a procedureIn vitro fertilisation

Drugs stimulate the ovaries to ripen several eggs at once; the eggs are collected through the vaginal wall under sedation or general anaesthetic in about half an hour; the eggs are mixed with sperm in a laboratory; and two to five days later an embryo is placed in the womb. The HFEA puts a cycle at four to six weeks, or about three weeks where the first hormone-suppression stage is skipped. The stimulation drugs are billed separately by most clinics that publish a price, and they can run to a third of the bill.

IVF crosses borders for a reason knee surgery does not. A knee is cheaper somewhere else; an egg is legal somewhere else. The ESHRE taskforce that surveyed 46 clinics in six destination countries — Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Spain — collected 1,230 patient forms in a single month and estimated 11,000 to 14,000 patients and 24,000 to 30,000 cycles a year crossing borders within Europe alone, and the reasons patients gave were led by legal barriers: a treatment banned at home, or a bar on age, sexual orientation or civil status.

The academy has fought over what to call this. Inhorn and Patrizio argued in 2009 that reproductive "tourism" implies leisure travel and proposed reproductive "exile" for patients who are forced to travel. Cohen's term for the wider class, in the Cornell Law Review in 2012, is circumvention tourism: travel to do lawfully abroad what is criminal at home.

Türkiye took the argument to its end point. Its 2010 regulation on assisted reproduction treatment practices and centres did not only ban donor eggs, donor sperm and surrogacy inside the country; it reached the citizen who went abroad for them, and the people who referred or arranged. Inference — a prohibition that follows the passport changes the destination rather than the demand, and the clinics that serve Turkish patients sit a short flight away in northern Cyprus.

Trade practice — the price pages are unusually good in this field precisely because the patients are shopping across jurisdictions. A clinic that expects a patient from three countries away publishes a number. What it does not publish is the drug bill.

Three legal facts move the price and the destination more than any clinical one. First, whether donor gametes may be used at all: Türkiye's 2010 regulation bans them, which is why Turkish patients appear in Cypriot and other foreign clinics rather than Turkish ones. Second, whether the donor stays anonymous: the UK ended anonymity for donations made after 1 April 2005, and a donor-conceived person may have the donor's name, date of birth and last known address at 18, while several European destinations run anonymous programmes — which is the single commonest reason a patient names for crossing a border for eggs. Third, who may be treated at all: age caps, marital status and sexual orientation appear in national statutes rather than in clinic protocols, and a clinic in the next country may have none of them. The rule records carry the country-by-country map with its instruments and dates.

On the bill: a published cycle price is normally the theatre, the laboratory and one transfer. Stimulation drugs are normally not in it — the Reprofit price list valid from 1 January 2026 names no medication in any inclusion line, and Newlife IVF in Thessaloniki puts medications in the exclusion list in terms. Preliminary tests, freezing, storage and any second transfer are separately priced almost everywhere. A cycle that ends before egg collection is charged at a reduced rate rather than refunded: Reprofit lists 130 EUR for a treatment cancelled before egg collection and 565 EUR for a cycle that produced no usable eggs.

As of September 2026 the published per-cycle prices read off clinic pages for this record run from 1,100 EUR for a native-cycle IVF with no stimulation in Brno to 5,290 EUR in Barcelona and 4,999 US dollars as a base price in New York state, with the drug bill outside all of them. The UK regulator publishes no price at all and says clinics set their own, noting that the same treatment can be two or three times more expensive depending on the clinic.

This page describes a treatment and reports what registers and price lists say about it. It is not medical advice and it is not legal advice.