OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:41 PM – Thursday, October 17, 2024
A bill that forbids traveling overseas to have a child through surrogacy was approved by the Italian parliament on Wednesday.
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Supporters maintain that the law upholds the sanctity of motherhood and traditional family values, while critics claim that it is a discreet tactic used by the country’s conservative administration to unfairly target gay couples.
According to several Italian outlets, the new law goes beyond Italy’s existing ban on surrogacy by threatening jail time and fines to anyone who travels overseas to have a child through surrogacy.
Reuters claimed that the new law is a “pet project” of Giorgia Meloni, who was elected as Italy’s first female prime minister in 2022. She has stated that she intends to strengthen traditional family values while in office in addition to facilitating much harsher punishments for convicted pedophiles and rapists.
Post Translation: “With today’s final approval in the Senate, the bill that makes surrogate motherhood a universal crime is finally law. A common sense rule against the commodification of the female body and children. Human life has no price and is not a commodity,” PM Giorgia Meloni posted on X (Twitter).
Italy’s Senate approved the bill in a vote of 84-58.
Additionally, Alessia Crocini, the director of an LGBTQ group called Rainbow Families, chimed in and remarked on the news of the bill.
“The people who can’t hide this are gay couples… this is about [targeting] gay fathers,” Crocini told the Washington Post.
Italy already banned domestic surrogacy in 2004, and several other European nations as well as some U.S. states have done the same. One centrist politician at the time compared surrogacy to “the sale of children,” stating that “surrogate maternity is the most extreme form of commercialization of the body.”
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party shares the Catholic Church’s anti-surrogacy stance. Pope Francis called for a worldwide ban on surrogacy earlier this year, calling it “deplorable” and that it “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child.”
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