Italy extends ban on surrogacy to foreign travel

Citizens of Italy are now restricted from going abroad to have a child through surrogacy.

A new law in the Republic, championed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, provides penalties of up to two years in prison and fines of up to 1 million Euros (almost $1.09 million). The bill passed by 84 votes to 58 in Italy's Senate on Wednesday, according to the BBC. The lower house had already passed it last year.

During debate, Senator Lavinia Mennuni of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said,

She added, "We want to uproot the phenomenon of surrogacy tourism."

Italians already are forbidden to seek the services of a surrogate mother within Italy itself. 

The law has been particularly opposed by homosexual advocates in Italy. The BBC noted that Meloni has described herself as a Christian mother and believes children should only be raised by a man and a woman.

“Meloni has previously spoken out against surrogacy involving LGBT couples, and anti-LGBT rhetoric was a key feature of her election campaign,” the British news agency said. “In a speech in 2022, she said ‘yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby.’”

In 2023, the prime minister's government instructed Milan’s city council to stop registering the children of same-sex parents.

The Economist reports that as same-sex marriage becomes more widespread, there is increasing focus on what some activists call “fertility equality” — the right to have a child regardless of biological ability. 

Meloni has described surrogacy as "a symbol of an abominable society that confuses desire with rights and replaces God with money," said the BBC.

Pope Francis also spoke out against surrogacy earlier this year, though not in support of any particular legislation.

“I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs,” the Pope said in his annual address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican.

Last fall, the European Parliament’s Committees included the practice of surrogacy in the list of human-trafficking offenses.

But why are there moral objections to the practice?

“Sometimes when there is in­fertility in marriage, couples make the decision to seek out the services of a surrogate in order to have a child,” says the National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC). “A surrogate is a woman who agrees to be implanted with an em­bryo produced by in vitro fertiliza­tion (IVF) and to hand over the newborn baby to the couple upon completion of the gestation and birth. In recent years, gestational surrogacy has become a multi-mil­lion dollar industry, attracting a broad clientele ranging from mar­ried couples to single women, gay couples to anyone else with the de­sire for a baby and the ability to finance the undertaking.”

But surrogacy raises “grave moral concerns” and “powerfully undermines the dignity of human procreation, particularly when it comes to the women and children involved in the process,” the NCBC says. 

One of the problems is that surrogacy introduces “fractures” into parent­hood by multiplying parental roles, the center says. 

“Surrogacy coerces children into situations where they are subjected to the unhealthy stresses of am­biguous or split origins, perhaps being conceived from one woman’s egg, gestated by another woman, raised by a third, and maybe even dissociated from their father by anonymous sperm donation,” says the NCBC. “Such practices end up being profoundly unfair and dehumanizing for the children caught in the web of the process.”

Another ethical problem, of course, is that surrogacy requires either artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization.