ABSTRACT
Besides the conspicuous growth in family travel for emotional reward (Kluin and Lehto, 2012) and educational self-discovery (Santos and Yan, 2010), the geographies of tourism are equally shaped by the routinized but largely concealed patterns of global travel by prospective parents seeking to fulfill their intimate desires for family building. The avenues for obtaining reproductive assistance continue to multiply in ways that imply a corresponding increase in process accessibility. Yet, even the most uncomplicated cases of assisted family building often require parents to obtain various advanced medical procedures, to reply upon rapid communication systems and to traverse long distances to and from service provider destinations. Surprisingly little consensus exists within cultures on the standards needed to regulate parental travel to receive these vital, socially constitutive processes.
