For more than four years, the mayor of Milan, the progressive Giuseppe Sala, has allowed the names of both parents to be registered on the birth certificates of the children of homosexual couples. He so far he had recorded some 400 creatures. But he will no longer be able to do it, by order of the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, who has sent a letter through the Government delegation asking him to stop doing it based on a 2004 law on medically assisted procreation, that in this country only couples of different sex are allowed. “I cannot expose a municipal official to personal risks of a judicial nature,” Sala lamented on his podcast, Buongiorno Milano.
Last week, hundreds of people protested in the Lombardy city against what the Italian LGTBI community sees as gross discrimination against the collective, a demonstration that included the new leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Elly Schlein. The Italian Senate has also just rejected the Brussels proposal for the European Certificate of Paternity, so that all EU countries automatically recognize established and legal paternity in another Member State, including that of LGTBI families.
“I have an eight-year-old son and until recently, after managing to adopt him, I could not go abroad without a police document and my partner’s permission, I could not sign a legal consent in a hospital or, in a pandemic, I could not walk legally with him on the street because nothing recognized him as my son”, explained the president of the Rainbow Families association, Alessia Crocini, denouncing the bureaucratic obstacles that these families face.
Under the government of Matteo Renzi, Italy legalized gay civil unions in 2016, but has yet to approve gay marriage. And, since legal responsibility for a non-biological child can only be guaranteed in this country through marriage or adoption, gay couples who conceive through assisted reproduction or surrogacy abroad find themselves in limbo. legal when they return home with their children. For example, they cannot transmit citizenship to them –for gay couples who resort to surrogacy in countries like the US or Canada– or automatically designate them as their heirs.
Some progressive mayors, such as Sala or the former mayor of Turin, Chiara Appendino, decided to act in the face of this vacuum by registering these children themselves in their town halls. “We were lucky because when our children were born there was a mayor in my small town of Bolzano who agreed to transcribe the Canadian birth certificate. Otherwise, we would have had no choice but to indicate only one of us as the father, so the other would need to ask permission all the time to accompany our children to medical visits, for example, ”says Alex Bauer, who resorted to surrogacy in Canada in 2019 and 2021. Now that mayor could no longer do it, according to the Government of Meloni, because the circular specifies that only “the parent who has a biological link with the child” can be mentioned in the act of birth and the “transcription of birth certificates issued abroad” is not allowed.
The text also refers to a recent sentence of the Italian Supreme Court, which ruled that children born abroad by surrogacy “must be recognized in Italy as children of both parents by adoption in particular cases”, through the approval of a judge, and not by transcription in the Civil Registry. A process that takes years and that can involve added problems if the couple separates before it is finished.
“The law that allows the recognition of children born to same-sex couples did not exist before, but this willingness of the Ministry of the Interior to send a circular to block the municipalities is a political position taken by the Meloni Government and they should assume the responsibilities ”, Crocini denounced before the foreign press.
The case has already become a political controversy for the Executive of Giorgia Meloni, who has never hidden her rejection of “gender ideology” or that her family model is the traditional one. The person in charge of defending these ideas in the cabinet is the Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Family, Eugenia Roccella, a well-known anti-abortionist who justified in a television interview that surrogacy is a “market for children” and defended that what is appropriate is “a father and a mother”. The fire has been fueled by the statements of the Italian Brothers deputy Federico Mollicone, who, to support her, considered that “surrogacy is a more serious crime than pedophilia.”
