Pregnant women's perspectives on umbilical cord blood banking.

Promising clinical results suggest that umbilical cord blood (UCB) collected after delivery of a child may have many advantages over bone marrow for transplantation. As there are an increasing number of options regarding the collection of UCB, including private and public banking, more pregnant women are likely to be asked to make decisions about UCB collection. We conducted three focus groups with pregnant women to learn about their perspectives on this emerging technology. All the women in these focus groups indicated that they would choose to have UCB collected. Reasons leading to this choice were that the UCB would otherwise be discarded and altruism. Participants indicated that possible reasons to decide not to have UCB collected include concerns about the safety of the mother and neonate, beliefs about the placenta, threats against confidentiality, rejection of UCB, and the influence of fathers. While feeling confident in making an anticipatory decision about UCB collection, women expressed a clear desire to learn much more about the collection, storage (including distinctions between public and private banking), and use of UCB. In addition, they believed that recruitment for UCB collection should occur after sufficient education about UCB and certainly not after delivery and collection. These data will be useful in guiding efforts to help women make decisions about having UCB collected and in developing an appropriate recruitment and informed consent process for donating UCB to a public bank.