A mural has recently appeared in a square in Milan that portrays the leaders of the first two Italian parties, the Prime Minister and head of Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and the general secretary of the Italian Democratic Party (PD), Elly Schlein. Both appear naked and pregnant. One of them, Schlein, carries an LGBTI flag on her arm. The other, Meloni, the tricolor flame that characterized the Italian Social Movement, the party founded by the heirs of Mussolini, a controversial symbol that keeps Brothers of Italy in the logo.
The work aims to reflect on motherhood and the freedom of choice on the female body, especially on the issue of surrogacy, a highly controversial topic at the moment in the country. Now, Brothers of Italy, the party that leads the Government coalition, has taken the first step to penalize the use of surrogacy abroad and punish Italians who resort to the reproductive practice as a “universal crime” in countries where it is legal.
Surrogacy is already banned in Italy. A 2004 law punishes anyone who “makes, organizes or sponsors the commercialization of gametes or embryos or surrogacy” with penalties of between three months and two years in prison and fines of between 600,000 and one million euros. But now, an amendment that has been approved in the Justice Committee of the Chamber of Deputies to a bill that received the green light from the Meloni Government in February wants to extend the punishments to all Italian citizens who do this reproductive practice in other countries and then return to Italy with the child conceived through surrogacy.
The aim, says the amendment, is to “impede any practice that can be configured as commercial trafficking of children”. It is the first parliamentary procedure in anticipation of the bill reaching the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies on June 19. It will then have to be definitively approved in the Senate, which is a given given the large majority of the right-wing coalition in the Italian Parliament. “The attitude of the Government is one of absolute condemnation of any form of surrogacy, as it is a way of commercializing paternity, harmful to the dignity of women and the rights of children”, said the Minister of Family, Equality of Opportunities and Italian Natality, Eugenia Roccella, a veteran anti-abortionist who admires the so-called pro-life movements.
The law does not differentiate between heterosexual or homosexual couples, but it puts another obstacle to LGBTI couples who wish to become parents months after the Italian Executive limited their rights when it prohibited local councils from registering minors born through surrogacy or artificial insemination abroad of homosexual couples, who until now could register both parents as parents in some progressive councils thanks to a legal loophole.
Schlein, for example, is personally in favor of this path, but not everyone in the party thinks the same. Riccardo Magi, from the progressive formation Europe, regrets that with this law there will be consequences for the children, who will be left in an unrecognized limbo. The 5 Star Movement also thinks so, which has voted against it because it believes that children should be able to have “both parents” and that guardianship should be favoured.
The question of motherhood is a central pillar in the electoral program of Brothers of Italy, which defends that the family must be made up of a father and a mother and conceived in traditional ways. It is something that also affects the Prime Minister in a very personal way, who does not hesitate to always define herself as a mother, and whose personal history is marked by the abandonment of her father when she was just a child. “The practices of surrogacy are an execrable example of the commercialization of the female body and the children who are born through these practices and who are treated as commodities,” assured Meloni.
