Cross-Border Reproductive Travel, Neocolonialism, and Canadian Policy

Abstract

The 2004 Canadian Assisted Human Reproduction Act bans commercial contract pregnancy and egg provision, but Canadians undertake cross-border reproductive travel to access these services. Feminist bioethicists have argued that the ethical justification for enforcing the ban domestically, namely exploitation, grounds its extraterritorial enforcement. I raise an additional problem when Global Southern or low-income countries are destinations for travel: neocolonialism. Further, I argue that a ban on commercialized reproduction is problematic. Although well-suited to address neocolonial forces of exploitation and commodification, a ban reinforces neocolonialism by paying insufficient attention to the agency of gestational laborers and egg providers.

Reproductive outsourcing: an empirical ethics account of cross-border reproductive care in Canada

“…The spirit of the AHRA was to protect vulnerable people from commercial exploitation,35 but it encourages foreign markets revolving around egg donors or gestational surrogates that are potentially more vulnerable than their equivalent in high-income countries with public health coverage. The Act and its interdiction of remunerating services offered by third parties have failed to protect them from potential exploitation and useless medical risks 36. It had the contradictory effect of sustaining a global reproductive market.…”

The north-south policy divide in transnational healthcare: a comparative review of policy research on medical tourism in source and destination countries

“…Yet, empirical research on their systemic drivers and effects is scarce. The objectives of most research are exploratory or descriptive, and focused on ethical and medico-legal issues arising from outbound medical tourism [30][31][32][33][34], contradictions between intent and policy [35,36], and operational challenges [37][38][39]. This points to the relative nascency of policy research on Canadian medical tourism.…”

Securitizing the Canadian Family Through Transnational Reproductive Governmentality and Citizenship

“…To do so, the document states that parents should not be discriminated against "...on the basis of their sexual orientation or marital status" (Government of Canada 2004:2).New technologies, same ideologiesThe qualities described in the above paragraphs have led Canadian-based surrogacy to garner a positive reputation on the global stage. Both nationally and internationally, Canadian surrogacy is well known for respecting diversity in family structure and upholding altruism as a uniquely Canadian value(Deomampo 2015;Fulfer 2017). Given the state's original unwillingness to commodify key components of the surrogacy process and the explicit reference to the prevention of discrimination against the families drawn to surrogacy, this progressive stance seems reasonable.…”

“…In Canadian surrogacy, this tendency manifests as the commercialization of some processes related to surrogacy. Aligning with Foucauldian theory, state movement towards neoliberalism is not complete, but retains neo-conservative and neo-eugenic qualities of the original version of the Act; enforcing altruism as a uniquely Canadian quality exemplifies such preservation(Deomampo 2015;Fulfer 2017;Snellart et al 2008). As Wendy Brown advances, this combination of neo-conservativism and neoliberalism is indicative of Westernized nations in the current political economy, with "...neoconservativism...born in part as a response to capitalism's erosion of meaning and morality..." (2006:699), attempting to stabilize society by rooting it in a set of core traditional values and institutions to uphold such principles.One of the problems with this blend of neoconservative, neo-eugenic, and neoliberal oriented governance is that the government's push to neoliberalize components of birthing for another has unclear limits on the level of commodification.…”