Italy: Parliament Votes for a Total Ban on Surrogacy

The law will prevent children from being obtained abroad through surrogacy. It punishes cross-border surrogacy, with fines of up to €1 million and prison sentences of up to two years for those who continue to use the system to have children despite the ban.

Thus, surrogacy is criminalized, regardless of the country where the “parents” would go to obtain this “service.”

The bill, the jewel of Mrs. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, was adopted in the Chamber of Deputies by 166 votes to 109. Four members abstained. The bill must now be approved by the Senate, the upper house, to become final. The government also has a majority there.

Eugenia Roccella, Minister of the Family, attended a demonstration in support of the bill in Parliament. “This is an important day,” she said, “because it puts Italy at the forefront of defending women and children internationally. We hope that this vote will open a global debate on this practice in order to achieve its abolition.”

The Italian LGBT movement reacted with indignation. According to a spokesman for Arcigay, Italy’s largest LGBT advocacy organization, this “absurd” law poses a “threat to thousands of families.”

What is interesting is that many feminists, who usually support the LGBT movement, absolutely refuse surrogacy, seeing it – rightly – as a kind of slavery of women, and therefore strongly oppose homosexuals on this point. It is because of this opposition that the law allowing surrogacy has not yet been proposed in France.

Finally, it must be remembered that the country that has been the main provider of “wombs for rent”  was Ukraine, until the war put a near-term end to it. It is indeed one of the few countries in the world that allows commercial surrogacy for foreigners. A dozen agencies fostered the birth of 2,500 to 3,000 children per year for clients residing in the United States, China, and the European Union.