It can also make them outlaws.
“They don't consider us a family,” Capuano, 47, said, referring to the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. “They consider us criminals.”
Italy bars same-sex couples from adopting children in most circumstances or accessing fertility treatments. Like many countries in Europe, it also prohibits the practice of surrogacy within its national borders. This situation has led couples like Capuano and Scarpa, 30, to arrange to have children using surrogates abroad — often in the United States, with its relatively liberal policies.
But now, under Italy's most right-wing leadership since World War II, the government is targeting international surrogacy, as part of what LGBTQ+ community activists criticize as a war on same-sex parenthood.
A decree issued by the Meloni government last year banned local mayors from registering birth certificates that include same-sex parents. This means that 7-month-old Paola – so revered that her umbilical cord, dipped in gold, hangs on a wall in her family's apartment – remains a legal orphan, without parents or recognized citizenship rights in Italy.
The government is also moving to tap abroad Surrogacy is a crime. The extraordinary measure would impose a prison sentence of up to two years and a fine equivalent to $1.1 million on Italians who return with children born via surrogacy. outside. The proposal was approved by the House of Representatives last July, and is expected to be voted on in the Senate — also controlled by Meloni's conservatives — in the coming months.
If passed, this legislation would close the last path to parenthood for same-sex couples like Capuano and Scarpa.
“For us, this is our only option,” Scarpa said.
Meloni campaign against surrogacy
Last month, Estonia It became the 20th country in Europe to legalize same-sex marriage and grant same-sex couples equal parental rights. A vote is scheduled to be held in Greece this month. But as in the United States — where states passed more than 75 anti-LGBT laws last year — the march toward equality has sparked a populist backlash.
“When we look at legal progress, the trend is still going forward,” said Katrin Hoogendobel, advocacy director at ILGA-Europe, an LGBT rights advocacy group. But she added: “What we are seeing across Europe is a decline in the sense that some governments have shifted to the right and are pursuing a very conservative agenda.”
Meloni, 47, is the star of this new generation of conservative leaders, offering a new model for far-right governance. She has distanced herself from her party's neo-fascist roots, largely avoiding the kind of authoritarian projects undertaken by other European populists, and endeared herself in Washington and Brussels by taking a tough stance on Russia and her strong support for Ukraine. It also promoted classic far-right positions on immigration, national identity, and “traditional families.”
Meloni opposes elevating same-sex civil unions, approved in 2016, to marriage status, which would, in theory, open the door to adoption by same-sex couples.
“We live in a time when everything we value is under attack,” Melonie, a single mother who was never married to her child's father and separated from him last year, said at a demographic conference in Budapest in September. “This is dangerous for our national, religious and family identity.”
Nothing has made her position clearer than her long-running campaign against surrogacy.
Meloni's Brotherhood of Italy party was ordered to pay damages last year to a same-sex couple after they, in an earlier campaign against surrogacy, seized a photo of them crying over their newborn son. “He will never be able to say mama,” the ad read. “Children's rights must be defended.”
Eugenia Maria Rossella, Meloni's family minister, insisted: “The problem is not at all about people's sexual orientation.”
“Our goal is to prevent the exploitation of women’s bodies,” she said.
This is fairly common in Europe, where many countries are uncomfortable with surrogacy as a commercial transaction. Pope Francis – who appeared with Meloni at an event last spring to promote Italy's high birth rate – last month called for a global ban on surrogacy, citing the “exploitation of cases of the mother's material needs.”
But legal experts say criminalizing the search for alternatives in other countries would go further than any existing EU policies.
Roccella acknowledged that Italy's ban on international surrogacy would have a disproportionate impact on same-sex couples.
Only 10% of Italian foreign surrogacy clients are in same-sex relationships. But heterosexual couples using surrogates abroad are unlikely to raise red flags when they return home, because they will be able to show birth certificates that contain opposite-sex fathers. For them, the law could serve as a greater “deterrent,” Rosella said.
She added that she knows gay couples who are “wonderful fathers,” but that fatherhood is not “a right” for everyone.
Rokela said that when the government wrote to mayors last year, it was simply informing them of a court decision against parents who sought to register their child's birth certificate in their names. However, legal scholars argue that the concept of legal precedent is less comprehensive in Italy than in the United States. They say that if the government had not issued its notice to mayors, cities and towns would have continued to register children of gay parents.
