Bun in the oven
How dare Italy refuse to treat women like machines for the gestation of other people’s babies???
Italian authorities are bringing in new measures targeting LGBT families and making it harder for them to have children. Many same-sex parents feel that a new law, which would make it illegal to have surrogacy abroad, is a personal attack against them.
“We have two options: to stay in Italy and face prison, or to run away.”
Husbands Claudio and Davide (not their real names) have a baby on the way through surrogacy – a woman in another country is carrying their son for them.
They don’t “have” a baby on the way. What they have is an arrangement by which they pay a nameless woman in “another country” – I’m guessing one poorer than Italy, where women are more desperate to survive – to spend nine months carrying an ever bigger and heavier baby for two guys far away who are paying her (not nearly enough). It’s not a neutral business arrangement with no moral issues attached. It’s not mere “carrying,” like carrying a suitcase or a bag of groceries.
The practice is illegal in Italy and most of Europe, so couples travel to countries where it is legal – such as the US and Canada – and bring their babies back home.
Now why might it be illegal? Is it homophobia or mere squick? Or could it be at all to do with exploitation and/or the inherent risks to the manufactured child? The BBC doesn’t say.
But the Italian senate is set to approve a bill that would make surrogacy a “universal crime” – one so serious that it would be prosecuted even if committed abroad, like human trafficking or paedophilia.
Again, why might that be? Could it possibly be because it is like human trafficking? The BBC doesn’t say.
“I don’t want to leave my country. I am proud to be Italian,” Davide says.
“I’m trying my best to be a good citizen, and now I’m being treated like a criminal – just because I want to have a family.”
No, that’s not true. The issue is not his wanting to have a family. The issue is the rent-a-womb method of “having a family” he’s resorting to.
The surrogacy bill is part of the socially conservative agenda of Giorgia Meloni – Italy’s first female prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party is a direct political descendant of a movement formed by members of Mussolini’s Fascist Party after the war.
But social conservatives are not the only ones who think surrogacy is at least morally questionable.
Angelo Schillaci, Professor of Comparative Public Law at Rome’s Sapienza University, calls the proposed law “irrational” and says it does not make sense to place surrogacy in the same legal category as paedophilia and crimes against humanity.
“This bill is seeking to punish things that are perfectly legal in countries that are our allies, such as the US and Canada,” Prof Schillaci says. “It would be like prosecuting someone for smoking weed in Amsterdam after they’ve come back home.”
No it would not. What a callous frivolous brutal comparison. A woman is not a joint.
And what about the child? What about the child’s learning that she or he never had what we understand as a mother, but only a “gestational carrier”? What if the child feels like a piece of toast, produced by a machine?
Carolina Varchi, the Brothers of Italy MP who drafted the bill, vehemently rejects [the claim that the law is an attack on LGBTXYZ rights]. “Most people who use surrogacy are heterosexual,” she says.
Experts have told the BBC that 90% of the couples who use surrogacy in Italy are straight, and many of them hide the fact that they have gone abroad to have a baby.
You mean gone abroad to hire a machine-woman to produce a baby for them.
Ms Varchi strongly believes the new law will “protect women and their dignity”.
“It’s intolerable. Women’s bodies are reduced to objects that are rented for nine months to bring a child into the world, who is then ripped away to be delivered to the clients.”
Via Amazon no doubt.
In countries where surrogacy is legal, regulations vary – including whether or not a surrogate can be paid more than expenses, and what steps must be taken to ensure surrogates give free and informed consent.
Aha – so they admit “surrogates” can be exploited and coerced. Why doesn’t that cause them to think a little more carefully?
Even if it didn’t turn out to be the case that the vast majority of couples who purchase women’s reproductive services are heterosexual, this law is not ‘infringing on the rights of LGBT families’ – L families and many B families don’t need to hire women to gestate their babies. It’s only gay male couples who, for some reason, choose not to adopt who are affected by this.
The activists opposing this law point out that same-sex couples cannot adopt in Italy, so this is the only option. Well, fix that! Push to make adoption by same-sex couples legal! I cannot for the life of me understand why this isn’t obvious.
@2 thanks for that additional info…but yes, if same-sex couples can’t legally adopt in Italy that seems like a sensible thing for activists/advocates to change.
Since same-sex couples often make good parents, probably at about the same rate straight families do, the only reason not to allow adoption is the “ick” factor or the religious objection. There are a lot of reasons to allow same sex couples to adopt; there isn’t much reason for allowing them to exploit women. That goes equally for straight couples.
I had a sister who wanted me to be a surrogate for her. She also asked my younger sister. Neither of us was willing, even for a sister. It would have halted or at least postponed my college, which would have changed my life and not for the better. Plus, why would I want to do that to watch someone I don’t trust around children raise a child I spent nine months of my life giving life to?
I just think that’s an outrageous thing to ask anyone, including a sister (or any other relative). It’s being relentlessly normalized, which means it’s being made harder and harder for women to say no, and that’s grotesque.
