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The Role of Biomedical Technology
Published in Kant Patel, Mark Rushefsky, Healthcare Politics and Policy in America, 2019
Surrogacy has become a global billion-dollar industry (Greenfield 2015). A growing number of infertile heterosexual couples, same-sex couples, and single men and women who desire to have children are traveling abroad to use donor gametes or a surrogate. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of “fertility tourists” from affluent countries crossing national boundaries and traveling to low-income countries for the purpose of achieving conception and childbirth, often referred to as “biocrossing.” India has become the surrogacy outsourcing capital of the world in the globalized assisted reproduction industry. However, India is not alone. Clinics in Southern European countries and regions such as Spain and Cyprus offer “IVF holidays” to wealthy Northern Europeans seeking reproductive services. Singapore and Thailand are also popular destinations for such “fertility tourists.” A variety of terms are used to describe the phenomena, such as “cross-border reproductive care,” “Travel ART/Travel IVF,” “reproductive tourism,” “fertility tourism,” and “procreative tourism” (Gupta 2012).
Domestic Medical Tourism: A Neglected Dimension of Medical Tourism Research 1
Published in Frederick J. DeMicco, Shirley Weis, Medical Tourism and Wellness, 2017
Simon Hudson, Xiang (Robert) Li
Related to issues of quality and accreditation are the ethical dimensions of medical tourism. While arguably ethical issues arise for all surgical treatments—informed consent, liability, and ensuring remedies for surgical malpractice—forms of medical tourism (fertility tourism, transplant tourism, stem cell tourism, and even euthanasia tourism) raise ever more fundamental questions (Lunt and Carrera, 2010). In addition, the impact of medical tourism on the overseas country, particularly when treatments are carried out in Third World countries raises a range of ethical and moral dilemmas. The expectation that economic and health benefits trickle down to local populations remains contentious (Bose, 2005). In Thailand, for example, the presence of well-endowed hospitals that cater to medical tourists has prompted an internal brain drain from the public to the private sector, thereby decreasing equity in access to health care for the local population (Ramirez de Arellano, 2007).
Anticipatory Governance of Noninvasive Prenatal Testing for “Non-Medical” Traits: Lessons from Regulation of Medically Assisted Reproduction
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2023
Hui Zhang, Jing Wang, Yan Qin, Chuanfeng Zhang, Bingwei Wang, Yuming Wang
Cross-border travel to access reproductive services is a significant topic that has constantly raised significant socio-ethical and legal controversies. Because of the differences in ART regulations across nations, individuals from countries with more restrictive regulations could travel to countries with more permissive ones to seek services unavailable in their home country (Ginoza and Isasi 2020), and surrogacy could be cited as an example. Although surrogacy is banned in many countries, some allow altruistic surrogacy, whereas in others such as Ukraine, even commercial surrogacy has become a well-fledged form of fertility tourism. Many critics have denounced commercial surrogacy as a “global baby business,” which results in the exploitation of women and commodification of human life. Although to minimize the risks posed by commercial surrogacy, improvements in national laws may not be sufficient, and the main effort needs to be made to pursue an international consensus (Piersanti et al. 2021). However, due to the different social, cultural, and legal contexts across countries, there are inevitable difficulties in reaching global agreements in many areas of medically assisted reproduction. Therefore, as the attitudes toward TOP and the importance of informed and free choice regarding NIPT vary greatly among countries (Ravitsky et al. 2021), we believe that the anticipatory governance of NIPT for non-medical traits is worthy of global conversation.
What Exactly “History Has Taught us”? Enhancing the Socio-Political Perspective in Neuroethics
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2022
Marcelo de Araujo, Murilo Vilaça
Varied perceptions of human enhancement technologies across the international landscape have another important implication for the use of a Rawlsian framework in neuroethics. Stringent regulation of new technologies in one country will not preclude its citizens from accessing human enhancement capabilities and services in countries with less stringent regulations. “Fertility tourism”, for instance, has become an important issue in bioethics, which suggests that, in time, “human enhancement tourism” might also emerge as a widespread practice. This entails questions of social justice at both domestic and international level, as human enhancement technologies might aggravate social inequality within and among countries. Whether or not the application of the Rawlsian framework to the international arena, as advanced by Rawls himself in his 1999 book The Law of People, would enable Dubljević and colleagues to address this issue successfully is unclear.
Medical tourism development: A systematic review of economic aspects
Published in International Journal of Healthcare Management, 2021
Marziye Hadian, Alireza Jabbari, Seyed Hossein Mousavi, Hojjat Sheikhbardsiri
Between 7and 10 per cent of tourism is attributed to the field of infertility tourism service, but at the maximum about 150 infertility tourism services were conducted in Iran. In accordance with 1404 Iranian perspective document, we should have 20 millions infertility tourists in the country in a year, but country tourism hardly arrives at one-fifth of this number. Any foreign tourists, equivalent to 25 barrels of crude oil (thousand dollars) of revenue for the 20-year perspective plan, if realized, this would be the equivalent of 500 million barrels of oil revenues [14]. Indulding in infertility tourism is a clear example of dynamically achieving the goals of a resilient economy and in this way, the use of central infertility capacities, proficient and value of human forces in the field of medical and introduction of infertility tourism attraction has the main rule. Therefore, due to the importance of this issue, this study aimed to determine the challenges and strengths of the medical tourism development in Iran.