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Social & Legal Studies
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Reframing Medical Injury? Viewing People With Hemophilia as Victims of Cultural Injustice

Michael Orsini

University of Ottawa, Canada

There is a burgeoning literature in the social sciences on the politics of reparations for historical injustices. Using a case study of Canada, this article asks whether people with hemophilia who contracted HIV and/or hepatitis C through the blood system should be viewed as victims of cultural injustice. The dominant approach to understanding the claims made on behalf of tainted-blood recipients is the narrow frame of compensation for medical injury. Tainted-blood recipients are cast as the unwitting victims of a system that placed a premium on cost savings over patient safety. Giving contaminated blood to members of a community who were presumed to be already infected made sound economic sense at the time. As members of a tight-knit community, people with hemophilia have been stigmatized and subjected to school-yard taunts from classmates who viewed them as sissies because they had special medical needs and because of their association with a `gay disease'. Weaving elements of social movement theory and the reparations literature, I argue that the inarticulation of recognition claims to remedy cultural injustice simplified the state's response to the redistributive claims made on behalf of tainted-blood victims.

Key Words: cultural injustice • hemophilia • HIV/AIDS • medical injury • social movements • stigma • tainted blood

Social & Legal Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, 241-258 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907076533
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