Cord cutting

We finally made a decision about this cord blood banking racket. Perhaps racket is too strong a word, but the majority of literature, at least the stuff the doctors give you, guilts the future parent in such an extreme way that we felt like we would be horrible, non-loving parents if we didn't shell out $2k to extract the cord blood and another $200/year to bank it. (The basic gist of cord blood banking is that you have a store of stem cells in case your child or other relative ever needs them in order to treat blood and immune disorders and, down the road, other diseases.) After talking to my brother and a few other people with a science background who keep up with innovations in human biology, we decided not to pay an exorbitant amount to do this as right now biotech is perfecting extracting stem cells from one's own living tissue and thus this whole banking technology will be obsolete in a few years.

But the real clincher was our discovery that the cord blood needs to be collected within the first 5 minutes of delivery. This means that the cord has to be cut while it's still pulsating, while the baby is still partially reliant on its placenta to breathe. This is really bad. (Plus, there would be a whole extra team of personnel swooping into the delivery room at the moment we will most want to calmly meet our baby.) We're willing to take the gamble that, in the next few years, our child won't need stem cells to fix a disease it has a 1 in umpteen thousand chance of getting versus making its first hour of life uncomfortable and complicating its chances of breathing and breastfeeding successfully. There are a ton more studies that demonstrate babies whose cords remain intact until they're finished pulsating (only about 15 minutes or so) feed better and are healthier than their instantly snipped counterparts than that cord blood banking is going to save a life. If someone else wants to do this, and everyone I know seems to, I can understand. We just decided it's not worth the trauma to the baby or to us.