Circumvention Medical Tourism and Cutting Edge Medicine: The Case of Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy

"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 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.