There is a point where politics meets the truth of human life, where law measures itself with the mystery of life that is born. It is the point in which a woman carries a child inside her, feels him growing, guards him, accompanies him in the silence of the months in which everything is formed: the body, the breath, the primordial memory of the loved one. It is from this point that we must look at the proposal for an international moratorium on surrogacy (promoted by the governments of Italy and Chile during a conference on the sidelines of the session of the UN Human Rights Council, ongoing from 15 June to 10 July in Geneva, ed.) not as an abstract debate, but as a question on human dignity.
Surrogacy today is not a gesture of solidarity between human beings. It is a market where many women experience exploitation, psychological manipulation, economic dependence, up to extreme forms of contractual violence: if the child does not correspond to what was agreed, the contracts can provide for the rejection of the child up to the request for abortion. AND after giving birth comes a further deep wound: the immediate, planned, inevitable separation. A separation dictated by a clause. In Italy, all this is not allowed. The law prohibits surrogacy in all its forms. And this ban is not a legacy of the past: it is a protection of the woman, of the child, of the truth of the relationship that unites them.
For this reason it is ambiguous – and profoundly misleading – to present surrogacy as a gestation for others, almost as if it were an act of generosity, a sacrifice of love made for the good of others. The language, here, risks deceiving: it transforms a planned separation into an apparent form of altruism, as if the delivery of a commissioned child could be interpreted as a gift. And even if there were no financial compensation, it would still be unacceptable. Because motherhood is not a service that is performed. Because the woman’s body is not an instrument that is made available. Science confirms it, but even before that, the experience of every mother says it: a biological, emotional and sensorial dialogue is created between the woman carrying on the pregnancy and the child growing inside her. It is an ancient language, made up of shared beats and rhythms.
It is a bond that cannot be contracted out, cannot be interrupted without leaving traces. Natural motherhood is not just a biological fact: it is gratuitous, it is a gift, it is a “yes” that cannot be bought or sold. It is the certainty that the child is not a product, but an entrusted mystery. Every human being, growing up, formulates the question that establishes his own identity: Where do I come from? It’s not a psychological question. It is an ontological question. It is the need to know one’s origins, to recognize oneself in a story, in a face, in a voice.
The moratorium is not against anyone. It is for someone: for the vulnerable women who become cogs in a system that uses them; for children, who have the right not to be exchanged; for society, which cannot accept that maternity becomes a performance and life a contractual good. It is an act of global responsibility, a way of saying that not everything that is technically possible is humanly acceptable.
Parenthood, when authentic, is always an act of gratuitousness, it is a gift that requires no guarantees. Surrogacy, on the other hand, introduces an opposite principle: performance, guarantee, delivery. And when life enters the logic of the contract, it loses its deepest truth. In my daily work at the Mangiagalli Life Help Center I meet women who experience difficult motherhood, often marked by loneliness, fear and precariousness. Yet, in each of them, even in the most complex situations, I see a strength that no contract can ever replicate: the strength of the bond, of the desire to protect, of the responsibility towards a life that only asks to be welcomed. The moratorium is not a limit to freedom. It is a limit to the power of money, of technique, of desire which becomes absolute right. Why the question “Where do I come from?” deserves an answer that is not a contract, but a face.
*Soemia Sibillo, vice-president of the Italian Movement for Life and director of Cav Mangiagalli in Milan
