Italy’s parliament has made it illegal for couples to go abroad to have a baby via surrogacy – a pet project of the prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s party that activists say is meant to target same-sex partners.
Since taking office in 2022, Meloni has pursued a highly conservative social agenda, looking to promote what she sees as traditional family values, making it progressively harder for LGBTQ couples to become legal parents.
On Wednesday the upper-house senate voted into law a bill proposed by Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party by 84 votes to 58. The bill had already been approved by the lower house last year.
The legislation extends a surrogacy ban already in place in Italy since 2004 to those who go to countries such as the United States or Canada, where it is legal, imposing jail terms of up to two years and fines of up to €1m (£836,000).
“Motherhood is absolutely unique, it absolutely cannot be surrogated and it is the foundation of our civilisation,” the Brothers of Italy senator Lavinia Mennuni said during the parliamentary debate. “We want to uproot the phenomenon of surrogacy tourism.”
Earlier this year, Meloni called surrogacy an “inhuman” practice that treated children as supermarket products, echoing a position expressed by the Catholic church.
On Tuesday, demonstrators gathered near the senate voicing their outrage at the bill, saying the government was lashing out at LGBTQ people and damaging those who wanted to have children despite the fact that Italy has a sharply declining birthrate.
“If someone has a baby, they should be given a medal. Here instead you are sent to jail … if you don’t have children in the traditional way,” Franco Grillini, a longtime activist for LGBTQ rights in Italy, told Reuters at the demonstration.
Alessia Crocini, the president of Rainbow Families, said 90% of Italians who choose surrogacy were heterosexual couples but they mostly did so in secret, meaning the new ban would de facto affect only gay couples who could not hide it.
The clampdown on surrogacy comes against the backdrop of falling birthrates, with the national statistics institute ISTAT saying in March that births had dropped to a record low in 2023, after the 15th consecutive annual decline.
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