Don’t Pay for Cord-Blood Banking
Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET on October 17, 2022
In the fall of 1988, Matthew Farrow, a 5-year-old boy with a rare blood disorder, received the world’s first transplant of umbilical-cord blood from a newborn sibling. It worked: Farrow was cured. This miraculous outcome broke open a whole new field in medicine—and, not long after, a whole new industry aimed at getting expecting parents to bank their baby’s umbilical-cord blood, just in case.
These days, in fact, being pregnant means being bombarded at the doctor’s office and on Instagram with ads touting cord blood as too precious to waste. For several hundred dollars upfront, plus a storage fee of $100 to $200 every year, the banks’ ads proclaim, you could save your child’s life. Cord-blood banking has been likened to a “biological insurance policy.”
In the U.S., the are Cord Blood Registry and ViaCord. Together, they have collected more than 1 million units. But only a few hundred units of this privately banked cord blood have ever been used in transplants, the great who chose to bank because they already had a child with a specific and rare disorder treatable with a transplant. For everyone else, the odds of using privately banked cord blood are minuscule—so minuscule that the against private banking. It does make an exception for families with that disease history. “But that’s a rare circumstance,” says Steve Joffe, a pediatric oncologist and ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and not one that anybody is going to build a successful business model around.”
