Italy’s surrogacy ban undermines family values

Who gets to be a parent? Italy has decided on a simple answer: the straight and fertile. After an 84-58 vote, Italy has fully criminalised surrogate pregnancies, barring thousands of would-be parents from ever having children of their own. The reasons for the surrogacy ban are straightforward. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her party, the Brothers of Italy, oppose the “LGBT lobby”. They also want to enshrine the “dignity of the woman” in law, and they wish to discourage what League Senator Elena Murelli calls the “child trade”, protecting children from exploitation and unseemly parenting arrangements.

It is not clear that banning surrogacy accomplishes any of these goals. Opponents tend to argue that homosexual parents will be bad for the children they raise. It is certainly taboo, but the evidence that having homosexual parents harms children is at best weak. When I reviewed the evidence on the impacts of surrogacy on children’s outcomes in mid-2023, I found that the only outcome that looked to be meaningfully differentiated between children raised by homosexual parents and children raised in traditional families was that the children from homosexual families were more likely to themselves be homosexuals.

There are those who hold that homosexual parents are a problem even if they make fine parents. The reasoning here is quite pressing in the case of Italy, because one of the most convincing reasons for conservative Italians to reject homosexual parenting is that Pope Francis has denounced it. The Pope may have valid religious reasons for denunciation, but, curiously, when he remarked on the practice in 2015, his arguments seemed to be focused on child welfare rather than scriptural prohibition.

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