According to clinics, the number of reproductive tourists visiting California each year is already in the thousands, and growing fast.

The Pacific Fertility Centre in Los Angeles, which got a 62-year-old French woman pregnant in 2001 using donor eggs, says that it can barely keep up with demand from patients from Britain, France, Spain and Australia.

That is because in many countries, including Britain, it is illegal for infertile women to buy donor eggs, meaning it can take years to get treatment.

In the United States, payment for eggs is ostensibly to cover expenses, but can be lucrative at up to $8,000 (£4,400). That means there is no shortage of donors, and some young British women have sold their eggs in California to help to pay university tuition fees. California also attracts reproductive tourists from countries such as Costa Rica, where any kind of IVF treatment is illegal.

Unlike some European countries, including Britain, California has no limit on the number of fertilised embryos that can be implanted in a woman. This increases the chances of success, but also of dangerous multiple births. A handful of Californian clinics will also allow future parents to choose the sex of their offspring.

Although reproductive tourism is good for California’s economy, some academics are predicting a future immigration headache for the US, when the offspring of children conceived by foreigners with the eggs of American donors claim US citizenship.

“We’re like the Disneyland of the fertility world, or the Egg-o-land, if you will,” Fay Johnson, a programme co-ordinator for the Centre for Surrogate Parenting in Encino, told the San Francisco Chronicle, amid growing concern over reproductive tourism this week.

California has nearly 50 fertility clinics, and “VIP” agencies that offer sperm and eggs from donors with Ivy League degrees. Meanwhile, an online database operated by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention even allows patients to compare the success rates of competing US clinics.

The Center for Surrogate Parenting specialises in finding healthy women who are willing to carry fertilised embryos for others and give birth to their babies. Gay couples who want children often use this kind of service, as well as women who cannot carry children for medical reasons. The cost can be high, more than $100,000 in some cases.

In the UK, surrogate mothers cannot be paid anything other than reasonable expenses. In California, however, surrogates can be compensated for “pain, suffering, inconvenience, lost wages, travel expenses, miscellaneous living expenses and for the pre-birth support of the child”, according to the Academy of California Adoption Lawyers.

Under British law, the surrogate mother remains the legal parent of the child until six weeks after its birth, when the “intended parents” can apply for a parental order. In California, surrogates have no rights over the children they carry. In 2001, a British woman sued her Californian surrogate after she refused to carry twins.

In California, however, some conservative religious groups object to IVF and consider America’s 400,000 or so frozen embryos to be “souls on ice”.

They consider destroying the embryos to be the same as abortion. California is also facing the problem of whether babies born using fertility treatment after the death of their fathers have a right to share inheritances. The issue is affecting the families of American soldiers who donated sperm before being killed in Iraq.

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