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.

This Article derives in part from the George P. Smith Lecture given at the Maurer School Law, Indiana University on March 22, 2016.