Cases of suspected “birth tourism” happening on Canadian soil are estimated to be about 2,500 a year, according to a report by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).
Published in September 2022, the report said the number of estimated deliveries by short term visitors, i.e. “residual” deliveries, shows an upward trend in recent years, “from around 800 annually in 2010 to around 2,500 in 2017.”
Numbers were drawn by cross-referencing immigration records with hospital births by foreign mothers who paid out of pocket for medical care under the category of “Other country resident self-pay.”
“[T]he advantage of this analysis is to identify and separate, when possible, the deliveries by Canadian citizens by birth, immigrants, temporary residents and short-term visitors,” wrote researchers of “An Examination of In-Hospital Deliveries Outside Quebec,” as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter….