SHOULD YOU STORE YOUR BABY'S CORD BLOOD ?

Parents have a lot of decisions to make when their precious baby enters the world. There are some decisions you have to make for example to bottle feed or to breastfeed.

Then there are some decisions which do not have to be made, or perhaps more commonly parents are unaware that they indeed do have a decision to make. One such decision is whether or not to store your baby’s umbilical cord blood.

This is really a new phenomenon and there are now a considerable number of companies offering this service, particularly in developed countries. Following the birth of my baby, in Australia, I was quite inundated with pamphlets advertising cord blood banking services.

There are not really any disadvantages to taking and storing your baby’s cord blood. Taking cord blood does not hurt the baby at all; if it’s not banked it would be thrown away. Assuming that the cord blood is professional stored it could in the future be used to cure your child from a lot of potentially nasty diseases. So taking cord blood is a really a purchase of a long term insurance policy.

However, the cost of taking and storing cord blood is prohibitively expensive for most families. Fees can easily run to $5,000 to $10,000 for storage until your child reaches the age of 18. Unfortunately some families have succumbed to pressure from cord blood banking companies and signed up, only to have financial difficulties at a later date. Parents are particularly susceptible to pressure marketing during the emotional turbulence of child birth. Furthermore the odds of your child actually requiring their own cord blood have been estimated at possibly less than 1 in 100,000.

Well whatever choice you make think about it carefully – best to decide early on during your pregnancy. If you do decide to store your baby’s cord blood let’s hope that you never actually need to use it.