“Imagine that from one day to the next they tell you that your daughter is no longer your daughter”, is how Elisa and Camilla, a couple of Italian mothers living in Barcelona, ??summarize the “nightmare” they are experiencing. The lives of these women have fallen apart after the Padua Prosecutor’s Office —their hometown— is going to take them to court to erase the name of the non-pregnant mother from the birth certificate and her last name from the name of the minor, aged three years.
The measure comes after the rise to power of the far-right Giorgia Meloni, who has been against a minor being able to have two mothers or two fathers. The Government of Italy issued an instruction last January prohibiting the parentage of children of homosexual couples, as well as the registration of the non-pregnant parent in same-sex couples.
This order represents a new setback and limitation of rights for LGTBI families with children, and retroactively affects all children born after 2017. “They are children who already have a constructed identity and it will have a very emotional impact.” strong,” says Camilla, a mother who would lose all her daughter’s legal rights.
Homosexual couples cannot adopt in Italy and many lesbian women, as is your case, resort to assisted reproduction in other countries such as Spain. Shortly after having her daughter, they decided to come live here, considering Spanish society to be more “open” and “progressive” than Italian society.
A few years ago Italian heterosexual couples with problems having children had to go abroad to undergo assisted reproduction, since the donation of sperm and eggs was also prohibited. Starting in 2004, everything changed and the law opened the possibility of performing this technique, but only to those couples made up of a traditional family – woman and man -, married and with proven infertility problems.
Today, these types of families have no problem registering their children, unlike homoparental families, whose marriage has never been legalized and have only been able to unite as de facto couples since 2016. “They want to punish us for being homosexuals, but the ones who are going to lose the most are our children,” Camilla expresses indignantly.
There is a legal loophole to carry out these registrations, since the law does not explicitly prohibit registering the children of homoparental families. Law 40 of 2004 prohibits artificial insemination in couples of two women or women who want to be single mothers, which is why many go to foreign countries to resort to these techniques.
Based on this legislative vacuum, some progressive mayors of cities such as Padua, Milan or Rome have registered all these years the children of homosexual couples, conceived by any method, under the welfare of the minor.
The situation changed when the Ministry of the Interior sent circulars to all councils in March to stop the registration of children of same-sex couples. “Some mayors obeyed, but many others continued to register minors in an act of civil disobedience in order not to leave these children without the same rights as the rest,” they say.
After this decision by Meloni, the last step has been taken by the Padua Prosecutor’s Office, which has summoned at least 33 families of lesbian couples to court to cancel the surname of the non-pregnant mothers of all minors born since 2017 in the records. forward. The court has already set the first hearing to be held on November 14.
Since the news was released, both Elisa and Camilla have been extremely concerned about the consequences that this order will have not only on them, but especially on their little girl. “If I am removed from her registry, I will not be able, in the best of cases, to go pick her up from school or take her to the doctor. But, not only that, if something happened to Elisa, our daughter would be an orphan.” At the same time, she would also not have the right to receive the inheritance from her non-biological mother.
The legal possibilities they have, beyond exhausting the three judicial instances, is for Camilla to adopt their daughter. The couple has already contacted two lawyers, both in Spain and Italy, to explore all legal avenues.
Angelo Schillaci, professor of comparative public law at the Sapienza University of Rome and member of the legal team of ‘Famiglie Arcobaleno’ (Rainbow Families), has recommended that they exhaust judicial avenues and, in the event that they end up deleting Camilla from the registry, initiate adoption in “particular cases” in Italy. He emphasizes, however, that it is a procedure with “very high” costs, not only in terms of time and money, but also on a symbolic and emotional level. “It would be surreal if strangers came to our house to evaluate a family that already exists, added to the fact that perhaps we would have to move back to Italy,” says Camilla.
At the same time, the lawyer Joaquim Juncosa, from Jurif Advocats and the Association of Lesbian and Gay Families (FLG), who advises them in Barcelona, ??recommends that they sign a document before a notary to prove that they are both mothers of the minor in case any of them something will happen to them. “My advice is to take advantage of all the legal resources that the country gives you to also have coverage against other states.” For this reason, Juncosa has also recommended that they get married here and thus include his daughter in the Spanish family book.
While Elisa and Camilla wait expectantly how the first challenges of the Prosecutor’s Office to those families of same-sex mothers will be resolved. Although they feel very supported by a large part of civil society, they need “a stronger response from the Italian left.” And they warn, alluding to the presence of the extreme right in Spain: “We do not believe our conquered rights because, at any moment, everything can change.”
