Women Flock to Mexico for ‘Fertility Tourism’

Women Flock to Mexico for ‘Fertility Tourism’

TIJUANA, Mexico – More American women are flocking to Mexico for cheaper fertility treatments, reports Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión. Claudia Alferez, a mother of three boys from Ontario, Calif., went to a Tijuana fertility treatment clinic in the hopes of having a daughter. She underwent assisted fertilization with sex selection, a medical procedure that costs more than $15,000 in California but cost her only $5,000 in Tijuana. With a combined income of $45,000, Claudia and her husband Enrique joined the growing number of people doctors call “fertility tourists.” Only 14 private medical insurers in the United States provide basic coverage for fertility treatments while well-equipped clinics abound in cities like Tijuana, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Their procedures, from artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization with sex selection and “pre-implant diagnostics,” or tests for various genetic characteristics before fertilization, cost roughly half of what they do in the United States. The first Tijuana assisted reproduction clinic opened in 1999. Four clinics operate there today. Dr. Fabian Walter Arballo, the director of the Angels Hospital of Fertility and Assisted Reproduction in Tijuana, says about 70 percent of his patients come from the United States.