Reproductive tourism is an interesting case. While I typically lean toward the side of approval as far as medical tourism is concerned, reproductive tourism comes with many more ethical complications. Medical tourism involves an individual leaving their country of residence in order to acquire a medical service that is not legal or is too expensive in their home country. This process does contain risk but it is solely to the consumer. There is something to be said about risk of bringing back foreign diseases, but this risk is shared between medical tourists and regular tourists. The only way to mitigate this risk is to control travel, which I do not support, so as far as risk-benefit analysis is concerned, I support medical tourism.
Reproductive tourism, in the common case, requires another individual to assume a great amount of risk in the form of a surrogate. Many people who engage in reproductive tourism are middle class, and seek to capitalize on the low prices of international surrogacy. However, the typical surrogate in a place like India, which is "fast becoming the world champion in providing commercial assisted reproductive technology" (NCBI), does not share the same economic class as the client. One of the chief ethical pitfalls of the international surrogacy industry is taking advantage of the surrogate mother financially. If the reason why reproductive tourists leave their home country for better surrogate pricing, then this competitive pricing comes at the expense of the surrogate mother.
The essence of my trepidation toward approval of reproductive tourism, specifically international surrogacy, stems from the fact that, unlike medical tourism, a large portion of risk is not assumed by the client. Pregnancy exerts a massive physical toll on anyone, and surrogate mothers should be compensated fairly (and generously, I think), for assuming that risk. Another incredibly overlooked risk is that in some countries, the child of such surrogacy is considered stateless until the child is adopted. If the client was to suddenly back out of the deal, the government would have much less obligation to care for the child.
International surrogacy is rife with ethical dilemmas, and certainly we should continue debating to improve a system where more wonderful life is brought into the world, but surrogacy is not the only example of reproductive tourism. Many people travel to countries with better services and technology in order to provide better quality care for their child. In these cases I feel very similarly to how I did with medical tourism. There is also a population of reproductive tourists who leave their country in order to bypass wait lists. This I am on the fence about. The value of parents is not defined by affluence, so why should they be allowed to bypass the system? However, there is no ethical way I can see to prohibit this, and isn't one of the hallmark descriptors of a good parent that they would do expend any resource in order to ensure their child's health? Reproductive tourism, like most things, is a mixed bag of risk and benefit, but there is much potential, and I hope to see greater strides taken worldwide to ensure the safety and fair compensation of surrogate mothers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4544809/
There really are a lot of grey areas when it comes to leaving the country looking for a surrogate, or even leaving a country as a surrogate looking for business! It's hard to draw the line where exactly the regulations should start, but I definitely think that it should start where the well being of the surrogate child is at stake. Being able to regulate the care of surrogate children, whether they are kept by their intended parents or adopted otherwise, seems like the most important thing to be aware of as a government.
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