WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #172 - The surrogate uterus trap (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The right wing in government has cleverly shifted the debate inherited from the

last legislature on the recognition of the rights of same-sex parental couples
(Zan law) to the problem of surrogacy which is an extremely limited practice in
Italy; moreover, out of ten couples who resort to it, nine are heterosexual. It
is also estimated that no more than 250 couples in our country have resorted to
this practice to have a son or daughter. The self-styled left-wing parties and
the press have fallen into the media trap, proof of which is that the right, in
the eyes of public opinion, has managed to disguise the attack it is carrying on
the non-traditional family, discrediting it, with the intention of demolish the
spaces of legality and social consensus towards same-sex parent couples. What the
right does not tolerate is that families of same-sex couples are accepted by the
community which increasingly considers these unions and their children as a
family within which situations of solidarity develop and love. Proof of this is
that the attack launched has shifted the registration in the registry office of
the children of same-sex parent couples - who, it should be remembered - are not
all children born resorting to rented wombs, but as is known and evident , are
the result of a maternity which resorts to a sperm donor extraneous to the couple
consenting to natural or artificial insemination and prohibiting, despite the
adoption in special cases, permitted following the sentence n. 79 of 2022 of the
Constitutional Court "which guarantees the adoptee the status of daughter/or of
the adopter", allowing the children to be recognized as belonging to both parents
through the adoption procedure.
Having said that, one wonders what fault we have the children of having been
conceived in this way to be deprived of the legal protection of their parents and
of not being regularly registered in the registry office, under the parental
responsibility of both members of the couple, in order to be able to access the
services, from health care to all the others, provided by law for all citizens,
to allow both parents to look after them and equally protect them.
In other words, it is not clear why these children should be downgraded for
entirely legitimate choices attributable, in any case, exclusively to their
parents, who are hindered in the exercise of parental activities.
The intentions that the right wants to pursue are understood if one considers
that in common feeling these children are welcomed into social structures in the
eyes of their peers like everyone else and all this is reflected on their family
which is considered as such in social feeling. This is why, discriminating
against them in their rights serves to repress, a
to punish, to sanction, the behavior of their parents, even if it is the children
who pay the price. The true objective of the right is the one affirmed by
Salvini, who never tires of repeating that every child must have a father and a
mother, forgetting that this is not the rule, also because it can happen due to a
large number of events that the child grows up, and is well cared for, within a
couple of people who are equally loving and attentive, affectionate and present,
regardless of their gender and legal ties with the children.
Given that it is completely clear and a priority to unmask this media operation,
we do not shy away from the need to discuss the problem of the rented uterus,
even if this problem is, as usual, presented as an emergency and today ends up
being used as a weapon of mass distraction to divert and distract the public
debate from more relevant and central problems in Italian society such as the
growth of deaths at work, starvation wages, the growth of inflation, job
insecurity, the destruction of entire production chains with the expulsion from
the world of work of workers over forty who are put in the position of no longer
being able to find a dignified place in the world of work, the growing
shortcomings of the health system, the absence of the right to housing,the
growing inequalities, the penalization of the poor and marginalized.
To fall into the media trap were the new managers of the PD who immediately took
to the field alongside LGBT+ families, reinforcing and legitimizing the media
operation of the right who had the opportunity to underline that not as much
effort was made in the fight to defend the social rights, especially those of the
lower classes.

