One reason why you may seen more women plasma donors is because of HDN.

Once you have a healthy baby, and you understand how it could have been, you want to pay if it forward, you know?

HDN is Hemolytic Disease of the Newborn or erythroblastosis fetalis, which happens when mother and baby have incompatible blood types. More specifically, when mom is Rh- but baby is Rh+.

You get this shot called the RhoGAM shot which is derived from donor blood plasma who have the antibodies or proteins or whatever. All Rh- mothers get this shot now at around 6 months.

It's one of those painful "peanut butter" shots that are painful as hell and leave a golf ball sized swelling at the injection site. If you get it in your ass, you're not sitting comfortably for a week; it's like that.

But. It protects your baby from the problems that can happen from blood type incompatibility. Illness, brain damage, severe ane.ia, death.

Back before RhoGAM, a fair number of newborn deaths were from HDN. An estimated 10K a year in the US alone. But thanks to RhoGAM and women plasma donors, there have been no deaths (US) in over 50 years now. Over $1 billion in medical treatments is saved yearly thanks to that shot.

And that's just one disease prevention from plasma derived medications. One I know about because I'm Rh negative.

Like I said, no mother wants another mother to suffer or have her baby suffer needlessly when you can prevent that suffering from 90 minutes of your day. Especially when someone else's time and gift gave you a healthy child.