Italy passes anti-surrogacy law that effectively bars gay couples from becoming parents
Source: Washington Post
ROME Italy on Wednesday passed the Wests most restrictive law against international surrogacy, threatening would-be parents who use birth mothers abroad with jail time and severe fines in a move that critics say will chiefly target same-sex couples.
Domestic surrogacy was already banned in Italy, as it is in some other countries, but the amended Italian law goes further, classifying surrogacy as a rare universal crime that transcends borders, like terrorism or genocide.
The measure marks the strongest salvo yet in far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Melonis bid to put a conservative stamp on Italian society, and it elevates surrogacy as a hot-button issue in the Wests raging culture wars.
The law, passed last year by the lower house and effectively ensured by the Senate vote Wednesday, also criminalizes work by Italian citizens employed as doctors, nurses and technicians in foreign fertility clinics that facilitate surrogacies.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/16/italy-surrogacy-ban-gay-parents/
Joinfortmill
(16,385 posts)wolfie001
(3,627 posts)This will have far-reaching consequences and in this era of filming everything, it will not be pretty. They won the battle but lost the war long ago. Reaching back to 1922 is not going to help them.
PortTack
(34,643 posts)slightlv
(4,325 posts)someone please explain it to me. Is it the fact that money may (and many times IS) involved? What makes it on the level of terrorism and genocide? The fact you may be introducing a different race or racial mix into the country of pure white? (I don't think Italy is pure white, but I may be wrong there, I admit).
Just like IVF, Family Planning, and just "rut and see", families come in all types. What makes this ONE type of family so inherently evil?
muriel_volestrangler
(102,476 posts)The neofascist government may be OK with heterosexual couples using a surrogate mother (I don't know; the more fundamentalist may be against that too, on the grounds it's "not natural" , but if this can hurt same-sex couples, they're OK with some others being hurt too, if they're not too common.
slightlv
(4,325 posts)Teacher of the Year
(153 posts)I'll be kind of crass and put it real simple: a straight drug addict guy can just go knock up a drunk woman, never talk to her again and she can raise the kid at her crash pad in poverty and this is acceptable parenting.
A gay person cannot make detailed plans and commitments to bring a child into the world, with another consulting adult, often at great thought, expense and with much decision making and care--because that would be unfair to the child.
Pardon me DU, I think I have to go make some angry tweets.