«I am profoundly against the practice of surrogacy or GPA (gestation for others, ed.) because, as the Constitutional Court said, it is a crime that offends the dignity of women. Having said that, laws are not made to affirm principles but to solve concrete problems. In this case, one of the most urgent problems is the protection of minors which we cannot pretend do not exist and which the newly approved law completely ignores.”
Graziano Del Rio (in the photo above, during the debate at Palazzo Madama), Catholic senator of the Democratic Party and father of nine children, makes this premise before analyzing Wednesday’s vote in the Senate which made the practice of GPA a “universal crime”. This means that it will be punishable even if an Italian citizen uses it in a state where the practice of renting a womb is legal. The expected penalty ranges from three months to two years, to which is added a fine of between 600 thousand euros and one million euros.
Senator Del Rio, why don’t you like this law?
«All the experts heard by the Commission expressed strong doubts. Gabriella Luccioli, advisor to the Court of Cassation, defined it as a legal stretch for three reasons. The first is that it will not resist the rain of appeals that will arrive, the second is the smallness of the sentence with the paradox of a universal crime punished with imprisonment from three months to two years and the third is that in Italy the GPA is prohibited by twenty years. If you wanted to prosecute an Italian citizen who committed this crime abroad, you could easily have done so even earlier but the Ministry of Justice has never done so in recent years because delicate balances are being struck in relations between states.”
In many countries, including European ones, surrogacy is not a crime.
«Yes, and that’s another problem. The GPA is a global phenomenon, transversal to states, which fuels a huge turnover. The associations against it have been fighting for years for an international ban. Universal crime in a single country serves no purpose other than to wave an ideological flag. It is no coincidence that this rule has been commented on in many foreign media, from BBC al Washington Postbecause other states risk being perceived as an interference in their sovereignty.”
What is the most important gap in this standard?
«The Constitutional Court’s call on the urgency of approving a law on adoptions to protect minors born from these practices and avoid the use of automatic transcriptions at the registry office which present various problems in the case of double motherhood but, above all, of double paternity. This aspect has been completely ignored in this law which, like the Protocol on migrants brought to Albania, will be of no use to anyone but only for propaganda.”
Is your position against the law a minority in the Democratic Party?
«Yes, but that’s not the point. I have always had a very clear position, other party colleagues of mine agree with me, others are only in favor of the so-called “solidarity” GPA. The opposition to this practice which commodifies women’s bodies is transversal, ranging from the Catholic world to feminist associations up to the Radicals. The other day in the Senate there was no discussion on the merits of the problem but in the abstract, an ideological clash that has nothing to do with politics, a game of pick-up lines where everyone has their say and then leaves everything as it is” .
Where can we start again?
«In September 2023, I, together with other colleagues from the Democratic Party, presented a bill to facilitate the adoption of children born abroad through surrogacy, meeting the call of the Consulta. It has not yet been scheduled. Do it and we will discuss it in Parliament trying to resolve the problem.”
