Maternity Tourism: a growing trend

Residents of a quiet block in San Gabriel, California, noticed something odd about a row of townhouses on South Palm Avenue: a revolving door of pregnant women. "It felt like something wasn't right in there," neighbor Taylor Alderson told the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the luxury homes had been converted into a makeshift maternity ward for so-called "birthing tourists."

According to local law enforcement who shut the unlicensed business down earlier this month, wealthy pregnant women would fly in from China, paying up to $35,000, to spend month or more in the boarding house, in order to have their babies born as U.S. citizens.

It's a practice that's totally legal and on the rise in California. Some dossiers provide three-month packages where pregnant women can spend the last two months of their third trimester and first month as a mom in a boarding home. Some promise cable TV, internet, meals and even sight-seeing trips. Other accommodations are far more sparse. It's what the L.A.Times describes as a "twist on similar centers in China, in which women recuperate for a month after delivery, following a strict diet and traditional rules meant to ensure their future health."

But the conditions the women were living in at the San Gabriel center, may not have been putting their health first. At the time the business was shut down, there were 10 newborns and between 7 and 12 women crammed in a four bedroom home. "The people were sitting and eating at a table. All the babies were in bassinets with a nurse attending to them," said Jennifer Davis, San Gabriel's director of community development. "They had moved walls around without proper permits. They did interior work that can sometimes create unsafe environments afterwards."

One expectant mother confided to a neighbor how unpleasant the living situations were, in particular the regimented meal plan. All the babies in the ward, however, weredelivered in hospitalsand deemed healthy.

Similar setups housing South Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese tourists have been found in other parts of Southern California."The mainland (China) moms believe the U.S. has better educationalresources,"Robert Zhou told theWashington Post last year. "They believe that with U.S. citizenship, their children can have a more fair competitive environment."Zhou runs a birthing travel agency in Shanghai, and claims to have helped over 500 Chinese families, including leaders in business and government, obtain US citizenship for their newborn.

Free schooling and more university options may be why birthing tourists flock to the U.S., but free healthcare has had the UK and Canada on the tourism map for a few years now. "Obstetricians have seen a recent surge in the numbers," Dr. Gaetan Barrette, president of the Quebec Federation of Medical Specialists told the National Post in 2009. "Those women will come for one delivery, then come back two times, three times to the same doctor for the same purpose." The Post reports that a bulk of their birth tourism attracts other French speaking visitors from France, Morocco and Syria. The paper even found a France-based website advertising Canadian birthing tourism.

But maternity tourism isn't an illegal practice in Canada or the U.S., nor was it the reason the Southern California townhouses were cleared out. The homes were shut down because of illegal construction and the fact that they were functioning as a business in a residential area.

"There is nothing in the law that makes it illegal for pregnant women to enter the United States," San Gabriel code enforcement officer Jorge Arellano told news outlets.

But some lawmakers are hoping to change that."People can come here on a Visa and circumvent immigration laws ... what about those folks that wait in line?" California state Assemblyman Tim Donnelly argued to local legislature this week.

But there's no hard numbers to suggest that birthing tourism is a major fiscal problem in the U.S., big enough to merit an amendment change that would affect millions of people.

Regardless of the legislative or financial impact, the women flying oversees in their third term aren't doing it for themselves but for their children."When we look at the overall disadvantages that some countries still experience with quality of life...[these moms] should certainly be commended for looking at the future welfare of their children," said San Gabriel's mayorDavid Gutierrez,"but we need to be very careful that as a result it doesn't impact services and quality of life that we provide for U.S. residents."


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