Abortion Tourism: Extraterritorial Application of Criminal Laws, a Narrative Review

Abstract

Although the laws of some countries, including Iran, contain regulations regarding the entry and exit of Iranian and foreign nationals, there is no specific law regarding the purposes of tourist travel. Legal abortion tourism can be interpreted as fraud against the law. The aim of this study is to examine the extraterritorial application of criminal laws for abortion tourism. In this narrative review, the extraterritorial application of criminal laws for abortion between 1990 and 2023 was investigated using the keywords of “abortion, law, jurisprudence tourism, and criminal law”. Abortion tourism is a travel abroad with the intention of participating in an abortion that is prohibited in one’s own country but permitted in the destination country. In response to the question of whether the country of origin has allowed or obliged to extend its existing criminal prohibition extraterritorially, three perspectives are examined: 1. Considering legal punishment 2. Passing shield laws, and 3. Applying the rule of tolerance in the decisions of the actors of the criminal process.

Considering the negative functions of abortion tourism, such as violating the mother’s right to life, physical integrity and maternal deaths in inappropriate logistical conditions, supporting the right to life of the fetus, it is necessary to try to draw the attention of countries to each other’s ethical and legal considerations in order to reduce the grounds for the emergence of illegal tourism in the field of abortion.