Cord Blood Donation

It is super popular these days to bank your infant's cord blood. In every pregnancy and early parenting magazine, and almost every pregnancy website has a bombardment of ads promoting this practice. And though, I am sure there is a reason why parents would choose to do this, but for me personally it seems as if you are bracing yourself constantly for your child to become very ill. Instead of banking my baby's cord, I began to wonder what if we could just donated it. There are so many people out there that could benefit from a match.

First, I asked, my birthing instructor but she had no idea. I took the liberty of emailing a contact at the Florida Blood Services organization because he and I have had a good relationship over the years since I was in charge of planning the dates for the blood mobile to come to school. He looked into a couple of options but there is no system in place for such a donation. As a last resort I have done some light googling on the subject and it turns out that this is highly dependent on the facility that you give you birth. Through the information provided by the National Marrow Donor Program, Florida only has 4 hospitals that will accept a cord donation and there are no additional cord blood banks. There is no way to donate it from this state. The national organization actually just recommends a financial donation if there are no available banks to receive your cord blood.

Can you imagine the impact if there were more venues for donation? I imagine that we are not the only perspective parents that would happily donate our infants cord blood and there are so many children in need.