Circumvention Medical Tourism and Cutting Edge Medicine: The Case of Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy (The George P. Smith Lecture)

Abstract

“Medical Tourism” is the travel of patients from a home country to a destination country for the primary purpose of receiving health care. “Circumvention Tourism” is a sub-type of such travel where the motivation is circumventing a domestic prohibition on accessing a medical service. This Article, adapted from the George P. Smith Lecture given at the University of Indiana's school of law, focuses on such circumvention tourism for cutting-edge medicine. I use the recently reported case of travel to Mexico for Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy as a springboard for examining the legal and ethical issues raised by the practice and to discuss restrictive regulation in place in the United States.

Keywords: medical tourism, reproductive technologies, mitochondrial replacement, circumvention

JEL Classification: I100, I1, I10, I11, I14, I18, I31, K20, K32, K36, F1, F00, F6