Richard F. Storrow of the Dickinson School of Law at Pennsylvania State University has published Quests for Conception: Fertility Tourists, Globalization and Feminist Legal Theory at 57 Hastings L.J. 295 (2006). Here’s part of the abstract:
Fertility tourism is a phenomenon that has received a great deal of media attention recently as the cost of in vitro fertilization in the West skyrockets and countries enact laws that drastically curtail women’s access to assisted reproduction. Professor Storrow examines the relationship between restrictive reproductive laws that purport to be expressions of local values and norms and globalization, the process of increasing worldwide interconnectedness that encourages fertility tourism. After a discussion of the meaning and causes of fertility tourism, Storrow demonstrates how fertility tourism acts to dampen organized resistance to restrictive reproductive laws and thus how globalization itself sustains the dismantling women’s rights on the local level . . . . Storrow concludes that countries considering bans or restrictions on certain forms of assisted reproduction have an ethical obligation to consider and address the effects that those laws will have on infertile couples and gamete donors in countries that have become the destinations of fertility tourists.
– Bridget Crawford
