A look inside the Czech Republic’s booming fertility holiday industry
By Amy Speier,
The Conversation
| 03. 17. 2016
Untitled Document
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...
Related Articles
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli, The New York Times | 09.24.2025
For some Greenlanders, sorry isn’t enough.
The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, made a special visit Wednesday to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, to apologize in person for a traumatic chapter in Greenlandic history, when Danish doctors forced birth control on...
GeneWatch UK has prepared a briefing on the genetic modification of nature for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in October 2025
The upcoming Congress claims to be “where the world comes together to set priorities and drive conservation and sustainable development action.” A major concern for those on the outside is that the Congress may advance plans to develop and encourage the use of synthetic biology in nature conservation. This could at first glance sound like...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...
By Charmayne Allison, ABC News | 09.21.2025
It has been seven years since Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui made an announcement that shocked the world's scientists.
He had made the world's first gene-edited babies.
Through rewriting DNA in twin girls' embryos, the man who would later be dubbed...