The American Academy of Pediatrics and UCLA Medical School is a great resource for questions like this. So I consulted them. Here's what they have to say.

Should you bank cord blood for possible use by your own family?

Certainly there's no shortage of companies offering private cord blood banking. Some are very sophisticated with contractual relationships with individual doctors and hospitals. Some companies market heavily to 'pregnant families' and, if you found this page, the chances are their marketing has already found you.

If you have a child with leukemia or other disease that might be treatable by transplant and you are pregnant, please, talk to your Oncologist or Pediatrician about saving the cord blood. This is one time when banking your baby's cord blood really makes sense. Under these circumstances I'm fairly certain your hospital's bone marrow transplant center will provide free cord blood banking or can refer you to someone who can help. In Southern California.. contact us and we'll see what we can do. For other areas, check the NMDP list of Cord Blood Banks to see if there's one near you.

If you're not in this special, very high risk group....

• Here's what we think....Should I store cord blood just for my own family?
• Here's a summary of an article from the American Academy of Pediatrics
• Here's what "Time Magazine" had to say about the subject in late 1998.
• Here's a "U.S. News and World Report" story on the same subject.
• One of our cord blood donors sent us an account of her decision to donate cord blood rather than banking it privately. Click here to read "Gabriel's Story".
• Here's an article from "OncoLinks" by Dr F. Leonard Johnson, MD, of Oregon Health Sciences University.
• Dr Claude Lenfant, Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute had this to say..."Neither the transplant community nor the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents routinely store their children's own cord blood for future use. Such storage is recommended only in cases where a family member already has a disease known to be treatable by bone marrow transplantation."
• The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an article on covering legal aspects of cord blood banking. Among other things the author had this to say about private banking..."For placental blood, the promise of future use, by a family without a history of a disease that hematopoietic cells could be used to treat, seems unrealistic and deeply exploitative of new parents. The author went on to add this about public banking... "There is a serious shortage of matched bone marrow for transplantation, and public placental-blood banks could help relieve it. This seems to be the most responsible way for this field to develop."