A look inside the Czech Republic’s booming fertility holiday industry

In 2008, a friend sent me a link to a Czech company called IVF Holiday. Clicking the link, I saw images of quaint European towns. These were accompanied by pictures of smiling white babies – and promises of affordable and safe rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

I soon realized I’d stumbled into a new type of tourism: fertility holidays.

As a medical anthropologist, I knew I had to pursue this topic. Here was a perfect example of patients turning to medicine’s global marketplace when high prices of health care back home block access to treatments.

I subsequently conducted three years of fieldwork in the Czech Republic and North America to trace the fertility journeys of 29 American reproductive tourists. Their stories are in my forthcoming book Fertility Holidays: IVF Tourism and the Reproduction of Whiteness.

A souvenir of a different sort

IVF is an assisted reproductive technology that increases the chances of conception for women or couples suffering from infertility. It monitors and stimulates a woman’s ovulation, retrieves a woman’s eggs and fertilizes the eggs with...