Opposition to surrogacy in Italy has taken aim at the babies of same sex couples.
The NYT has the story:
Surrogacy Emerges as the Wedge Issue for Italy’s Hard Right. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has ordered municipalities to stop certifying foreign birth certificates for same-sex couples who used surrogacy, leaving some babies in a legal limbo. By Jason Horowitz
"the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni ordered municipalities to obey a court ruling made in December and stop certifying foreign birth certificates of children born to Italian same-sex couples through surrogacy, which is illegal in Italy.
"The decision has left Martino Libero and several other children suspended in a legal limbo, depriving them of automatic Italian citizenship and residency rights like access to the country’s free health care system and nursery school.
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"Milan, a city that has long served as a cosmopolitan haven for same-sex couples in Italy, has for now complied with the Meloni government order and suspended issuing Italian birth certificates.
"Without official recognition, Libero Martino, 2 months old this month, will have to leave and re-enter the country every few months to remain legal. A court could eventually recognize one of the men as the biological father — they decline to say which one is the sperm donor — and then they could start a separate adoption process for the other.
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"Ms. Meloni’s government has sought to shift the issue away from the status of the children to the practice of surrogacy, which, while legal in the United States and Canada, is illegal or restricted in much of Europe outside of Greece, Ukraine and a few other countries. In Italy, home of the Vatican, it is not only illegal, but it is also widely opposed, including among Catholic corners of the center-left opposition.
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"Prominent members of Ms. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party have called surrogacy a crime “even worse than pedophilia,” in which gay couples, one of whom is usually the biological father, seek to “pass off” children as their own and mistake “children for Smurfs,” saying gay couples can uniquely afford surrogacy, even though it is overwhelmingly used more by heterosexual couples.
"The party is floating a proposal, made by Ms. Meloni when she was a member of Parliament, to make Italians’ seeking of surrogate births abroad — what she had called “procreative tourism” — illegal and “punishable with three months to two years of prison and a fine of 600,000 to a million euros.”
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"In an interview shortly before her election, as her young daughter ran around her in a Sardinia courtyard, Ms. Meloni said she opposed gay marriage, not because she was homophobic — “I’ve got many, many homosexual friends” — but because she saw it as a step to same-sex adoption, which she opposed, and which the Roman Catholic Church successfully lobbied to exclude from a civil unions law passed in 2016.
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