Student push to lower blood donor age to 16 wins passage in House

After being turned away because he was too young, Mark Chonofsky crossed state lines - to donate blood.

Now Chonofsky, a 16-year-old from Lexington, is leading a campaign to lower the minimum age for blood donors from 17 to 16, winning passage yesterday in the House of a bill he drafted himself. The measure would allow Massachusetts to join Maine, New York, and about a dozen other states and territories on a small but growing list of places where 16-year-olds can donate blood with parental consent.

Chonofsky gave blood in Maine after first being denied at Lexington High School's blood drive because of his age.

"I thought that was really an inequity, since I met all the other physical requirements," said Chonofsky, who will be a junior this year.

Chonofsky hit the archives, studying the initial legislation in the early 1990s that set the age at 18 and the subsequent law that lowered it to 17. He consulted the state's legislative drafting manual to try to replicate the appropriate legal language.

Then he approached his local representative, Jay R. Kaufman, at a victory party last year for a local tax override and asked him to sponsor the bill. Kaufman, a Lexington Democrat, agreed.

The Joint Committee on Public Health endorsed the bill in April, and it reached the House floor yesterday, where lawmakers unanimously passed it on a voice vote.

Supporters hope that it will swiftly pass the Senate and become law - especially given a shortage in the state's blood supply.

"[We] have an urgent need for people to come in and give blood," said Donna M. Morrissey, spokeswoman for the New England region of American Red Cross Blood Services.

Massachusetts relies on other states to provide 36 percent of the blood used in hospitals in the state each year. And as of yesterday afternoon, the Red Cross had 2,341 units of red blood cells available at its New England distribution center in Dedham - just a one-day supply, well short of the preferred three- to five-day supply, Morrissey said.

Representative Peter J. Koutoujian, House chairman for the Joint Committee on Public Health, said the bill was easy to support, given Chonofsky's diligence and enthusiasm and the intended outcome.

"There's no downside to this," Koutoujian said. "We always think about engaging young people in doing service work for the community, for going out to vote and things like that. This is more meaningful in many ways, and this will be lasting."

Chonofsky attended the legislative session yesterday, then made his way to a summer job in a lab at the Harvard University Herbaria, one of the largest plant specimen collections in the world. He is also a member of the student-faculty senate at Lexington High, an avid rock climber, and a Boy Scout. He said he's trying to decide on an Eagle Scout project and is thinking about trail work or maybe a blood drive.

Although Lexington High already has a thriving blood drive, the school has a large contingent of underclassmen who have been turned away in the past and are eager to give.

"People are saying that it would be apropos," Chonofsky said.

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.