“Reproductive Tourism in Europe: Infertility and Human Rights” by Ruth Deech, in Global Governance (Oct. 2003), William S. Hein & Co., 1285 Main St., Buffalo, N.Y. 14209.

To the long list of conundrums caused by the rise of new biological technologies, add another: “reproductive tourism.” People who find their home country’s rules on infertility treatments inconvenient, for example, are shopping around elsewhere for what they want. Does your national government bar you from choosing the sex of your baby? Maybe it’s time for a little getaway to Rome, where the law won’t stand in your way.

More serious problems are posed by the international trade in sperm. To reduce the risk of unknowing incest by offspring, for example, France allows sperm donors to “father” only five children. But Denmark allows 25 offspring from a single donor. If they import Danish sperm, the French must therefore accept the Danish risk level. Britain’s sperm donors are anonymous, but women who conceive a child with donated Swedish sperm are told the biological father’s identity.

Such problems are especially ticklish in Europe, where national laws and the emerging European Union law are full of potential conflicts, writes Deech, principal of St. Anne’s College at Oxford University.

In Britain, for example, a young woman named Diane Blood, planning to conceive a child through artificial insemination, persuaded doctors to extract sperm from her comatose husband before he died. Under British law, the husband’s lack of consent rendered her plan illegal. But Belgian law posed no such obstacle, and Mrs. Blood sought to export the sperm there. In the tangle of court cases that followed, British laws were weighed against European statutes limiting restrictions on trade among member nations and protecting the human rights of people such as the late Mr. Blood. In the end, the case was decided against Mrs. Blood on the narrow ground that exporting sperm merely to avoid national law was impermissible.

But the bigger issues won’t go away, Deech warns, nor will the pressure driving “national standards toward the regional lowest common denominator.” International treaties setting standards in Europe and other regions could help, but “if regional arrangements are deemed unduly constraining, people can simply go farther afield.”