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

Suggested Citation

Cohen, I. Glenn, Chapter 10: Medical Outlaws or Medical Refugees? An Examination of Circumvention Tourism (2012). 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, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2221441

I. Glenn Cohen (Contact Author)

Harvard Law School ( email )

1525 Massachusetts Avenue
Griswold Hall 503
Cambridge, 02138
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
110
Abstract Views
1,570
Rank
447,736
PlumX Metrics