By Ellen Friedrichs.
I had a long list of things I meant to do before having my daughter almost three years ago. I meant to clean my bathroom. I meant to buy a nursing bra. I meant to inform my health insurance company about her imminent arrival, get a bassinet and shave my legs. I also meant to look into cord blood banking.
But then she came three weeks early.
I had gone in for a routine early morning OB appointment. Pretty
soon, I found myself in a cab speeding to the hospital after my
doctor determined that my water had broken and had probably been
leaking for the past week. At the time, my thoughts were more on
figuring out how to contact my sleeping boyfriend, whose phone I
knew was turned off, than they were on dealing with all my
unfinished business.
Thanks to a friend who had our keys, my boyfriend was roused and
made it to the hospital before our baby did. And despite the
urgency I had felt during my appointment, things didn't move so
speedily once there and we had plenty of time to kill. So in
between watching bad TV and sneaking snacks, we perused the cord
blood brochures lining the nurse's station.
Suddenly, the $2,000 collection fee didn't seem so
outrageous.They looked a lot like the ones I had
spent the last nine months ignoring in my doctor's office. On
the cover was a cute little tot with her T-shirt pulled up to
reveal a cute little bellybutton. The promise of umbilical cord
stem cells and amazing predictions for their use in curing
everything from blood disorders to leukemia served as text.
Rounding this out was a section dedicated to testimonials from
parents of sick kids who were deeply grateful that they had
banked.
Once I bothered to look at it, the pitch was pretty effective.
Suddenly, the $2,000 collection fee and $250 a year storage cost
didn't seem so outrageous. I mean, this was our daughter's
future health we were talking about!
So we went for it.
A few months later I asked a midwife friend for her thoughts on
cord blood banking. She scoffed, telling me that the reality of any
child ever actually being cured of a disease due to her own cord
blood was pretty miniscule. She hadn't banked blood for either
of her daughters and slept just fine at night. She also gently
mentioned that some people viewed private banking as uncharitable
and instead opted to donate cord blood to a public registry. This,
she explained, was not only free, but was done for the greater
good. Publicly
banked blood could be used to treat medical conditions in
anyone who was a match. Oh.
Now with my second baby due in a month, and despite the fact that
my boyfriend is still on the fence about the issue, I am not
inclined to bank privately again. Not only is the cost prohibitive,
but the motives of these banks seem more driven by profit than
science. Subsequent research alerted me to some things I hadn't
realized the first time around.
Read more on
Babble.
