• Surrogacy society without breaking with Mili: "I came out of her belly"

The LGTBIQ collective of Italy mobilizes before the offensive against homosexual families promoted by the Government of the far-right Giorgia Meloni, which in recent days has rejected the European paternity certificate and demands that the City Councils stop registering the children of same-sex couples born abroad.

Both movements culminated with the presentation of up to three bills to declare surrogacy carried out abroad a "universal crime", whose processing began this Thursday in the Chamber of Deputies.

It's a new hurdle for gay families in Italy, one of the few Western European states where marriage equality is not legal. "Surrogacy is the excuse, Italy has never regularized the paternity of same-sex couples, it did not do so in 2016 when the only LGTBIQ law was approved, which is that of civil unions," activist Alessia Crocini, president of the association Famiglie Arcobaleno (Rainbow Families), told EFE.

Thousands of people demonstrated last Saturday in Milan after the mayor of the city, the progressive Beppe Sala, confirmed that he stopped the registration of children of same-sex couples born abroad at the direction of the Ministry of the Interior, and today another mobilization has been called in Genoa.

Milan took advantage of a legislative vacuum to make these inscriptions in the Civil Registry, along with a handful of Italian municipalities, such as Padua, whose councilor, Sergio Giordani, continues to do so despite everything: "Mayors are called to act with common sense to protect the dignity of children and their fundamental rights", said Wednesday.

But the Supreme Court ruled in December that those born in another country by surrogacy will only be recognized as children in Italy through the adoption process and the law governing assisted procreation in Italy dates back to 2004, covering only heterosexual couples with fertility problems.

"There are Italian parents of children who have an American passport (a country that allows surrogacy to foreigners) and cannot transcribe their birth certificate," says Crocini, for whom minors are excluded from the welfare state because they cannot go "to the pediatrician or to public school."

The only way for these families is to start an adoption process in the courts and wait for the decision of a judge, complex in the case of homosexual families since civil unions do not enjoy the same facilities for adoption as marriages, says the activist.

In the case of a couple composed of two women, only the surrogate mother is recognized as a biological mother in the registry while the other has no legal link with the child." They want to make the lives of LGTBIQ people more complicated," Crocini said. Because it is true that before there was no law, but some mayors found a way to formalize the records."

A day after asking municipalities to cease registration, the Senate rejected the "European Paternity Certificate" proposed by the European Commission for all European Union (EU) countries to recognize the paternity of a family from another member state.

The ruling coalition, led by Meloni's formation, Brothers of Italy (FdI), justified that the proposal was an invasion of national law and generated problems by recognizing children born through surrogacy in other countries.

In recent days, this practice of assisted reproduction has been the target of harsh messages pronounced by conservative politicians such as Federico Mollicone, deputy of FdI, who said on television last Monday that "surrogacy is a more serious crime than pedophilia". The matter has already reached Parliament because the right-wing coalition wants to add to the 2004 law, which outlaws "surrogacy", the phrase "the penalties established in this article shall also apply if the acts are committed abroad".

In Italy, where almost 40% of the population opposes marriage equality according to a survey conducted by Istat in 2021, the measures have the support of organizations such as Provita and Famiglia, which celebrated in a statement "the hard blows for the Italian LGTBIQ lobby".

"As is usual to attack minorities, such as immigrants or the LGTBIQ collective, it is a good way to distract public opinion from other problems," Crocini contrasted.

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