Donating cord blood is free, painless, and takes only a few minutes after your baby is born. The blood left in your umbilical cord and placenta contains stem cells that can treat roughly 80 diseases, including leukemia, sickle cell disease, and immune deficiencies. Without donation, this blood is simply discarded as medical waste.
The process requires some advance planning, though. You’ll need to register with a public cord blood bank between your 28th and 34th week of pregnancy, and your delivery hospital must partner with a bank that collects donations.
What Cord Blood Treats
Cord blood is rich in blood-forming stem cells, the same type found in bone marrow. These cells can rebuild a patient’s blood and immune system after treatments like chemotherapy, or replace cells that aren’t working properly due to genetic conditions. Cord blood transplants are a standard therapy for about 80 diseases, including several types of leukemia and lymphoma, sickle cell disease, thalassemia, aplastic anemia, and severe combined immunodeficiency (sometimes called “bubble boy” disease).
For some of these conditions, a stem cell transplant is the only available treatment. For others, it’s used when first-line therapies fail or the disease is especially aggressive. Cord blood has one notable advantage over bone marrow: patients who receive cord blood transplants tend to develop less chronic graft-versus-host disease, a serious complication where donated cells attack the recipient’s body. This also means cord blood doesn’t need to be as precisely matched to the recipient as bone marrow does, which is especially important for patients from diverse ethnic backgrounds who may struggle to find a perfect bone marrow match.
Step 1: Check if Your Hospital Participates
Not every hospital collects cord blood for public donation. Only hospitals that partner with an accredited public cord blood bank can perform collections, and these tend to be larger facilities in metropolitan areas. Your first step is finding out whether your planned delivery hospital is on the list. The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and HRSA both maintain online directories of participating hospitals and their partner banks.
If your hospital doesn’t participate, you generally can’t donate to a public bank. Some private cord blood companies offer mail-in collection kits, but those are for paid private storage, not public donation.
Step 2: Register During Your Second Trimester
HRSA recommends contacting the public cord blood bank that partners with your hospital between weeks 28 and 34 of pregnancy, roughly three months before your due date. During registration, the bank will walk you through several steps:
- Eligibility screening. The bank checks whether you meet basic health guidelines for donation.
- Health history forms. You’ll fill out paperwork covering your own medical background and your family’s health history.
- Delivery details. You’ll share your expected delivery type (vaginal or cesarean) and due date.
- Consent form. You sign a form agreeing to donate. This also authorizes the bank to test your blood for infectious diseases after delivery.
Tell your doctor or midwife about your decision at the same time. They’ll need to know so the delivery team is prepared for collection.
Step 3: What Happens During Delivery
When you arrive at the hospital, let your nurse know you’re donating cord blood. The collection itself happens after your baby is born and doesn’t change anything about your birth experience. Your baby’s care always comes first.
After delivery, the umbilical cord is clamped in two places and cut between the clamps. A provider then either inserts a needle into the cord to draw out the remaining blood or lets it drip into a sterile collection bag. The entire process takes just a few minutes and is completely painless for both you and your baby. The blood collected is what would have been thrown away along with the placenta.
The day after delivery, you’ll be asked to give a small blood sample of your own. This is tested for infectious diseases as a safety check. No blood is drawn from your baby at any point.
What Happens After Collection
The cord blood unit is shipped to the public bank shortly after birth. Qualifying units are processed and frozen within 48 hours of collection. At the bank, technicians check the unit for three things: whether it contains enough blood-forming cells to be useful in a transplant, whether it’s free from contamination, and what its tissue type is.
Units that pass these checks are frozen in liquid nitrogen and listed on the national registry run by the C.W. Bill Young Cell Transplantation Program. From there, any patient in the world who needs a stem cell transplant and matches that tissue type can receive it. Your donation is assigned an alphanumeric code, keeping you and your baby anonymous.
Not every donation makes it to the registry. Sometimes the cord doesn’t yield enough blood, or the cell count is too low for transplant use. This is normal and doesn’t reflect anything about your health or your baby’s health.
Public Donation vs. Private Banking
Public donation and private banking are fundamentally different choices. When you donate to a public bank, the cord blood is available to any matching patient who needs it, and there’s no cost to you. You give up ownership of the sample, so you can’t retrieve it later for personal use.
Private banking means paying a company to store your baby’s cord blood exclusively for your family. This typically involves an upfront collection fee plus annual storage costs that continue for as long as you want the sample preserved. The idea is that the cord blood would be available if your child or a family member ever needed a transplant.
In practice, the chance of a child needing their own stored cord blood is very low. Most major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend public donation over private storage for families without a known medical need. The exception is when you already have a child or close relative with a condition treatable by stem cell transplant. In that case, directed donation or private banking may make more sense.
Quality and Safety Standards
Public cord blood banks in the United States operate under strict quality controls. AABB, the main accrediting body for blood banks and cellular therapy facilities, conducts on-site assessments of cord blood banks every two years. Banks that pass these assessments are verified to meet standards for how they collect, process, store, and distribute cord blood units. You can look up accredited cord blood facilities through AABB’s online directory to confirm that your bank meets these benchmarks.
If Your Hospital Doesn’t Participate
The biggest barrier to cord blood donation is hospital availability. Many people want to donate but deliver at facilities that don’t have a collection program. If you find yourself in this situation, you still have a few options. You can ask your provider whether any nearby hospitals in the same health system offer collection. In some cases, switching your delivery location is feasible if it’s close enough and your pregnancy is uncomplicated. If donation isn’t possible, know that the cord blood would simply have been discarded, so not donating carries no downside for your baby.