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I. Glenn Cohen, Medical Outlaws or Medical Refugees? An Examination of Circumvention Tourism, in Risks and Challenges in Medical Tourism: Understanding the Global Market for Health Services Controversies in the Exploding Industry of Global Medicine 207 (Jill Hodges, Leigh Turner & Ann Marie Kimball eds., 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.