Luxembourg bill moves to end blood-donation deferral for gay and bisexual men

Luxembourg edged closer on Monday to scrapping the rule that keeps sexually active gay and bisexual men from giving blood, as a parliamentary committee took up a bill that would tie donor eligibility to individual risk rather than sexual orientation.

The Chamber of Deputies' Committee on Health and Social Security examined draft law No. 8738 on 29 June 2026. Filed on 28 April by the opposition Socialist (LSAP) deputy and former health minister Paulette Lenert, the text would amend Luxembourg's foundational law of 15 March 1979 on blood transfusion to forbid any exclusion from blood donation based on a donor's sexual orientation. Taina Bofferding, who leads the LSAP parliamentary group, was named rapporteur.

According to the Chamber's own summary, the bill would write into law the principle that eligibility criteria "must rest solely on an individualised medical assessment of risk behaviours, and not on the donor's sexual orientation." Its backers frame the change as serving two ends at once: widening a chronically thin donor pool and removing what campaigners have long described as a discriminatory carve-out. The measure is at committee stage and would still need a vote in the full Chamber; no date for entry into force has been set.

A deferral that outlived the last reform

Gay and bisexual men are not banned outright in Luxembourg, but a deferral has persisted. Until 2021 the donor questionnaire asked people directly about their sexual orientation and excluded men who have sex with men. That question was dropped at the start of 2021, replaced by one about recent behaviour. Yet a man who has had sex with another man in the previous 12 months still cannot give whole blood; he may instead donate plasma, which is frozen and tested before it is used.

"We no longer ask a donor whether he is homosexual or not. That is not what interests us. What he does, not what he is, is what matters." — Anne Schumacher, medical biologist and medical director of the capital's transfusion centre, in 2022

Blood collection in the Grand Duchy is run by the Centre de Transfusion Sanguine of the Croix-Rouge luxembourgeoise, the Luxembourg Red Cross. The Red Cross and the health ministry have discussed transferring the centre's activities to a public body, partly to make it easier to revise the exclusion criteria and shift toward individual risk assessment.

A government already promising change

The legislative push follows more than a year of pressure on the governing coalition. Responding to a parliamentary question from Pirate deputy Sven Clement in early 2025, Health Minister Martine Deprez, of the Christian Social People's Party (CSV), acknowledged that the rules would be revisited. Clement argued that "the current practice of categorically excluding men who have sex with men can be regarded as discrimination."

Deprez signalled openness to reform but did not commit to a timetable, telling deputies the issue would be taken up directly with the Red Cross: "This subject will be one of the discussion points that we will address in detail with the head of the Red Cross from January." The minister had told parliament in December 2024 that gay men would eventually be able to give blood, with a regulation said to be in the process of being validated. The debate has unfolded against repeated Red Cross appeals over low blood reserves.

In step with a European shift

If adopted, Luxembourg would join neighbours that have already abandoned orientation-based screening in favour of a behaviour-based model:

• France aligned the criteria for men who have sex with men with those for the rest of the population on 16 March 2022, ending all abstinence requirements after cutting the deferral to four months in 2020. Men had been excluded there since 1983.
• Germany moved to a screening system based on individual sexual behaviour rather than orientation in 2023.
• Belgium and several other states adopted a four-month deferral as a halfway step.

The common thread across these reforms is a move away from blanket exclusions tied to who a donor is, toward questions about specific recent conduct that may carry infection risk — the approach Lenert's bill seeks to anchor in Luxembourg law.

Supporters say the science and the supply argument now point the same way: every prospective donor lost to a categorical rule is a unit of blood a small country with thin reserves can ill afford. Whether the measure clears the full Chamber, and on what exact terms, remains to be decided. For now, the longstanding deferral stays on the books — but it is, for the first time, formally on the parliamentary agenda for removal.