Procreative tourism: debating the meaning of cross-border reproductive care in the 21st century

On 20 June 2012, the media announced the death of Lesley Brown, aged 64 years, the world’s first ‘test-tube baby mother’. During her reproductive years, Lesley suffered from blocked Fallopian tubes, the exact problem that IVF was designed to bypass. She and her husband had to travel across southern England (from Bristol to Cambridge) to meet Robert Edwards and his physician partner, Patrick Steptoe, who ultimately delivered baby Louise Brown in a distant third location in order to avoid both media scrutiny and moral condemnation (i.e., accusations that they were ‘playing God’ owing to Louise’s test-tube conception). In short, from the moment of IVF discovery, reproductive travel was undertaken, some of it under conditions of secrecy. By today’s standards, Lesley Brown would be considered as a ‘procreative tourist’, for she met all of the criteria of the following definition: “The travelling by candidate service recipients from one institution, jurisdiction or country where treatment is not available to another institution, jurisdiction or country where they can obtain the kind of medically assisted reproduction they desire” [1]. If Lesley Brown could be considered as a procreative tourist, then procreative tourism (also known as reproductive tourism or fertility tourism) is as old as IVF itself – 35 years, to be exact.