Italian lawmakers moved to shut down the emerging international market in gestational surrogacy on Oct. 16, when Italy’s Senate passed a law prohibiting Italians from seeking surrogacy abroad.
Domestic commercial surrogacy is already illegal in Italy, as it is in nearly all European countries. (Surrogacy is legal in the United States, but it is not regulated by federal law and its status varies from state to state.) The new legislation means engaging in surrogacy in another country, even where it may be legal, will be a criminal offense for Italian citizens.
The new ban includes advertising for surrogacy or organizing surrogacy or gamete donations abroad. The punishment for violation of the new law is three months to two years in prison and a fine ranging from 600,000 to one million euros. Italian lawmakers condemned surrogacy as a “universal crime.” Prior to the new prohibition, an estimated 250 Italian couples annually sought surrogates abroad to “host” their pregnancies.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing governing party, Brothers of Italy, proposed the law, which had been among Ms. Meloni’s promises during the 2022 election campaign that brought her party to power. The Senate debate over the bill lasted seven hours but passed with wide support—84 in favor to 58 against.
On social media, Ms. Meloni praised the law as a “rule of common sense, against the exploitation of the female body and children.” She said: “Human life is priceless and is not a commodity.”
The law has also been praised by feminists and medical ethicists around the world.
“Today is a great day of celebration for those of us who have worked tirelessly to stop the exploitation of women and the sale of children through contract surrogate pregnancies,” Jennifer Lahl, founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, said in a statement on Oct. 16. The U.S.-based think tank is best known for its documentaries on the ethical perils and physical dangers of surrogacy and gamete donation.
Ms. Lahl said that she has worked closely for years with Italian pro-family and feminist groups to campaign against surrogacy and had the opportunity last summer to meet briefly with Eugenia Roccella, Italy’s Minister of the Family, Birth Rate and Equal Opportunities, when speaking at two conferences in Italy. RadFem Italia and an international coalition of feminist groups endorsed the law.
Ms. Rocella celebrated the new law’s passage in the Senate. “People are not objects,” she said in the center’s statement, and “children cannot be bought, and parts of the human body cannot be sold or rented.”
“The Italian Parliament, with the convinced support of the government, today reaffirmed that parenthood cannot become a commercial contract.”
The Center for Bioethics and Culture is seeking an international ban on surrogacy, its executive director Kallie Fells told America. That idea is supported by Pope Francis, who called for a global surrogacy ban on Jan. 8 during his annual meeting with international diplomats to the Holy See.
The pope said then that surrogacy fundamentally violates the dignity of both the mother and the child. “The path to peace calls for respect for life, for every human life, starting with the life of the unborn child in the mother’s womb, which cannot be suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking,” he said.
“In this regard, 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,” Pope Francis said. “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”
He condemned surrogacy as a form of “false compassion.”
Surrogacy is widely considered a violation of human rights in Europe. The European Union even identified surrogacy as a form of human trafficking in a revision to a juridical directive on trafficking. But that has not stopped some Europeans from seeking loopholes that allow them to locate women abroad who are willing to act as gestational surrogates.
Ukraine, for example, has long been a surrogacy hot spot for Western Europeans. Its government allows heterosexual married couples to conclude contracts for gestational surrogacy. The French newspaper, Le Monde, recently reported that a growing surrogacy industry in Mexico serves mostly Europeans, many of them gay couples.
The United States is also an attractive destination for Europeans seeking to obtain a baby through surrogacy. In many American states it is relatively easy to enter into a commercial surrogacy contract, according to Joseph Meaney, a fellow at the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
The Spanish actress Ana Obregón, 69, made international news in 2023 when she brought her genetic granddaughter back to Spain following a surrogacy arrangement in which sperm from her son, who died in 2020 from cancer, was used to conceive a child, who was born to a woman in Florida. Ms. Obregón told Spanish media that she is genetically the child’s grandmother but legally her mother, though she did not disclose the process she used to establish her legal motherhood.
Spain, like Italy and other European countries, recognizes motherhood only through physical birth or through adoption. In many surrogacy-friendly jurisdictions, however, so-called intended parents like Ms. Obregón appear on the birth certificate without the name of the birth mother through a pre-birth parentage order. European authorities will sometimes accept these birth certificates to establish parentage and confer citizenship on the child.
In other cases, the intended parents must go through the legal adoption process before their parenthood of a child born through surrogacy is recognized. Spanish courts, though, have noted the contradiction in approving adoptions made through a contractual agreement that is considered a violation of human rights in domestic law.
Many bioethicists and feminists have hailed the new law as a concrete step in the protection of women and children, while critics have called it ideologically driven and inhumane. In a statement critical of the new prohibition, Alessia Crocini, president of Rainbow Families, an organization that supports L.G.B.T.Q. parents, said it was part of “a right-wing crusade against diverse families.”
During the debate in the Italian Senate, Ilaria Cucchi, a senator for the Green and Left Alliance, said passing the law was an “inhumane act against parents and children, which only fuels stigma and discrimination.” Filomena Gallo of the civil rights group Luca Coscioni Association, warned the law is “useless and even harmful if the aim is to protect people and prevent exploitation.”
But supporters of the law disagree, arguing that it will prevent some of the harms of international surrogacy.
“By ‘allowing’ Europeans an opportunity to exploit women in the United States, Ukraine, Mexico, or other countries, they are facilitating the existence of a dangerous loophole,” Ms. Fells said, “an adult-centered loophole that does not consider the well-being of the infant or infants in question.”
Besides the potential for the exploitation of women inherent in the practice of commercial surrogacy, additional problems include “abandonment (as seen during the Covid pandemic), stateless children, abuse, trafficking, illicit adoption and health impacts on the mother and child,” Ms. Fells said.
Yet even its supporters wonder how well the new law can be enforced and if it will significantly affect the quickly growing international surrogacy marketplace.
Enforcement requires heightened scrutiny of foreign adoptions, Mr. Meany admits. But he points out that international adoptions are already vetted “to make sure that people are not buying children abroad.” He notes also that surrogacy contracts “are part of the public record in many instances.” He argues it would not take much additional effort to discover which adoptions are resulting from surrogacy births.
He thinks the law could also make Italian clients far less attractive to U.S. surrogacy agencies. “Very few companies that do surrogacy would want to take the risk of working with [Italian intended parents] if they saw the Italian law being enforced,” Mr. Meaney said.
Ms. Fells believes any reduction in the practice of surrogacy that results from the law is a positive development.
“There is really no predicting how well, or not, this new law will be enforced,” she said. “If it slows or stops the fertility industry even a little, it will have been worth it. For far too long the fertility industry has been able to operate with little to no regulation or oversight, wreaking havoc across the globe.
“There is a reason that so many people and organizations speak out about the harms of surrogacy. There is a reason why Italy banned international surrogacy,” she said. “I hope now that the world stops to consider why.”
It is not clear if other countries will follow Italy’s lead and enact similar laws. Mr. Meany notes that E.U. countries seem to have two contradictory policies regarding surrogacy.
“There is a bit of a split mentality because the E.U. does not want to allow surrogacy in principle, but they are very friendly to the L.G.B.T.Q.+ lobby,” he said. “Surrogacy is increasingly used by homosexual couples as the way for the two men to obtain a child.”
Unlike other E.U. neighbors, among them France and Spain, Italy does not allow same-sex marriage or adoption by same-sex couples. Now it has stepped out on its own against international surrogacy.
