Circumvention Tourism

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Recorded on November 26, 2015

Travelling for Health

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About the Lecture

Medical Outlaws or Medical Refugees?
Medical Tourism for Services Illegal in a Patient's Home Country

Medical tourism 鈥� travel by patients who are citizens and residents of one country to receive medical treatment in another country 鈥� is a growing multi-billion dollar industry involving hundreds of thousands of patients each year.

This talk focuses on individuals who use medical tourism to get access to services which are illegal in their home countries and will discuss the legal and ethical issues raised by two kinds of medical tourism:

Travel for medical services which are legal in the patient鈥檚 destination country but illegal in the patient鈥檚 home country. This form of 鈥榗ircumvention tourism鈥� may include abortion, female genital cutting (FGC), assisted suicide, and reproductive technology usage.
Travel for medical services which are illegal in both the patient鈥檚 home and destination country, but where an illegal service is more easily accessed abroad than at home. The best example is travel to purchase a kidney from one of the black markets in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Phillipines, and elsewhere.

About the Speaker

Glenn Cohen
Professor of Law
Co-Director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics, Harvard University

Professor Glenn Cohen is one of the world鈥檚 leading experts in bioethics and health law. He speaks at international legal, medical and industry conferences frequently and his work has appeared on ABC, CNN, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and many other media venues. He has been invited to speak on the topic of medical tourism at dozens of international conferences and is a recognized worldwide leader on this topic.

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Professor Cohen鈥檚 research projects include work on the legal and ethical dimensions of reproduction/reproductive technology, human subject research, health policy, and medical tourism. His research interests:

Medical Tourism
Law and Medicine
Health Law
Reproductive Rights
Civic Procedure
Family Law

He is the author of more than 60 articles and chapters and his award-winning work has appeared in leading medical (e.g. New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA), bioethics (e.g. American Journal of Bioethics), and public health (e.g. American Journal of Public Health) journals. He is the editor of the book The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues and is currently completing the monograph Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Cohen was selected as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow for the 2012鈥�13 year and by the Greenwall Foundation to receive a Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics. He leads the Ethics and Law initiative as part of the multi-million dollar NIH funded Harvard Catalyst/The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center program. He is also one of three editors-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press.

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