One line contains the core of McArthur’s complaint: “Whatever might be said for such a policy, there’s simply no getting around the following fact: it makes the violent depletion of a child’s bodily fluids into a state-sanctioned method of discipline.”
The core of my claim: “Is it?”
What’s so bad about losing blood? Sure, if you bleed enough out, you’ll eventually expire, a dried-up raisin of a student. But contrary to McArthur’s claim of a “violence,” the students won’t be hemorrhaging from the righteous wounds of a wrathful dean. No doubt these venesections will occur under the watchful eyes of trained professionals, witnessing a scene that would have brought a smile to phlebotomists of yesteryear. We see the miracle of modern medicine, nurses conveying the vital fluids of happy donors to even happier recipients. In a matter of minutes, they’ll gladly swap as much blood as a gross of the cat o’ nine tails would take out of their back, but walk away munching cookies, sipping juice, and mildly mocking their mutual anemia.
After all, they’re merely losing, as McA puts it, “bodily fluids.” To be sure, they are losing a vital bodily fluid, but so are the students out on the neighboring football field, and without a single cookie. In fact, while football practice produces lamentable deaths by dehydration every season, the scourge of expiration by blood donors is, ahem, slightly less notorious. Yet that hasn’t discouraged the Coach Sweeney’s of this world from making their charges run laps in hundred degree heat, do somersaults until they vomit (speaking of violent loss of bodily fluids), or scream until the weaker freshmen wet themselves (see previous parenthetical).
In fact, while there are plenty of parts of your body that you can’t sell, unless you live in a country that rhymes with Shmoshmalia, blood is. Your blood is something you can use as a second income, at least the plasma part of it. And judging from the pay that plasma will get you, it doesn’t seem all that valuable.
Nor is the amount of blood so terrible, typically a pint or 500 ml. By comparison, consider what used to happen when you walked into a top of the line hospital:
One typical course of medical treatment began the morning of 13 July 1824. A French sergeant was stabbed through the chest while engaged in single combat; within minutes, he fainted from loss of blood. Arriving at the local hospital he was immediately bled twenty ounces (570 ml) “to prevent inflammation”. During the night he was bled another 24 ounces (680 ml). Early the next morning, the chief surgeon bled the patient another 10 ounces (285 ml); during the next 14 hours, he was bled five more times. Medical attendants thus intentionally removed more than half of the patient’s normal blood supply—in addition to the initial blood loss which caused the sergeant to faint. Bleedings continued over the next several days. By 29 July, the wound had become inflamed. The physician applied 32 leeches to the most sensitive part of the wound. Over the next three days, there were more bleedings and a total of 40 more leeches. The sergeant recovered and was discharged on 3 October. His physician wrote that “by the large quantity of blood lost, amounting to 170 ounces [nearly eleven pints] (4.8 liters), besides that drawn by the application of leeches [perhaps another two pints] (1.1 liters), the life of the patient was preserved”. By nineteenth-century standards, thirteen pints of blood taken over the space of a month was a large but not an exceptional quantity.
The kids should be happy the school lets them off so easy!
I have further, and significantly more serious, problems with McArthur’s second implied charge of incommensurability, as well as Felix’s misconceived notions of punishment and our penal system. Those I will address in a subsequent dissent: The Discursion of Coercion.