It could also make them outlaws.
“They don’t consider us a family,” Capuano, 47, said of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government. “They think we are criminals.”
Italy prohibits same-sex couples from adopting children or undergoing fertility treatments in most cases. Like many European countries, it also bans surrogacy within its borders. This attitude has led couples like Capuano and Scarpa, 30, to arrange to have their children overseas, in the United States, where policies are relatively liberal, using surrogate mothers.
But now, under Italy’s most right-wing leadership since World War II, the government is targeting international surrogacy as part of what LGBTQ+ activists have denounced as a war over same-sex parental rights.
Last year’s Meloni government decree prohibited local mayors from registering birth certificates that listed same-sex parents. So while 7-month-old Paola is so cherished that her gold-dipped umbilical cord is displayed on the wall of her family’s apartment, technically speaking, neither her parents nor her citizenship is recognized in Italy. This means that he remains a legal orphan.
The government is also moving toward overseas utilization. Surrogacy is a crime. Under the unprecedented measure, Italians who return home with children born through surrogacy will face up to two years in prison and fines worth up to $1.1 million. abroad. The proposal was approved by the House of Representatives last July, and is expected to be voted on in the Senate, also dominated by Meloni’s conservatives, in the coming months.
If passed, the bill would close the last avenue for same-sex couples like Capuano and Scarpa to become parents.
“For us, that’s the only option,” Scarpa said.
Meloni’s campaign against surrogacy
last month, estonia It became the 20th country in Europe to legalize same-sex marriage and grant equal parental rights to same-sex couples. A vote in Greece is scheduled for this month. But as in the US, where more than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ laws were passed in states last year, the March for Equality sparked a populist backlash.
“If you look at the legal developments, this trend is still continuing,” said Katrin Hugendubel, advocacy director at gay rights group ILGA Europe. But “what we are seeing across Europe is a regression in the sense that some governments are moving to the right and following very conservative policies,” she added.
Meloni, 47, is the star of a new generation of conservative leaders, offering a fresh model for far-right governance. She has distanced herself from her party’s neofascist roots, largely eschewing the kind of authoritarian projects that other European populists have embarked on, and has positioned herself in Washington and Brussels with a tough stance on Russia and strong support for Ukraine. I have admired you. She has also promoted classic far-right positions on immigration, national identity, and the “traditional family.”
Meloni opposes elevating same-sex civil unions to the status of marriage, approved in 2016, which would theoretically open the door to adoption by same-sex couples.
“We live in a time when everything we were grateful for is under attack,” said Meloni, a single mother who was never married to her child’s father and divorced last year, at a conference in Budapest in September. Speaking at the Demographics Conference. “It is dangerous to our national, religious and family-related identities.”
Nothing illustrates her position more than her long-standing campaign against surrogacy.
Last year, Meloni’s Italian Brotherhood party was ordered to pay damages to a same-sex couple who plagiarized a photo of them crying over their newborn son in an earlier anti-surrogacy campaign. “He’ll never be called Mamma,” the ad said. “Children’s rights must be protected.”
Meloni’s family minister, Eugenia Maria Roccella, insisted that “the issue is never about people’s sexual orientation.”
“Our aim is to prevent the exploitation of women’s bodies,” she said.
This is a fairly common opinion in Europe, where many countries are uncomfortable with commercial surrogacy. Last month, Pope Francis, who appeared with Meloni at an event to promote Italy’s birth rate last spring, called for a total ban on surrogacy, saying it “takes advantage of the situation of the mother’s material needs.”
But legal experts say criminalizing surrogacy in other countries would go further than the European Union’s existing policy.
Roccella acknowledged that Italy’s ban on international surrogacy will disproportionately affect same-sex couples.
Only 10% of Italy’s foreign surrogacy clients are in same-sex relationships. However, heterosexual couples who use surrogate mothers abroad are less likely to raise red flags when they return home because they can present birth certificates that list opposite-sex parents. For them, the law could serve more as a “deterrent,” Rossella said.
She added that while she knows same-sex couples who are “amazing parents,” not everyone has the “right” way of raising children.
Mr. Rossella said that when the government sent a letter to mayors last year, it was simply informing them of a court ruling against two fathers who had tried to register both names on their children’s birth certificates. However, legal scholars argue that the concept of legal precedent is not as comprehensive in Italy as it is in the United States. If the government had not notified mayors, cities and towns might have continued to register children with same-sex parents, they say.
