http://www.lifelinecryogenics.com/
http://www.cordblood.com/
http://www.viacord.com/
and every one of them has a picture of a goddamn kid on their front page.
here’s the skinny. the woman gives birth. while they wipe the kid down, the doctor goes back in. the placenta is delivered. parts of the umbilical cord are harvested. parts of it goes into a plastic bag. said bag goes to a place where they grow it. then they store it. you pay a yearly fee to keep it around. stem cells. just in case. in case one of your other kids develops bone marrow cancer or leukemia or anything else that’s sure to kill them. they just go back to the harvest. ninety percent match between siblings. shit, sixty percent match to the parents. it’s a potential cure-all that costs only pennies a day.
nevermind whether or not you can afford the procedure that would actually take those cells and make something useful out of them. these people are just a bank. what you do with the cells is your business, your problem, your responsibility. nevermind that they use pictures of happy and healthy children as if, when you store those stem cells with us, we can guarantee your child’s happiness, your child’s future, your child’s very life.
what’s even sicker is that health insurance doesn’t cover any of this. you can bang on our dime until your heart stops, but you cannot ensure any part of your kid’s future.