There’s an absurd Northern Ireland cop show on local PBS that I sometimes watch faute de mieux, and one plot thread is that a lesbian cop has agreed to be a surrogate for her best friend, and the treatment of the subject is just maddeningly frivolous and mindless. It’s as if she’s agreed to take care of her friend’s dog for a week or two. There’s zero mention of the drastic ways pregnancy and childbirth permanently change women’s bodies, or the risks of pregnancy, or the impact on her job, or anything else. Drives me nuts.
I saw a play about it, and the author obviously had some serious doubts about the practice, but her play made it seem much less exploitative than it is. It centered around the concept of a woman giving birth to a child and establishing a bond with it, making it impossible for her to give up.
The woman in question was upper middle class (both of them – the surrogate and the friend) and white. There was no mention of the exploitation of poor women, who are usually the ones carrying babies for other people, or the fact that much of it is done in third world countries where already marginalized women are exploited because of their extreme need.
I wrote a play about it. Though I retained the white characters, because it is part of a larger play, it could be played by any ethnicity. I used a poor woman, and showed how the wealthy couple renting her womb treated her as a commodity, one that was there solely for the purpose of pushing out a baby for them. Do I think it will get performed? No, because like you said, surrogacy has become so normalized. The theatre community is relentlessly woke, and would probably see it as a slight on “sex workers”.
I assume that in Italy, like in most Western European countries, there are few children available for adoption.
Unmarried and poor mothers are no longer (thankfully) forced to give birth & hand over their children. The foster-to-adopt option is not always available (many countries either don’t have this option or use it only in rare circumstances) and where available is not for everyone (these kids are often special needs and prospective adopters are carefully assessed for obvious reasons). International adoption is a lot more difficult and expensive than most people realise.
In short, no you can’t “just adopt”.
None of this us to excuse the horrible exploitation of surrogacy.
True, but the problem comes with the assumption that having a child is a right. It isn’t, really. You have a right to have children within a limited sense. If you are unable to have children, you don’t (or shouldn’t) have the right to use other women to give you children, no matter how much you pay. This is a privilege, not a right. It is a privilege that only belongs to people with enough money to pay the expenses of surrogacy.
One of the things about surrogacy is the possibility of using your own DNA. Yes, people want to propagate their DNA. It’s an evolutionary drive. That doesn’t make it a right, since rights are man-made.
The ability to have the children you are able to have and desire could be said to be a right. The ability to have children no matter what is not, IMHO, a right anybody should have.
Why the quotation marks on “just adopt”? Nobody here said “just adopt.”
I don’t consider the difficulty of adoption all that relevant. I get that it may make people want to rent a woman to make a baby for them, but what people want and what they should do are completely different things. The more everyone treats it as a perfectly cromulent way of acquiring a baby the more I think it’s a horror show that should be globally banned. If you can’t have a baby then YOU CAN’T HAVE A BABY.
When I first read about this conflict some months ago, featuring a different gay couple, I, like guest, wondered why they didn’t seem even to consider adoption. Buried in the article, and buried in this one as well, was the information that adoption wasn’t available, so surrogacy was “the only option”. I was angered that the framing was (and continues to be) that a failure to support international surrogacy for gay couples was hatred toward the LGBTUVWXYZ, while the activists were not even addressing the obvious solution of making something that is perfectly legal for opposite-sex couples also legal for same-sex couples. It was surrogacy or nothing. It made me wonder if the people pushing for surrogacy would even support legalizing adoption by same-sex couples.
It also irritated me (not in this article, but others) that it was not mentioned that most of the couples using surrogacy were opposite-sex, and that the bill would make it illegal for them as well as same-sex couples. That is, the entire issue was framed as if the law directly and specifically targeted gay – excuse me, LGBTUVWXYZ – couples, and affected no one else.
“t made me wonder if the people pushing for surrogacy would even support legalizing adoption by same-sex couples.”
I’m sure they would. But the problem is that is once more placing the desires of the prospective parents over the needs of the child. If Italy reforms its adoption laws, it should be for the latter reason and not the former.
Adoption is difficult in developed countries, not because authorities hate gay or infertile people, but because the number of healthy children under 5 available for adoption is less than the number of prospective adoptive parents.
Ah! So those prospective adopters should take in the older kids or the ones with serious medical conditions! If they don’t, that’s just proof they are selfish assholes who don’t deserve to be parents!
Except…. these kids have special needs, and it really isn’t in the child’s best interest to go into a home that’s not fully prepared for them. Many well-meaning couples have failed and inadvertently caused further damage.
I know this is getting away from the subject of surrogacy. I’m just tired of seeing adoption posted as a “gotcha” when it’s much more complicated than that, and seeing it as such is potentially harmful for children.
True, and true, but I still don’t see anything on this page that did cite adoption as a gotcha.
That said, the specifics of why adoption is difficult or impossible are good to remember.