“A child cannot have parents of the same sex; “This is the ideological premise of our government,” said Angelo Schillaci, a law professor at Sapienza University in Rome.
In one pending case, a prosecutor in Padua is moving to invalidate 33 birth certificates, dating back to 2017, that identify stepfathers.
One of these mothers is Irene Amoruso, 38, who has two children with a female partner. If she loses her appeal, her name will be removed from the birth certificate of the daughter who has no biological mother. Even the girl's last name – which is a composite of her mother's two surnames – must be changed to her mother's name only.
Restoring rights will depend on a long and expensive process of “adopting stepchildren.”
“Technically, I won't be the legal parent anymore, and I won't have any kind of connection to her anymore,” Amoruso said. “Basically, I wouldn't be able to pick her up from school, take her to the pediatrician, or travel alone with her abroad — they would tell me I was kidnapping a minor.”
The story of surrogacy between Italy and the United States
“Good morning!” Capuano tweeted the photo on FaceTime. Outside, the sun had set over the Bay of Naples. Six thousand five hundred miles away in the Southern California suburbs, Ashley May, their 38-year-old replacement, had just returned from her morning workout. When her two young children came into view, they leaned toward the phone to say hello to Sal and Luca.
May work in medical administration. Her husband is in construction management. She says she started thinking about surrogacy after following Instagram posts of a high school friend who was working as a surrogate. “I felt like if I could give this gift to someone, that would be great,” May said.
She said her relationship with Capuano and Scarpa was “instantaneous.” “You may be in your worst mood, and this is what lifts your spirits.”
Paula was the first child she had carried as a surrogate, and at first she wasn't sure she would ever carry another child. Then one night late last year, she and her husband talked about how if she could do it again, it would have to be with Capuano and Scarpa. She said the fertility clinic called her the next day. The Italian couple was hoping to have a second child. May said she started crying. She said she felt like it was “meant to be.”
“It kind of breaks my heart…the hoops and challenges they face on a daily basis,” she said. “Why not allow them to be the wonderful parents they were meant to be?”
The Italian couple knew that having children would be difficult.
Capuano, a financial lawyer, came from a generation in which openly gay men felt fatherhood was beyond their reach and entitlement. But Scarpa, who belongs to a younger generation unwilling to accept restrictions, pushed him to understand.
“We deserve a family,” Scarpa said.
After legal hurdles prevented an effective international adoption, they committed to surrogacy — an investment of $150,000. They also made a firm decision. Both men will give their sperm to a fertility clinic in California, and neither will know the identity of Paula's biological father.
They were at an Airbnb in Southern California, trying to get five-day-old Paola to sleep, when their smartphones lit up with news of a vote in the Italian Chamber of Deputies to criminalize the use of international surrogacy.
“Disgusting,” Capuano remembers him saying as he paced. Scarpa was in tears. She had tainted what had been, since Paula's birth, the happiest days of their lives.
There will be more disappointments when they return to Italy. The city's mayor, Ciro Buonagiotto, had done so He assured them that he would try to legitimize their infant, despite the new government decree on birth certificates. But neither he nor four other mayors could find a way to help.
“Whatever one may think about surrogacy, in my town, in the town of Ercolano, there is now a holy spirit called Paola – why doesn’t she get an ID card?” Bonagotto said.
Eventually, a kindly bureaucrat at the National Tax Office issued Paola an Italian health card, enabling her to receive vaccinations. But she is not registered as an Italian citizen, and is not entitled to public school, future work rights or a pension. Legally, she is an overstayed American tourist.
There will be only one complicated, expensive and frustrating way forward. Through DNA tests, Capuano and Scarpa were able to determine which of them was her biological father. She can then be registered as the daughter of a single father, while the other seeks stepmother rights in the courts.
If surrogacy is legalized, as analysts believe, the situation will be even bleaker for the second child Capuano and Scarpa hope to have.
They say they are willing to give up Italy before giving up their aspirations to start a family. They scan real estate websites in France and the United States.
Their departure will be painful for Paola's doting grandparents, who live in a basement apartment in the family's gated compound near the ruins of Pompeii.
But if it comes to that, “I will bless them and say to them, ‘Go.’” “Go where you're welcome,” said Luca's father, Franco Capuano, 79. Go where there is progress. Go where your rights are recognized, and do not think about us.”