Heterologous fertilization

To clarify the whole issue, it seems appropriate to begin by noting that the
growing capabilities of science have allowed humans to intervene in an ever more
incisive way on natural processes, posing quite a few ethical problems with
respect to the growing demands and needs to remedy the limits expectations and
desires of human beings. The development of genetics, in particular, allows today
to intervene in the initial stages in the life of human beings, acting both on
the ovum, on the sperm and on the embryo, to avoid the manifestation of genetic
diseases and prevent the causes of malformations which could compromising a
healthy life in the future child. These interventions - let us not deny it - pose
surmountable ethical problems, What has been elaborated at a medical level
intersects with the aspirations and desires of human beings and with the
evolution of customs: hence the emergence in the public debate and at a social
level of the role of emotional relationships between people of the same gender
which, mind you, they have always been there, even if hypocritically hidden.
Above all, the debate on emotional relationships conducted without preconceptions
has led today to the presence of relationships between people of the same gender
made clear and manifest, regulated by law providing for rights and obligations,
and to the corresponding request by these couples to live this relationship with
all possible similarities, since it is an emotional relationship, compared to the
one that develops between heterosexual couples,
completion of their relationship.
As a result of a social sentiment that places the development of the individual
at the center of the individual and social relationship, the request has
therefore grown to extend the right to procreation also to affective
relationships developed between people of the same sex. At the same time, the
development of genetics has made it possible to develop the necessary assisted
artificial insemination procedures which in turn have allowed the possibility of
insemination also from anonymous donors. This has greatly complicated everything
related to procreation that societies have heard the need to standardize these
procedures, establishing rules and allowing the lawfulness of requests and
suitable procedures to satisfy them. This choice necessarily leads to the opening
up of marriage not only in the direction of overcoming the relationship between
the two spouses, with forms of extended family, but also the possibility of
extending the marriage and parental relationship to same-sex couples as well.
If the parental requests of couples formed by two women are perfectly solvable
through the gestation of the pregnancy by one of them, inseminated or naturally
or through assisted fertilization, by a donor, the same request cannot be
immediately satisfied when it comes from a couple formed by two men.
In this regard, genetics has developed a solution, developing a particular branch
of medicine and suitable procedures that allow the fertilization of another
woman, extraneous to the relationship, who is willing to lend her body to make a
human person grow and develop . This practice is also used by women who are no
longer fertile or afflicted with malformations that prevent them from becoming
pregnant, by implanting an ovum supplied by them, fertilizing it and implanting
it in the uterus of a surrogate mother, who has declared herself available to to
indulge the desire for motherhood of women unable to procreate and of course even
more so than men. To fulfill the desire to procreate on the part of a homosexual
male couple, the uterus of the woman is used, making her body and her own egg
available or implanting one that has already been fertilized. Surrogacy therefore
exclusively concerns this second case and involves male parental couples and
women unable to procreate for various reasons.
Combining all the herbs and therefore tying the problem of recourse to the
surrogate uterus to all the questions inherent to the procreation of same-sex
parental couples is therefore wrong and misleading, but it lends itself to
achieving the political objective of criticizing a different vision of the
parental relationship, admitting as lawful only
that formed by a heterologous couple. The fact remains that whatever one thinks
about marriage and the emotional union between two human beings, whether the
choices of a same-sex parent couple or of parents who have resorted to medical
help for procreation, it falls on children and this also because once they are
born, they are a person, they are holders of all the rights that are proper to
every human being.
It unequivocally follows from the foregoing that denying registration in the
registry office of a family through a circular letter because it is single-sexed
may not have any implication with surrogacy, but rather constitutes a tool to
hinder the exercise of parenthood by families made up of people of the same sex.

Surrogacy

Once the relationship between the surrogate mother and the clients of the
procreative relationship has been defined from a physical and functional point of
view, the problem arises of how to juridically evaluate this fact, how to
regulate it, what types of contractual relationships to associate with the
occurrence of this event, given that all human activities are likely to be
conditioned by economic and interest relationships (it is no coincidence that we
speak of a marriage contract in law).
In other words, it can and does happen that there are women who lend their bodies
free of charge in order to see the aspiration to parenthood of two subjects
genetically incapable of developing a pregnancy using only their own bodies come
true, but experience shows , and more often it happens, that this activity is
provided in exchange for a remuneration, and in any case the need arises to
legally regulate the relationship that is determined between the different
subjects, also in relation to the future destiny of the unborn child.
 From these needs were born the contracts relating to the regulation of the
procedures connected to the practice of the rented uterus, in the most diverse
legal systems, such as the United States (in some states), Canada, but also
Belgium, the 'Ukraine, Russia, just to name a few. All the contractual schemes
envisaged by these laws are characterized by the concern of guaranteeing
themselves against possible fraudulent use of the woman's body and therefore
provide for a remuneration for the service performed which should prevent forms
of exploitation. These contracts, which oblige customers to bear maintenance
costs and those relating to the pregnancy, often include precise clauses relating
to the methods with which pregnant women carry out the pregnancy, forcing them to
conduct behaviors deemed functional to a healthy management of the pregnancy in
order not to jeopardize the status and health of the unborn child, but which are
in fact seriously restrictive of the rights of the person of the woman who agrees
to carry out this practice. These contracts also regulate the phase following the
birth and provide for and regulate the delivery of the newborn to the customers,
without the natural mother being able to exercise any right over the unborn child
and reaching the point of excluding any possibility for children born from
assisted fertilization to be able to know the identity of the original mother
(law regulated in Italy by art. 24 paragraph 5 of Law 149/2001, which grants the
adoptee who has reached the age of 25 but which are in fact seriously restrictive
of the rights of the person of the woman who agrees to carry out this practice.
These contracts also regulate the phase following the birth and provide for and
regulate the delivery of the newborn to the customers, without the natural mother
being able to exercise any right over the unborn child and reaching the point of
excluding any possibility for children born from assisted fertilization to be
able to know the identity of the original mother (law regulated in Italy by art.
24 paragraph 5 of Law 149/2001, which grants the adoptee who has reached the age
of 25 but which are in fact seriously restrictive of the rights of the person of
the woman who agrees to carry out this practice. These contracts also regulate
the phase following the birth and provide for and regulate the delivery of the
newborn to the customers, without the natural mother being able to exercise any
right over the unborn child and reaching the point of excluding any possibility
for children born from assisted fertilization to be able to know the identity of
the original mother (law regulated in Italy by art. 24 paragraph 5 of Law
149/2001, which grants the adoptee who has reached the age of 25 years of
accessing this information with an application to the Juvenile Court).
It is precisely this set of conditions that characterize surrogacy that arouses
the greatest reservations and opposition towards this practice, highlighting the
importance of the bond that is created between the silent man and the pregnant
woman, the inevitable affective, filial relationship that binds two subjects,
which is inevitably severed by contract, without the pregnant mother being able
to change her opinion on the delivery of the unborn child to the commissioning
couple. At this point the ethical, philosophical and social debate on the
admissibility of these behaviors opens, forcing each of us to question on the
problem and therefore to ask whether it is lawful and acceptable to allow the
exercise of these practices, rather if this does not conflict with a shared
social ethic.
If social relations are the contractual and mercantile ones typical of capitalist
society, which place an individualistic and non-solidaristic vision of life and
emotional relationships at the center of the realization of men and women, the
legal regulation of surrogacy practices through laws adapted to avoiding the
exploitation of the pregnant woman, as well as preventing, through the exercise
of an activity of blackmail, pressures of an economic nature as a condition for
respecting the contact are not enough to solve the problems. Certainly adequate
laws to regulate the various cases are necessary, but in any case they must not
give rise to negative consequences for the newborn, who, having become a person,
In another society, based on the values of social solidarity, it can be
hypothesized and made possible that the desire for parenthood expressed by a
one-sex couple can be satisfied through facilitated access to adoption procedures
- which has always been hindered to allow economic and social management of
orphans through orphanages, often profit factories - in order to offer family
affection and hospitality to every new born.
We do not deny that even when this social vision is shared, the problem of
surrogacy managed out of solidarity, on behalf of another woman, who is prevented
from carrying it out due to health reasons or physical difficulties, remains
open, and that this maternity make it possible. But this condition depends on the
human soul and therefore there can be no certainties about it. Moreover, we
believe that the normative capacity of the law, the strength of the rules of the
legal system, have limits, constituted by the unacceptability of the ethical
state, and each person must refer to that moral and ethical orientation which is
in any case the heritage and fruit of the elaboration of every human person, as
the value choices must be resolved in the individual, in his internal forum,
before than through the law.
This being understood - we reiterate it once again - that the rights of the
newborn cannot in any case be jeopardized. In fact, he is a new person who, as
such, must be protected by society in its development, allowing for growing
autonomy of the individual, progressively reducing parental power, and allowing
for the research and experimentation of a life worth living. , as with age the
autonomous personality of the individual is enriched with cultural experiences
and those deriving from human, individual and social relationships.

