Italian justice has taken an important step for families formed by same-sex couples, in the spotlight since, in January of last year, the Italian Government of Giorgia Meloni ordered city councils to stop transcribing birth certificates of children with two mothers born abroad through assisted procreation, something that in Italy is only allowed for heterosexual couples.
The court of the city of Padua yesterday rejected the request of the Prosecutor’s Office to retroactively annul the birth certificates since 2017 of 37 children from families made up of two mothers, something that would eliminate the non-biological mother from the records. Some of these children were already six years old, and if the Prosecutor’s request had been accepted, one of the mothers of these children would have lost all rights over them.
“I am a father and grandfather as well as a mayor, and for me it was impossible to imagine that there were children from Series A and others from Series B. Now I hope that Parliament urgently takes note that there is a serious regulatory vacuum and legislates to protect these families. ”, celebrated the mayor who allowed it, Sergio Giordani.
Both the city councils and the LGTBI associations ask Parliament to legislate the matter based on the different judicial decisions, since in another similar case, the Court of Appeal of Milan considered birth certificates with two mothers to be illegitimate. The problem is that there is a legal vacuum since Italy approved homosexual civil unions – not marriage – in 2016 without making a clear law on the parental rights of these families.
Taking advantage of the legal limbo, some progressive mayors decided to act by registering children conceived through assisted reproduction or surrogacy abroad in their town halls. The leader of the opposition, the social democrat Elly Schlein, also called yesterday to “pass a law that recognizes the same dignity for all families.”
