Not a flat world: the future of cross-border reproductive care.

Cross-border reproductive care (CBRC) raises new issues for both medicine and social science, as well as analytical and methodological challenges. On the one hand, this phenomenon extends well-established practices, such as family formation, in new ways, for example through new technologies. Similarly, CBRC could be described as a form of globalization. Yet this sector also departs from established patterns of reproductivity, for example by combining reproductive services and substances transnationally. In this way, CBRC also changes the understanding of globalization, revealing that it is not necessarily producing a newly 'flat' world, but instead reproducing a traditionally stratified one. These aspects of CBRC must be kept in mind in the struggle to define best practice.