Chapter 10: Medical Outlaws or Medical Refugees? An Examination of Circumvention Tourism
Risks and Challenges in Medical Tourism: Understanding the Global Market for Health Services Controversies in the Exploding Industry of Global Medicine, Chapter 10, Jill Hodges, ed., Praeger, 2012
23 Pages Posted: 25 Feb 2013
Date Written: 2012
Abstract
While many medical tourists are motivated to travel by the price of service, the ability to jump queues, or greater expertise of a foreign provider, there is also a very different kind of medical tourism afoot in the world today that I call “circumvention tourism” — travel to access services that are legal in the patient's destination country but illegal in the patient’s home country, thereby circumventing a domestic prohibition on the service. Examples include travel to obtain abortion, assisted suicide, reproductive technologies, and female genital cutting. This chapter in a book on medical tourism examines legal and ethical issues relating to "circumvention tourism," especially the issue of whether a patient's home country can and should apply its existing domestic prohibition extraterritorially.
These issues are dealt with in more depth in my article Circumvention Tourism, 97 Cornell L. Rev. 1309 (2012), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1965504.
Keywords: medical tourism, abortion, female genital cutting, assisted suicide, reproductive technology, extraterritoriality, criminal law
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