Anyone keeping umbilical cord blood?

Question

I just decided yesterday that I am going to keep my son's wanted to know if anyone else is!

Answer 1

I planned to, but during one of my prenatal exercise classes, there was another woman where who is a biochemical engineer for a pharmaceutical company.  

She told us that the current cyrogenic freezing techniques really only keep the stem cells in a useable state for about 8 years.  So, she told us that we were would really be paying for 8 years of storage.  After that the cells would still be there, but with today's medicine, they would not be very useful for anything.  If they were not useful, we would still end up going to a public bank.

Based on that information, my husband and I changed our minds.  We did not store for our first and won't for our second.  

If we had a family history of blood disorders, blood disease or cancer, we still would have.

Answer 2

I would like to, but i just can't afford it.  

Answer 3

I really wanted to do it with both my daughters, but it's just way to expensive. And even if we were we couldn't have anyway. It was only available during business hours and both daughters were born in the early morning.

Good on you for doing so.

Answer 4

Yes, I am. In fact I just signed up. I am due on Dec 5th with a boy, who we know is going to have hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  My son will have at least 3 open heart surgeries by the time he is 18 months old, and we dont know if or how many more he will have to have. With everything they are treating now with cord blood and them already looking into helping treat heart disease, I really hope it will help my son later in life.

It was cheaper then I thought 2095 and then 125 a year after that. Or payment plans for the 2095. My son is worth more then that to me, so I had made my mind up that no matter the price, I was going to do that.

There are some cord banking places that if you already have a child who has a disease that cord blood has already been proven to help, they will store the cord blood for free.

I forgot to add that we do not have to pay anything until the baby is born. So atleast we have a lil time to save up.

Answer 5

Great his own stem cells.  How are you going to store this without it degrading?  Blood life expectancy is not long and without some serious freezing (i.e. liquid nitrogen type freezing) i don't see how you are going to keep it.  Also why would you want to keep it?