Medical Law: Text, Cases, and Materials

Product Information

As Howells has pointed out ‘the provision of information is one of the key tools available to enhance consumer protection’. 40 According to classical contract theory, information provision serves multiple desirable goals: It would be possible to regard reproductive travel as an aberration, relied upon in extremis by people who are prevented, either by law or de facto, from accessing reproductive services at home. In response to the increasing numbers of people travelling for reproductive purposes, enabling more people to access local fertility services might therefore be a plausible and laudable regulatory objective. 61 But while we would support measures to improve access to services, not least because these might also meet the needs of those who cannot afford to travel, we would like to suggest that we should also be interested in what local fertility providers and regulators can learn from the experiences of reproductive travellers.

Jill Peay 'Mental incapacity and criminal liability: Redrawing the fault lines?' International Journal of Law and Psychiatry40 (2015) pp.25-35 the main IVF doctor that I saw here in Sydney was very against offshore surrogacy. I mentioned it to her just to get her idea and she said ‘oh that’s terrible. These are women that are terribly exploited and you’ll go over there and you’ll get a disease and you’ll be in some terrible baby factory and what not’. Anyway, she said those things and then I just shut down that dialogue with her. Is the use of IVF add-on treatments driven by patients or clinics? Findings from a UK patient survey’ Human Fertility (2023) (with Cirkovic et al.)The Ambiguities of “Social” Egg Freezing and the Challenges of Informed Consent'(2018) 14 Biosocieties 21-40

An underlying regulatory assumption is often that treatment at home is ‘better’ than the international alternatives. Implicit here is the premise that the law will best protect patients through discouraging international travel. Here, the patient experience diverges. It is clear that patients paying for treatment overseas feel as though they are more in control of their treatment, and that, in contrast to their experience of domestic fertility services, they do not have to be grateful for what they receive. Indeed, in many of our interviews patients have praised the standard of care they received overseas, considering it superior to that available at home. Opting out of local, regulated services is not necessarily always an unwelcome last resort then, but may have positive advantages for some patients. If this is the case, we should be interested in listening to what patients say is ‘better’ about treatment overseas, rather than just dismissing their accounts as wishful thinking. Like Lachlan, Lauren, another interviewee involved in a surrogacy arrangement in Australia, expressed a desire to pay her surrogate, and an anxiety about the ‘fuzzy’ definition of expenses in Australia: Using information disclosure as a consumer protection technique rests on the assumption that the average consumer has the capacity to process information and act on it, and that it is only atypical vulnerable consumers who need special protection. Yet, as Howells points out, ‘The truth is that we are all to some extent vulnerable, because of the limitations of the human mind.’ 50 Oren-Gill and Ben-Shahar explain that:Optimism bias is not universal: Sharot has pointed out that ‘people with mild depression show no bias when predicting future events, and people with severe depression tend to expect things to be worse than they turn out’. 60 This, according to Sharot, leaves approximately 80% of the population who ‘expect the future to be slightly better than it ends up being’, a tendency which she describes as ‘one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics’. 61 The seminal textbook for teaching any aspect of medical law...clearly written with a real depth of accessible analysis and a wealth of resources." - Caroline Chappell, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Chester Informed Consent and the Impotence of Tort’ in S. McLean (ed) First Do No Harm(Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006) 273-86