Reproductive tourism: A poetic inquiry

This paper employs poetic inquiry as a form of interpretive and aesthetic inquiry into the meaning and experience of reproductive tourism. The context is an ethnographic study of the fertility services industry in Cancun. Drawing upon interviews with the owner of a medical tourism company and a doctor who runs a large fertility clinic, we adopt varied strategies of poetic inquiry as a means of listening deeply to the stories of participants. In particular, we ask who gets to tell the story, how is the story told and why does it matter? This is profoundly personal and political work. As the poems and our reflections on them reveal, we remain uncomfortable deriving any straightforward scholarly conclusions but rather see ourselves as engaged in work that is intended to be both critical and creative.