Should Umbilical Cord Blood be for Sale?

Question

Looking for opinions on this topic, both for it and against it. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I agree with midnight.  Since cord blood is used in stem cell transplants, it should not be sold for the same reason that it is illegal to sell organs.

A.  People who have no money would never be able to get cord blood because most people would not give it without being paid

B.  When people are being paid for something like organs on the black market, they tend to lie about their medical history because they need the money.  Can you imagine paying however much for cord blood, then it not even be a match, or the mother passed AIDS to her baby and then you cant use it?  This is the same reason that blood products that are paid for, such as selling plasma, in the US atleast is not used in human transfusions.  It all goes to research.

For those that dont know, cord blood can be used in bone marrow transplants instead of bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells.

You can read about it at http://www.marrow.org

Answer 2

No.  For the same reason that organs cant be sold.  While part of me says, if you have the money, why not?  The other part of me...  I am a cancer patient.  I had leukemia, and I had a stem cell transplant (the medically correct term for bone marrow transplant) using cord blood.  I used cord blood because I have a rare tissue type with no matches in the adult registry.  If I had had to pay for my cord blood, above and beyond the blood bank services (which, btw, even from a public bank was close to a mil), I never would have had a chance at getting cord blood that matched me.  I would have died, without my transplant.

And, the domino effect.  If its ok to sell cord blood, why would it not be ok to sell organs?  And then sell embryos, or aborted fetus?

Answer 3

I don't see any reason why not.  After all, it doesn't do any harm to the donor.

Answer 4

I suppose there's no right or wrong answer for this, as it seems you're looking for opinions only.  I think of umbilical blood as an organ - you shouldn't be able to sell it, but you should be able to donate it out of the goodness of one's heart.

The controversy over the sale of cord blood isn't the only controversy - there is also the issue of private cord banks, where people can pay thousands of dollars up-front and hundreds of dollars a month to store blood that will likely never be used.  

And if the private cord blood bank goes out of business?  Who is responsible for the blood?  I would imagine a public cord blood bank would be more likely to pass the blood onto another blood bank, if it went out of business, but there's likely no commercial incentive for a public bank to do the same.

The above show that there is lots of controversy still with cord blood, once the ethical questions about using it in the first place are addressed...