21 Oct 2024 The Criminalization of Surrogacy in Italy
Last year, the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, passed a bill that criminalizes surrogacy if carried out anywhere in the world by Italian citizens. On the 16th of October 2024, the upper house, the Senate of the Republic, approved the bill. The President of the Italian Republic could veto it, but that is unlikely to happen.
The effort to pass this bill has been in the making for a year and half, and, while not unexpected, it is incredibly troubling.
This law impacts Italian citizens anywhere in the world. Technically, this means an Italian citizen living in Brazil, for example, and engaging in surrogacy in the US or Canada is committing a crime.
This will be nearly impossible to enforce globally. For instance, it seems highly unlikely that the Italian government would have a means to know whether an Italian citizen living in Boston or Tel Aviv is engaging in surrogacy. For those Italian citizens who do not live in Italy and have or are engaged in a surrogacy, it may be advisable to simply delay naturalizing the resulting children as Italian citizens and avoid scrutiny by the Italian government.
For those who live in Italy or are seeking Italian citizenship for the child, it’s a much bigger issue, but again, it doesn’t seem that the Italian government has the resources to devote to finding and prosecuting Italian citizens the world over.
Even if the government decided to prosecute an Italian citizen in Italy, they would likely face constitutional challenges both in Italy and in the European Court of Human Rights. This is all speculative, but, because we don’t know with certainty, Italians living in Italy may need to consider relocating if they plan use surrogacy to build their family, use a second home as their main residence, or delay surrogacy for a period of time. Italians living elsewhere in the world may not have much to worry about.
For Italians who already have children through surrogacy or have started their journey, this new law is unlikely to have a retrospective application, but that remains to be clarified.
Given the practical problems with enforcement, e.g., logistics, cost, resources, etc.…it seems most likely that the purpose of this law is to take a moral stance, to denounce the surrogacy process, and to serve as a deterrent, but the threat is real and should be considered. Once this bill becomes law, the battle will move to the courts, and it will most likely take a few years before the final outcome is determined.
We’ll continue to track and report on this development.
