MarloElaine

Nowadays, it seems like every baby and parenting magazine is filled with powerful ads for umbilical cord blood banking. The ads feed into every parents’ desire to protect their children from harm. One website touts membership in their cord blood banks as “powerful gifts” “for the future health of their loved ones.” They constantly remind parents that it is literally a once in a lifetime chance to protect their newborn’s health.

But is it worth the huge expense associated with collecting and storing the cord blood? Should parents gamble away their hard earned money when, as stated in the fine print of another cord banking website, “there is no guarantee that a cord blood transplant will be an appropriate treatment therapy or that it will provide a cure.” In this article, I will detail step by step my family’s decision not to store our children’s umbilical cord blood.

I first heard about umbilical cord blood when I was working as a nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I read all about the stem cell rich cord blood and its curative properties and potential benefits, though I never actually witnessed any of it. I also watched the same precious blood being routinely discarded with the biohazardous waste.

When my son Sammy was born in 2003, I seriously considered banking his cord blood. I wasn’t thinking so much about my son’s health, but my sister’s. At the time, she was suffering from serious health problems, including kidney failure. She required hemodialysis three times a week in addition to her numerous medications. The advertisements seemed so promising, but when we looked into it further, we discovered that it was not a treatment for her type of illness. We decided against cord blood banking, but knew that since we planned to have more children, we would have at least one more chance to reconsider.

By the time I was pregnant with Sophie in 2005, my sister’s health greatly improved, thanks to a kidney transplanted from our extremely generous brother. I still reviewed many of the advertisements, and even studied many of the cord blood bank websites. I got extremely frustrated because many of the sites did not discuss pricing. They kept insisting that i submit personal information to them so I could be contacted by their pushy sales associates.

Cord Blood Registry is one of the few sites with full disclosure of their pricing and payment plans. The total expenses for the first year is $1975. They offer a variety of payment plans, and even an 18 year prepaid option (another $1850). As I understand it, if a family cannot afford to continue their payments, there is a cancellation fee.

One of our friends banked her son’s umbilical cord blood through one of these services, though I am not sure which one. She eventually cancelled her “insurance policy” and regrets wasting thousands of dollars. When we learned this information, we were already leaning away from banking our daughter’s cord blood. My husband and I decided to earmark the money that would have gone to the collection and storage fees to a college fund instead.

In researching for this article, I learned that there are many public cord blood banks out there accepting donations and making the material available for transplant. Any guilt that may have lingered from my decision not to privately bank my children’s cord blood has now diminished. Had I known how easy it was to donate that precious blood to a public bank, I probably would have.

An excellent website for parents struggling with this decision is http://www.parentsguidecordblood.com. The site does not contain any advertising and does not make any facility recommendations. The author lists all of the collection banks in the U.S. and even has Tables of Company Features and Pricing, organized by country. They list pros and cons of cord blood banking, discuss recent legislation and news articles, and even explain how to collect the samples. Some of the information contains a lot of medical terminology that can be difficult to understand. One section that I found helpful details which diseases are currently being treated by blood stem cells through standard therapies, clinical trials, or experimental treatments.

If you have been struggling with this decision as well, please feel free to leave your comments. If you have donated or privately stored your child’s umbilical cord blood, we’d love to hear your experiences about it.