Birth Tourism.

You know how sometimes you are driving along listening to the news on the radio and you hear a story and immediately think to yourself, “This issue must be addressed in haiku form!”? Well, that happened to me today. Apparently someplace in LA authorities discovered that a guy was running a secret maternity ward out of his house. Wealthy, pregnant Asia women would fly into America to give birth so that their children would have America citizenship, and then fly home with their dual-citizenship baby.

Interestingly, this activity doesn’t break the law, so the guy that ran the operation was basically fined for not having the proper permits to run a business and because he did not get the proper permits for modifications that he made to the house. The story said that he sometime shad as many as fifty pregnant women living in this single-family house at any given time.

According to the news story this sort of thing is so common that it even has a name: birth tourism.

Immediately I was struck by the haiku-ic potential of this term. Below are my attempts to write the quintessential Birth Tourism haiku. None of these quite capture the essence of the issue, but I will keep working on it! There’s not a single ounce of quit in me.


ATTEMPT #1:
Birth tourism:
From Asia they come to birth
Americans.

ATTEMPT #2
From Asia they come
for citizenship for sons
and daughters too!

ATTEMPT #3:
Let’s all give birth in
America, our kids will
have citizenship!


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