Surrogacy universal crime

All this having been stated, the intention of the government majority, and in
particular the positions on this issue expressed on several occasions by the
minister of the family and by the entire government to declare surrogate
motherhood a universal crime, appears to be in fact a demagogic-declarative
provision, devoid of legal effects and the result of the modus operandi of those
who believe they can impose their own jurisdiction and their own law on the whole
world. Prosecuting someone for having committed a crime requires the cooperation
of the legal system of the State in which the crime is believed to have been
committed.
clerk. Obtaining this collaboration is necessary to initiate the process and
proceed with the delivery of the sentence but the fact that those conducts that
in Italy are considered illegal in the country in which they were implemented are
lawful and regulated by law. It therefore becomes impossible for the ordering of
these states to provide any collaboration to instruct the process. The demagogic
and propaganda aim that characterizes the Government's declarations thus becomes
evident and all this to cover up and justify the repressive measures aimed at
hitting and discriminating against families of parents of the same sex, an
objective certainly privileged compared to that of increasing births in any case
of girls and boys, even if only partially of the same genetic line, with a view
to countering the feared substitution of the Italian population which, the result
of an international conspiracy, would aim at ethnic substitution. Evidently, on
the right, aversion to homosexuality trumps even the fear of ethnic substitution.
But, be careful, it must be taken into account that what disturbs the right is
the open nature that they want to give to the institution of marriage which, in
an anti-authoritarian vision of social and human relations, questions the
principle of authority and the patriarchal vision of family, has a profound
effect on the education of children and offers space for ideological pluralism.
on the right, aversion to homosexuality even wins over the fear of ethnic
substitution. But, be careful, it must be taken into account that what disturbs
the right is the open nature that they want to give to the institution of
marriage which, in an anti-authoritarian vision of social and human relations,
questions the principle of authority and the patriarchal vision of family, has a
profound effect on the education of children and offers space for ideological
pluralism. on the right, aversion to homosexuality even wins over the fear of
ethnic substitution. But, be careful, it must be taken into account that what
disturbs the right is the open nature that they want to give to the institution
of marriage which, in an anti-authoritarian vision of social and human relations,
questions the principle of authority and the patriarchal vision of family, has a
profound effect on the education of children and offers space for ideological
pluralism.

The editorial staff

http://www.ucadi.org/2023/06/19/la-trappola-dellutero-in-affitto/