Why should you bank cord blood?

Birth is a one-time opportunity to help society by donating your child’s Cord Blood to a public bank. There are three sources of Stem Cells for transplant patients: bone marrow, circulating blood, and umbilical Cord Blood. The first two exist in all healthy adults, but Cord Blood can only be harvested and stored at birth. We will see below that it is easier to match transplant patients with cord blood than with the two sources of adult blood. Hence, establishing public banks of stored cord blood from donors with diverse tissue types can save many lives.

Birth is also a one-time opportunity to help your own family by saving your child’s cord blood. Transplant patients recover better when they receive Stem Cells from a related donor, instead of an unrelated donor. In the future, if there are regenerative medicine advances which can repair the body with the patient’s own Stem Cells, then families which saved cord blood will have better access to those treatments.

There is virtually no reason not to save your child’s cord blood. The only cautionary remarks which can be made about cord blood banking is that the cord should not be clamped too soon after birth.