Every time there is bad weather or a holiday, they are always saying there is a critical blood shortage, and no matter where it happens, it is always Type 0-negative they run out of first because it is the universal donor. Whenever someone comes into an emergency room and there is not time, or if nobody has bothered to type their blood, they give them Type 0 negative, which is why they are always running out of it. Then they will put on a news report saying they are "rationing" it, but I have never seen an explanation of what "rationing" means, except for one paper on medical ethics that seemed to suggest that the ethical thing to do was to let an O-neg patient who needed a lot of blood die because they needed to save that blood type for other people. I am Type 0 negative. I used to give blood a lot. The red cross would ring my phone off the hook the first day that I was eligible to donate again. O-negs donate at a higher rate than the average person. So does that make us kind, wonderful people, or suckers who are bled dry and left to die in an emergency? I was living in another country when I got pregnant and my doctor told me to go home, because they said if I had an emergency in childbirth, and I needed clean O-neg blood, there was no way I was going to find any. I suspect that the reason I cannot find an explanation of what "rationing" means is that they don't want the O-negative universal martyrs to quit donating. Why can't everyone have their blood type tattooed behind their ear at birth, then we would never have a shortage, or at least it would not all fall on a tiny part of the population.