While their curly-haired rescue dog napped on the floor, an Italian couple logged on to a late-night video call with their American surrogate, sunbathing in her garden in Oregon. The fathers-to-be cooed as she told them she was playing fairy tales close to her belly that they had recorded for their future daughter. “And she is kicking!” she said.
But the men, both civil servants, said they had not dared to share their excitement with almost anyone around them. They did not talk about the pregnancy with many friends, colleagues or neighbors or post about it on social media. They asked to remain anonymous for this article.
They have reason for caution. Surrogacy is already illegal if conducted in Italy. But the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wants to expand the prohibition. It has promoted a bill that would also punish Italians who make use of surrogacy even in places abroad where it is legal, like in parts of the United States. Those Italians who do could face up to two years in prison and be fined the equivalent of about a million dollars.
Italy’s lower chamber of Parliament approved the bill last summer, and the Senate’s justice committee greenlighted it last month. The Senate is expected to vote on it as soon as the fall.
On the international stage, Ms. Meloni has presented herself as a pragmatic partner for mainstream European leaders and aligned herself with Western democracies on the issues that matter to them, like support of Ukraine.
But at home, Ms. Meloni has asserted her conservative credentials on cultural issues such as abortion, gender, gay rights and surrogacy.
“No one can convince me that it is an act of freedom to rent one’s womb,” she said in the spring at an event in Rome. “No one can convince me that it is an act of love to consider children as an over-the-counter product in a supermarket.”
“Uterus renting is a shameful, inhuman practice,” she said. “It will become a universal crime.”
While Ms. Meloni’s stance may reflect her own deeply held convictions, analysts say such rhetoric also serves to please the right-wing base of her Brothers of Italy party. Polls show that her party’s voters are disproportionately more opposed to surrogacy and adoption by gay couples than the general population is.
“On the economy and foreign policy, she took completely mainstream positions,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “And she compensates her mainstream positions with the fact that she still uses an old-right rhetoric on things that don’t matter to define her international profile.”
Issues like surrogacy and same-sex parenthood “still define her as a right-wing person sensitive to traditional values,” Mr. D’Alimonte said. “And she exploits this when she can.”
Many of those positions — for instance, against gay parenthood and favoring abortion prevention rather than access — place Ms. Meloni in much the same ranks as other social conservatives and the Roman Catholic Church.
But her Italian critics say that by pressing for further restrictions on gay families in a country that already ranks near last in Europe when it comes to such civil liberties, Ms. Meloni has taken a particularly hard line.
Her moves on the cultural front have often been subtle, like her tinkering with Italy’s abortion law. When it comes to surrogacy, many feminists also oppose it, and other European countries also outlaw it, though it is allowed in some, like Britain or Greece, under certain conditions.
But analysts and opponents say Italy’s proposed new law is especially perplexing because it is tailored to penalize a relatively small number of Italians and is so far-reaching that some experts are skeptical it could withstand legal challenges.
“It’s pure propaganda,” said Susanna Lollini, a lawyer for L.G.B.T.Q. families, “but it’s spreading absolute panic.”
Most Italian couples who use surrogacy are believed to be heterosexual, and they could also be affected by the proposed new law. But because same-sex couples need a third party to have children, many gay Italians feel that the change in the law would leave them vulnerable to special scrutiny. Also, adoption is allowed only for heterosexual couples, leaving gay Italians with few options.
“I can’t tell I am about to become a father,” one of the future fathers said. The other added, “We can’t tell our story, because my government is persecuting me and my family.”
Ms. Meloni’s lawmakers have not hidden whom the law is targeting. Carolina Varchi, who presented the anti-surrogacy bill, wrote on Facebook in June that with the new law, her party was working against L.G.B.T. “ideology.”
Even before Ms. Meloni took office at the end of 2022, Italy, home to the Vatican, was one of the few European Union countries not to recognize same-sex marriage, and the couples interviewed for this article were joined by civil union or unmarried.
Still, L.G.B.T.Q. activists say, while they had to challenge previous governments to advance their rights, now they are playing defense.
In another step aimed at same-sex couples, Ms. Meloni’s government this spring appealed a court decision that allowed parents to be identified as “parent” on their children’s IDs, instead of as “mother” and “father.”
“I think it would be wrong to prevent by law a child from having a father and a mother,” Ms. Meloni said on Italian television in July.
Members of Italy’s L.G.B.T.Q. community are especially concerned by what they consider to be a tone by the government that singles them out.
“No member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community could say that this government has a moderate attitude,” said Emanuela Bruno, a lesbian mother, who is trying to prevent Italian authorities from removing her name from her twin children’s birth certificates.
Ms. Meloni’s government has sought to vigorously enforce a court decision that had barred a mayor from registering children born through surrogacy abroad as having two fathers. Cities that used to issue such certificates, like Milan, stopped doing so.
The government’s directive has had the ripple effect of encouraging Italian prosecutors in several cities to also revise the birth certificates of children born to lesbian couples.
In the northern city of Padua, prosecutors are now trying to remove at least 38 mothers from the birth certificates of their children.
Among the mothers is Brona Kelly, an Irish teacher who has a child with her Italian wife, Alice Bruni.
Ms. Bruni, who is the child’s biological mother, is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and she worries that if Ms. Kelly were to lose her recognition in court, their 1-year-old son would become an orphan in the event of her death.
Like other gay parents, Ms. Bruni is considering leaving the country, but for now she has to stay put because of her cancer treatment.
When her case went to court, Ms. Bruni said, she listed to the judges what she considered the serious problems facing the world: wars, violence, abuse.
“And we are here for what?” she asked. “Because I have a child with the woman I love?”
Read More: Has Power Moderated Italy’s Leader? Not to Same-Sex Parents.
