Imagine having a beautiful baby, ten years later your child gets cancer and needs a bone marrow donor who can match their bone marrow (25% chance of a sibling match and only 1% chance that a stranger’s will match!) If only you had deposited your baby’s stem cells into the cord blood bank!

The umbilical cord (and all the blood that’s in it) is usually trashed right after the baby is born! But this blood has millions of stem cells in it that can repopulate your baby’s bone marrow after any cancer therapy treatment up to however many years later! Cord blood collection is the extraction of about 250 mL of blood from a baby’s umbilical cord right after they’re born.

This can be done through several different companies. At Cord Partners, it costs about $1700 to use their stem cell bank, but if you have twins, there’s a multiple birth discount! Saving your newborn’s stem cell cord blood in a bank could be the miracle that saves their life!

-Amy Shah