Surrogacy as a universal crime

The Italian Senate has definitively approved a bill that makes surrogacy a "universal crime", punishable even if carried out abroad in a country where such a practice is legal.

Law No. 169 of 4 November 2024 consists of a single article, which amends Article 12 of Law No. 40 of 19 February 2004. In particular, paragraph 6 of this article states: "Anyone who, in any form, carries out, organizes or advertises the commercialization of gametes, embryos or surrogacy, shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to two years and a fine from 600,000 to one million euros." A paragraph has been added to this provision which provides as follows: "If the acts referred to in the previous sentence, with reference to surrogacy, are committed abroad, the Italian citizen shall be punished according to Italian law".

What is the reason for reaffirming what was already established in 2004?

Surrogacy is undoubtedly contrary to the respect due to human dignity and detrimental to that deep and lasting bond between the pregnant mother and her child. Gestation goes beyond the simple function of a "womb for rent". While pregnancy and childbirth are biological and human processes of immense value, surrogacy reduces everything to a technological process, instrumentalizing the role of parental figures - in particular that of the mother - and reducing childbirth to a functional act.

The surrogate mother then becomes a mere means to help a couple or a single person and must renounce any rights to the child she has carried.

Jean-Louis Brugues wrote Jean-Louis Brugues in his book "Artificial Insemination: An Ethical Choice" (1991), "we want the uterus, not the face.  The person is divided and dehumanized to the extent that all the richness of the exchange with the child that he carries within him is denied. The woman thinks she is doing a service, yet she is being used. The fact that he gave his consent does not change the facts of the moral problem; voluntarily, the woman is humiliated in your body."

And the child is considered an object of exchange and - at the same time - part of the agreement stipulated between the pregnant mother (sometimes also genetic) and the "intentional" or "commissioning" parents. The child is thus deprived both of the right to maintain the relationship with his mother after birth and of the right to a past to refer to for the structuring of his personal identity.

These reasons have been taken up by law, both in a regulatory and jurisprudential key, and which have led to the decisions contained in Law No. 169 of 4 November 2024.