From the Earth & Sky radio series:

magine your child has a fatal illness and your doctor says you could save the child’s life by having a second child and transferring cells from one child to the other. Would you do it?

[...]

Doctors can treat the illness by giving a sick child a transplant of blood-forming stem cells from a closely related person. Doctors have learned how to collect these cells from a newborn child’s umbilical cord.

[…}

So there’s no physical harm to the donor sibling . . . you’re not taking anything away from that child. You’re taking cells out of the umbilical cord that would be discarded anyway.

Have another kid to save the one you’ve got? Eep. Sounds creepy, especially if you hadn’t planned on more children.

Fortunately, the show says, when it’s been done, “savior siblings” tend to take pride in the fact that they’ve helped an older brother or sister.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 at 6:16 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.