In Italy on Wednesday, the Italian Senate pushed forward the West’s most restrictive ban on international surrogacy, making it a crime punishable by prison time for Italians to use surrogates in another country. The move closes the door on same-sex couples’ last, best option to start a family in the country.
The far-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had already banned both surrogacy and domestic or international adoption by same-sex couples in Italy.
The legislation amending existing Italian law would classify surrogacy as a universal crime transcending borders and impose a two-year prison sentence and a million-euro fine for defying it. The law also criminalizes work by Italian doctors, nurses and technicians in foreign fertility clinics that provide surrogacy services.
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Last year, Meloni’s government barred Italian cities and towns from accepting birth certificates that list same-sex parents, denying their children access to citizenship, public schooling and healthcare. That edict is tied up in court.
The Senate’s passage of the anti-surrogacy law, 84 to 58, follows approval by the government’s lower house last year, virtually assuring its enactment.
Meloni has made “traditional values” a cornerstone of her tenure leading the Brothers of Italy party, despite being a single mother who never married. The far-right populist league was founded on the ruins of Benito Mussolini’s Republican Fascist Party in the aftermath of World War II.
“It’s like a truck hitting us in the face,” Pierre Molena, a gay man pursuing surrogacy abroad with his partner, told The New York Times.
“We are worried about our future and that of our children,” he said.
“It is nature that decides this, not us,” Sen. Susanna Campione, who voted in favor of the law, told the The Washington Post.
“This is a civilized law that safeguards the child but also the woman, since we believe that surrogacy essentially reduces a woman to a reproductive machine.”
While most U.S. states and Canada allow the practice, surrogacy has become a flashpoint in Europe. Germany and France ban domestic surrogacy, while it’s legal in the United Kingdom and Greece under certain circumstances. Pope Francis has labeled the practice “womb renting,” and called for a global ban.
About 250 couples a year in Italy pursue international surrogacy, according to legal experts. Ten percent of those couples are same-sex.
“This law is disgusting,” Salvatore Scarpa told the The Post. The gay dad and his partner had a daughter with a surrogate based in California last year and plan to have a second child with the same woman. They have an implantation planned for this month.
“They cannot stop our family. How dare they judge us,” he said.
Alessandra Maiorino, a member of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, said the new law stigmatizes children already born to gay couples as well, telling lawmakers who voted for it: “It looks like you don’t realize these people already exist.”
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