Italy: Giorgia Meloni Strongly Condemns Surrogacy

The Demographic Question

It should be remembered beforehand that Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, estimated at 1.25 children per woman (in 2021), being preceded at the bottom of the ranking only by Spain with 1.19 children per woman, and by Malta which dropped to 1.13 children per woman.

The President of the Council began by affirming that this issue “constitutes an absolute priority” for her government. Adding that she thinks “it is time that we have a government courageous enough to devote itself to demography and the birth rate as priority challenges,” and that it is urgent matter to reverse the dramatic downward trend in the birth rate.

She then went on to attack delusional ideologies: “For decades, the dominant culture said that in fact, bringing a child into the world would be a choice probably incompatible with many others; … a choice was perhaps better not to make. … Recently it has even been said that giving birth to a child is crazy and is committing an act against the environment.”

This is why, explains Mrs. Meloni, her government wanted to put the demographic question “at the heart of our activity.” And this is manifested by the fact that “for the first time in the history of Italy, a ministry bears the name of birth rate.”

The Slavery of Surrogacy

The President of the Council took a swipe at the woke and feminist spirit: “the very fact of talking about father and mother in this society can sometimes seem like an act of revolution,” she notes. She continues: “When we do that, we tend to seem quite retro, in an era where we go so far as to deny that it takes a man and a woman to bring a child into the world.”

And, she adds, “when we come up against the obvious, we think we can resolve the question perhaps by feeding a transnational market which exploits the bodies of poor women, which makes children a commodity, while portraying this as an act of love or a gesture of freedom,” thus denouncing surrogacy.

But “unreasonable things do not become reasonable by repetition, and no one can convince me that it is an act of freedom to rent out a woman’s womb; no one can convince me that it is an act of love to consider children as an over-the-counter product of a supermarket.”

Mrs. Meloni then drives the point home: “It is not an act of love to transform the very legitimate desire to have a child into a right guaranteed by all possible means. This is why I continue to consider the uterus-for-rent as an inhuman practice, and I support the proposed law aimed at making it a universal crime, that is to say punishable in Italy even if committed outside the country.”

She concludes by specifying that “a proposal on this subject is currently being discussed within our Parliament and I hope that it can be approved as quickly as possible.” This is in line with the call from Casablanca which called for the universal abolition of surrogacy in March 2023.

Mrs. Meloni finally recalls that no “European nation has reached replacement rate” and that “from the point of view of the Italian government, one of the great revolutions that the Europe of tomorrow must guarantee is precisely that which consists of finally rising to the demographic challenge with strength, determination, and concrete instruments.”