third-party-assisted conception) restrictions on the availability of treatment for certain categories of people (e.g. Studies of Italian patients have reported a growth in overseas travel from Italy since legislative changes in 2004 ( Bartolucci, 2008 Ferraretti et al., 2010).Ĭommentators have suggested a range of possible motivations for cross-border travel, including legal restrictions on access to certain forms of treatment (e.g. (2009) also show a steady growth in foreign nationals treated in Belgian clinics between 20, particularly from France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. Patients from Italy and Germany were the most dominant travellers in this survey, which included 53 patients travelling from the UK.

While suggesting caution in extrapolating from these data to the rest of Europe, the authors estimate that there could be 24–30 000 cycles of cross-border treatment, involving 11–14 000 patients in Europe annually. In the European context, the survey carried out by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology's (ESHRE) Task Force on Cross-Border Reproductive Care ( Shenfield et al., 2010) provides the most comprehensive study of cross-border travel to date, with data from 46 clinics in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Spain, collected for a period of 1 month between October 2008 and March 2009. Recent papers have documented patient travel between Canada and the USA ( Blyth, 2010 Hughes and DeJean, 2010), from the USA and Australia to Europe and Asia ( Whittaker and Speier, 2010) and extensive movements to and from the United Arab Emirates ( Inhorn and Shrivastav, 2010).

Therefore, while there is evidence of cross-border fertility treatment occurring in many countries across the globe ( Nygren et al., 2010), there are few robust data on incidence. However, there has been little systematic study of this apparently growing phenomenon ( Hudson et al., 2011). Cross-border reproductive care, fertility tourism, reproductive tourism, treatment abroad, medical tourism IntroductionĬross-border reproductive travel, part of a more general globalization of healthcare ( Culley and Hudson, 2009), has attracted considerable interest from international media, and from academic commentators.

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