The head of the Italian government, Giorgia Maloni, has rejected the European paternity certificate and is asking municipalities to stop registering children of same-sex couples born abroad, reports El Mundo, citing Rador.

Italy’s LGTBIQ community is mobilizing against an attack on gay families backed by the government of Georgia Maloney, who in recent days has rejected European paternity certificates and asked municipalities to stop registering children of same-sex couples born abroad.

The culmination of both actions was the presentation of up to three bills on the recognition of surrogate motherhood carried out abroad as a “general crime”, the debate of which began this Thursday in the Chamber of Deputies.

This is a new obstacle for gay families in Italy, one of the few Western European countries where same-sex marriage is prohibited.

“Surrogacy is an excuse, Italy has never regulated the paternity of same-sex couples, it didn’t do it in 2016, when the single law on LGTBIQ was passed, which deals with civil unions,” activist Alessia Crocini told EFE. president of the Famiglie Arcobaleno (Rainbow Families) association.

“They want to make life difficult for LGBTIQ”

Thousands of people demonstrated in Milan last Saturday after the city’s mayor, the progressive Beppe Sala, confirmed he would stop registering children of same-sex couples born abroad at the request of the Interior Ministry. Another mobilization was announced in Genoa on Sunday.

Milan took advantage of the legislative vacuum to introduce these records into the civil registry, along with several other Italian municipalities, such as Padua, whose councilor Sergio Giordani continues to do so, no matter what: “We mayors are called to act with common sense. to protect the dignity of girls and boys and their basic rights,” he said on Wednesday.

But the Supreme Court ruled in December that those born in another country to surrogate mothers would only be recognized in Italy through the adoption process, and the law governing assisted reproduction in Italy dates back to 2004 and covers these procedures only for troubled heterosexual couples. with fertility. .

“There are Italian parents of children who have an American passport (a country that allows surrogacy for foreigners) and cannot rewrite their birth certificate,” says Alessia Crocini, for whom minors are excluded from social services because they cannot leave “to the pediatrician or public school.”

The only way for these families is to initiate the adoption process in court and wait for a judge’s decision, which is difficult in the case of homosexual families, since civil unions do not enjoy the same adoption opportunities as marriages, the activist explains.

In the case of two women, only the surrogate mother is recognized as the biological mother in the registry, and the second partner has no legal relationship with the child. “They want to make life difficult for LGTBIQ people,” condemns Crocini. “For it is true that before there was no law, but some mayors found a way to make the record official.”

“A way to distract the public from other problems”

A day after municipalities were asked to stop registrations, the Senate rejected a “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 governing coalition, led by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI), argued that the EC’s proposal was an invasion of national law and created problems with the recognition of children born to surrogate mothers in other countries.

In recent days, this practice of assisted reproduction has been the object of strong statements by conservative politicians, such as Federico Mollicone, the deputy of the FdI, who said on television last Monday that “surrogacy is a more serious crime than pedophilia.”

The issue has already reached parliament, as the right-wing coalition wants to add to the 2004 law banning “surrogate mothers” the phrase “the penalties established by this article shall also apply if the act is committed abroad.”

In Italy, where almost 40% of the population opposes equal marriage according to the 2021 Istat poll, the measures are supported by organizations such as Provita and Famiglia, which said in a statement “a strong blow to the Italian LGBTIQ front”.

“Since it’s common to target minorities like immigrants or the LGTBIQ community, it’s a good way to distract the public from other issues,” Alessia Crocini said.