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Can I stop paying for storage in a family bank and donate the cord blood?
No - cord blood that has already been stored in a family bank cannot be transfered to a public bank. When a public bank collects cord blood donations that will potentially be released to strangers, they are required to perform a very detailed family health history and collect a sample of the mother's blood. This screening must be performed at the time of donation and it cannot be retroactively performed for cord blood in a family bank.
An additional issue is that any given cord blood bank is very reluctant to trust the processing and storage of another bank. It is almost impossible to transfer cord blood from one bank to another, even among family banks. They do not want to accept a cord blood unit that was processed by another organization due to liability concerns.