Italy Wants to Make Surrogacy a Universal Crime
Why banning surrogacy isn’t the solution.
A petition to make surrogacy a “universal crime” was sent to the Italian Supreme Court by CitizenGO, an ultra-conservative advocacy group, a few weeks ago. In Italy surrogacy is already illegal, but nothing prevents Italian citizens from going to clinics abroad. Now this could change.
Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing party “Brothers of Italy”, who’s spearheading the campaign along with CitizenGO, called surrogacy a “third millennium form of slavery, which humiliates women’s bodies and turns children into a commodity.”
ART Technology
Surrogacy is one of many assisted reproductive technologies (ART), which are medical procedures used to address infertility.
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is probably the most common technique available to help people have a baby. Simply put, during IVF an egg is removed from a woman’s ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a lab. The fertilized egg is then returned to the woman’s womb to grow and develop. IVF can be carried out using the woman’s egg and her partner’s sperm, or eggs and sperm from donors.
Two other ART procedures that are becoming increasingly popular are gestational carrier (GC) and surrogate. Although…
