Surrogate motherhood, the restriction proposed by FdI: also illegal abroad – Corriere.it

That surrogacy becomes a universal crime. The Brothers of Italy are asking for it with a bill presented to the Senate, a text similar to the one that Giorgia Meloni presented to the Chamber in the last legislature. The request is simple: in Italy surrogacy is a crime, now it becomes so even if it is performed abroad by Italian citizens. The undersecretary and senator Isabella Rauti and the group leader of senators Lucio Malan signed this bill.

«There is a real procreative tourism, that is, that phenomenon whereby Italian couples who cannot have children make use of the technique of surrogacy in a foreign country where it is permitted», write the two senators in the premise of the bill. The costs of surrogacy are different depending on the country you go to. And Rauti and Malan have calculated them: «In India it can be done with 25-30 thousand dollars and the business is worth 2 billion a year. Volunteers who enter the legal market of clinics give birth to about 1,500 children to satisfy the demand that comes from abroad. They earn from 8 to 9 thousand dollars per gestation, a figure that corresponds to ten years of work of an unskilled worker. Women who, on the other hand, remain outside the circuit of legal clinics are paid much less, from 3 to 5 thousand”.

Surrogacy is also legal in the United States of America. And here for couples who want to do it, the rate is practically double that implemented in India, about fifty thousand dollars. The two senators write again: “In the United States the business of births exceeds two thousand each year, with respect to which aspiring parents are given the possibility to choose some characteristics of the unborn child”. In recent years, the decision of surrogacy abroad has been left in the hands of the judges. With this bill, we want the courts not to be left alone to decide what to do. Penalties for surrogacy in Italy provide for imprisonment from three months to two years and a fine ranging from 600,000 to one million euros. And with this text, as well as in the text deposited in the past by Meloni, it must be added: “The penalties apply even if the offense is committed abroad”.