Meloni is Selling Her Draconian Surrogacy Ban As A Feminist Act — I Don't Buy It

-OpEd-

PARIS — It's been a bill that right-wing leader Giorgia Meloni has been hoping to get through parliament since she came into office in 2022 as Italy's first-ever woman prime minister: The Italian parliament Wednesday night made it illegal for people to go abroad to have a baby via surrogacy.

For Meloni, it's always been a fight for feminism.

“A common sense norm against the commodification of the female body and children,” Meloni celebrated on X. “Human life has no price and is not a bargaining chip.”

On the website of her party, Brothers of Italy, the news is accompanied by the image of a pregnant belly turned piggy bank, with a one-euro coin being thrown into it.

Surrogacy has been illegal in Italy since 2004. Anyone who creates, organizes or advertises surrogacy commits an offense of criminal relevance that can be punished with up to two years in jail and fines of up to one million euros. But now, after the Tuesday vote in the upper house, the law extends the ban and the same fines and jail terms to those who go to foreign countries where surrogacy is legal.

It is unclear how the law could actually be applied, as legal experts such as Filomena Gallo told La Stampa newspaper: “It is legally inapplicable. To punish in Italy a crime committed in another country, it needs to be considered a crime there as well.”

What's the end game?

LGBTQ+ couples, who are not allowed to adopt or use IVF in Italy, consider the legislation an attack against them. Veiled behind a discourse that talks about the rights of women, right-wing politicians are trying to make it impossible for them to have a family, they say.

Yet approximate data show that of the 250 births by surrogate mothers who are registered in Italy every year, 90% are from heterosexual couples.

So, what is the government’s end game? They are trying to hide behind a women’s rights discourse to make this project more palatable? Surrogacy has become a business that “demeans the dignity of women”, Meloni has said over and over again.

“Motherhood cannot become a market, women's bodies cannot be rented out, lives cannot be bought, and we are concerned about mind-boggling numbers and figures, to the detriment of women who often find themselves in economic hardship or who in any case have as their main motive for joining this market that of the promised compensation,” said Fratelli d'Italia.

The danger of "cheap hubs"

After the law was passed yesterday, Family, Equal Opportunity and Natality Minister Eugenia Roccella said: “Those who are entrenched behind the rhetoric of 'rights' to justify the practice of womb renting, should ask themselves why there is instead a worldwide network of feminism that supports Italy's initiative and considers our country an example to be followed everywhere.”

It is true that there are feminists around the world who see surrogacy as a form of modern slavery and commercialization of the body. Don’t get me wrong: I also worry about the exploitation of commercial surrogacy in “cheap hubs,” as was the case of Nepal, Kenya or Ukraine.

But I also don’t believe in these absolute bans — especially when they are hiding something deeper. If the problem is that we are not remunerating women fairly for their work carrying a pregnancy, shouldn’t that be the focus of a fight against the way commercial surrogacy works now?

Also, if we are so worried about women carrying a fetus that is not their own, why isn’t Meloni in favor of abortion too?

Collective responsibility

As British feminist scholar Sophie Lewis writes in her 2019 book “Full Surrogacy Now”, we should expand the right of surrogate mothers towards the babies they gestate to acknowledge that surrogates are more than mere vessels, thus breaking down our assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share.

I simply don’t buy any of this so-called feminist rhetoric that Meloni is using. As an Italian journalist who has been covering children and the idea of caregiving for the past six years, I often find myself covering which governments worldwide really try to make people’s lives easier, and which ones encourage young people to have children. Given the natality crisis a lot of the global North is facing, this is a pertinent question.

It is also, by the way, one of the Meloni government’s foremost worries, apparently.

Perhaps, these considerations are indeed connected — just not in the way they think.

To me, Meloni and people like her — I am thinking of JD Vance and his criticism of childless “cat ladies” — are interested in more children being born only if they fit within their ideas of family: heterosexual, with the right passport, and wealthy enough not to put demands on the overall state machinery.

But it is exactly that strict idea of family that is making it impossible for younger generations to think about taking on the huge responsibility of having children. For the more politicians try to barge into the OB-GYN room, and the more they restrict the possibilities of who we can consider parents, the more difficult they will make the prospect of imaging building a life with children.

If instead we expand the definition of family and take collective responsibility for all children — rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with — we can imagine a radically different and more fruitful future. And it just happens to share a vision with the proverbial village that helped humanity evolve into who we are today.