The bioethical problems of umbilical cord blood: a study of institutional statements

Abstract

This article aims to explore the bioethical problems that are concentrated around the Umbilical Cord Blood. The publication in the year 2020 in Spain of the new National Umbilical Cord Blood Plan recalls the current status of the issue. The bioethical problems of umbilical cord blood have not been specially studied, rather there are few studies in this regard and above all they have focused on the controversy over its autologous use and its storage in private banks. This work, the result of reading twenty-six institutional statements from the most diverse institutions in different countries, offers a detailed and systematic enumeration of the bioethical problems that arise around the life of umbilical cord blood and proposes, fundamentally, a classification with an evolutionary criterion, that is, following the course of the Umbilical Cord Blood, from its donation to its use, passing through the problems of donors and storage. The sources used cover a period from 1998 to 2019 and are practically all the existing ones. This work offers a conclusive analysis of a synchronic nature, in which the bioethical constants are detected in the 31 years analyzed, specifically the principles of autonomy and solidarity, in addition to the so-called bioethics of expectations; and another of a diachronic nature in which the bioethical nuclei in which the questions are concentrated stand out: the lack of personalistic principles and the conflict between freedom and solidarity.