Whether or not to bank your baby’s cord blood is the latest decision put to expectant parents as pregnancy and birth become increasingly technically complicated.  On the one hand, many sick children have been successfully treated through stem cell transplants from siblings’ cord blood.  On the other, cord blood collection and banking can be an expensive prospect.

Now there looks to be a new choice on the horizon.  Doctors in Oakland, California have discovered that placentas have about five times the number of stem cells as cord blood. Since stem cell treatments from cord blood have sometimes failed due to there being too few cells available, this is good news in and of itself.  But even more promising, doctors believe the stem cells found in placentas to be more “primitive” than those found in cord blood, and thus more versatile in treating disease.

When (I am certain it is not a matter of “if”) placental cell banking becomes possible, parents will be asked to consider it too.  And I am sure the same businesses now promoting their banking services in parenting magazines and doctors’ office brochures will commence same with regard to placentas.

While this is very good news for medical progress, I have to worry that in our for-profit, capitalistic health care model, only those with the extra money to spend banking these cells for their personal families will be privy to the miraculous medical outcomes claimed by stem cell researchers.  I for one hope that in the coming months and years as the United States rethinks its health care system and puts something more just in place, the banking of these “miracle cells” will become a public good for all.  Parents, rather than deciding which bank to pay to preserve cells for their own good alone, ought to be presented with the option to bank those cells for the public good, at public expense.  This would not change the potential good the cells could do for the families contributing them to such a system, since, should they have need for stem cell treatment, those cells would be available and presumably, the best and most logical match for their own treatment.  Yet, in the more likely case that the families who contribute the cells to the public good don’t ever find themselves in medical need of them, they would be available to help anyone else who might benefit.

I am as excited and welcoming as anyone of the future of stem cell treatments for the diseases that claim the health, well being, and lives of so many people now.  But I fervently hope that the promise these treatments offer are offered to all, whether they have the extra income to bank their own family’s stem cells or not.

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