“A child cannot have parents of the same sex. This is an ideological assumption of our government,” said Angelo Schillaci, a law professor at the Sapienza University of Rome.
In one pending case, state prosecutors in Padua are moving to invalidate 33 birth certificates dating back to 2017 that identify the mother pair.
One such mother is Irene Amoruso, 38, who has two children with a female partner. If she loses her appeal, her name will be removed from the birth certificate of her daughter, who is not her biological mother. Even the girl’s last name (a combination of her two mothers’ last names) would have to be changed to her birth mother’s last name.
Restoration of rights depends on a long and expensive process called “stepchild adoption.”
“Technically, I will no longer be her legal parent and I will no longer have any ties to her,” Amoruso said. “Basically, I can’t pick her up from her school, I can’t take her to her pediatrician, I can’t travel abroad with her. She kidnapped a minor. You will be told that you are.”
The story of Italian and American surrogacy
“Good morning!” Capuano said into the FaceTime image. When I stepped outside, the sun was setting over the Bay of Naples. 6,500 miles away in the Southern California suburbs, 38-year-old surrogate mother Ashley Mae had just returned from a morning workout. As her own two young children burst into view, they leaned toward the phone and said hello to “Monkey and Luca.”
Mei works in a medical office. Her husband works in construction management. She said she started considering surrogacy after seeing an Instagram post from a friend of hers from high school who had done so. “She felt it would be wonderful if she could give that gift to someone else,” May said.
Capuano’s connection with Scarpa was “instantaneous,” she said. “They lift your mood even when you’re feeling your worst.”
Paola was her first baby as a surrogate mother, and she was initially unsure whether she would have another baby. Then one night late last year, she and her husband decided that if they were to do it again, it would be Capuano and Scarpa. The next day, she said, she got a call from the fertility clinic. The Italian couple was hoping for a second child. May said she started crying. It “was meant to be,” she said.
“It breaks my heart…the hardships and challenges that they face every day,” she said. “Why not allow them to be the great parents they are meant to be?”
The Italian couple knew having children would be difficult.
Mr. Capuano, a financial lawyer, comes from a generation in which openly gay men felt that raising children was unaffordable and unworthy. But Scarpa is from a younger generation who doesn’t want to accept limitations, and he urged him to understand.
“We deserved to have a family,” Scarpa said.
After legal obstacles effectively precluded international adoption, they invested $150,000 and committed to surrogacy. They also made a solid decision. Both men planned to donate sperm to a California fertility clinic, but neither knew the identity of Paola’s biological father.
They were staying in an Airbnb in Southern California and were putting their five-day-old baby Paola to bed when news of a vote in Italy’s lower house of parliament to criminalize the use of international surrogacy flashed on their phones.
“It’s disgusting,” Capuano recalled saying as he walked. Scarpa burst into tears. Paola’s birth ruined the happiest days of their lives.
They will be even more disappointed when they return to Italy. Their mayor, Ciro Buonaft, said: Despite the government’s new edict regarding birth certificates, he vowed to try to legalize his infant. But neither he nor the other four mayors could find a way to help.
“Regardless of what anyone thinks about surrogacy, right now in my city, the town of Ercolano, there is a holy soul named Paola. Why shouldn’t she get an ID?” Buonajuto said. Told.
Eventually, a kind IRS official issued Paola with an Italian health card so she could get vaccinated. But because she is not registered as an Italian citizen, she has no right to attend public school, and she has no right to work or receive a pension in the future. Legally, she is an overstayed American tourist.
There is one method that is complex, costly, and demoralizing. Through DNA testing, Capuano and Scarpa were able to determine who was her biological father. She will then be registered as the daughter of a single father, and her other father may pursue her stepparent rights in court.
If the surrogacy bill passes, as analysts predict, the situation will become even more difficult for the second child Capuano and Scarpa hope to have.
They say they are prepared to give up on Italy before giving up on their aspirations for a family. They are scanning real estate websites in France and the United States.
Their departure will be painful for Paola’s doting grandparents. They live downstairs in an apartment in a gated family compound near the ruins of Pompeii.
But if that happens, “I will bless them and say, ‘Go!’ Go wherever you want,” said Franco Capuano, 79, Luca’s father. Go where your rights are recognized and don’t think about us. ”