Cord Blood Question

We banked my daughter's cord blood with ViaCord. I never even considered banking at 2 locations. First of all it's very expensive, and secondly, I'm not sure that they could get enough to have 2 samples that were large enough (usually if the cord blood is used, they use most of it at one time). All of the Cord blood banks have safety features to prevent something happening to the cord blood. I suppose anything is possible, but the thought never even crossed my mind.

I banked both my boys cord blood with CorCell, didn't know about the National Registry, but it sounds like a great idea. CroCell has lots of back up in case of an electrical outage, so I never thought about doing 2 banks, pus it's pretty expensive. Congrats for banking you childs cord blood, you're making a great choice for your family!

We donated to the National Cord Blood Registry as well. Cord blood should be like regular blood that you get from a free bank and is available to all. If all parents donated their babies cord blood, we would all benefit. I personally think that private banking is a scam on new parents.

I looked into banking cord blood, but I couldn't afford it at the time for one let alone two.

And my second child... The cord snapped off the placenta (it was gross but very funny) and the cord blood was EVERYWHERE! So no banking that...

I'm not sure that you'd have an issue with only having one.

Actually we donated to the National Cord Blood Registry with our 2nd child. That's the big one where you don't pay for storage. Our feelings were that we stored the first child's with Viacord, so it is always available for only us, and chances are the 2nd child's would be available too, but it may also go to someone else who was a close enough match (and they usually don't use the entire sample, so just because it matched for someone else, doesn't mean it won't be there for you if you need it). I honestly never considered the fact that something may happen at a bank and it would be good to have it in two different places. The route we chose puts our cord blood in two different places, but we only have to pay for one.

We just donated this past week and were told two things by the nurse that may help with your question. She said that the hospital gets data back from the cord blood bank (not for individual donations, but for their donations in total), and that only about 20-25% of the donations are bankable. She also said that many samples are not large enough to provide even one viable sample, so I don't know how you could donate to more than one place.

We have no way to verify if what she said is true. However, if that's truly the case, I'm all the more pleased that we went the donation route than the private banking route (to pay all that money for something that's not even viable would be inexcusable, in my opinion). I don't know how to tell you to research this further, but I wanted to at least let you know what we were told...