriminatory practices, allowing more eligible people to donate life-saving and life-creating bodily tissues in the coming years.
