Circumvention, crisis and confusion: Australians crossing borders to Thailand for international surrogacy

The spread of ARTs throughout the world, combined with the ease of international travel and local restrictions, has produced a growing trade involving Australians travelling for international commercial surrogacy. Surrogacy may be used to enable couples who are unable to gestate a pregnancy due to medical reasons, such as the absence of a uterus in a woman, inability to carry a pregnancy, cases of recurrent failed implantation, recurrent idiopathic miscarriage or when a single male or same-sex male couple use ARTs to have children. Travelling for surrogacy services has been described as a form of ‘circumvention travel’, i.e. travel to receive medical services that are banned or restricted elsewhere or unavailable for those whose status makes them ineligible for treatments (as is the case with many treatments for infertility due to age, marital status or sexual orientation). These include certain states of the US, Ukraine, India and, until recently, Thailand. Those travelling for reproductive services sometimes self-describe as ‘reproductive exiles’, drawing attention to what they consider to be the ‘forced’ nature of their travel (Inhorn and Patrizio, 2009).