Italy passes anti-surrogacy law that effectively bars gay couples from becoming parents
The West’s most restrictive law against international surrogacy threatens would-be parents who use birth mothers abroad with jail time and severe fines.

By Anthony Faiola and Stefano Pitrelli
October 16, 2024 at 12:25 p.m. EDT

ROME — Italy on Wednesday passed the West’s 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 and U.S. states, 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 Meloni’s bid to put a conservative stamp on Italian society, and it elevates surrogacy as a hot-button issue in the West’s raging culture wars.

The law, passed last year by the lower house and effectively ensured by the Senate vote on Wednesday, also criminalizes work by Italian citizens employed as doctors, nurses and technicians in foreign fertility clinics that facilitate surrogacies.

That and other aspects of the amended law may be hard to enforce. Even backers of the legislation concede that heterosexual couples may face few questions when returning to Italy with an infant, or when registering their child’s birth certificate with local municipalities. Who is to say that the woman in that couple didn’t deliver the baby while abroad? By contrast, an infant in the arms of same-sex parents — particularly two men — would amount to an obvious red flag.

{snip}

By Anthony Faiola
Anthony Faiola is Rome Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. Since joining the paper in 1994, he has served as bureau chief in Miami, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and New York and additionally worked as roving correspondent at large. follow on X @Anthony_Faiola

By Stefano Pitrelli
Stefano Pitrelli is a reporter in the Rome bureau for The Washington Post.follow on X @StefanoPitrelli