Cradle Controversies: Examining Italy’s Surrogacy Ban via Feminist Theory
by Nic Oke
On October 16, 2024, the state of Italy passed a law that completely prohibits residents from seeking surrogacy abroad, with punishments ranging from fines up to $1.1 million (USD) to two years of imprisonment. Technically, the ban is an extension of a previous law prohibiting surrogacy that has been in effect within Italy since 2004. However, this ban only prohibited Italians from seeking surrogacy domestically (Zampano & Santalucia). Thus, pragmatically speaking, many individuals/couples could circumvent the ban for decades by simply travelling abroad to another nation where surrogacy was allowed and returning to Italy after a child had already been conceived from the procedure. However, the updated ban patched this transnational loophole. The policy has sparked a fierce debate among the Italian public with opponents protesting the ways that it gravely harms queer individuals in Italy who wish to build families (Zampano & Santalucia). In this essay, I will draw upon feminist theory, specifically Engels and Kollontai’s theory of the family and Mayanthi Fernando’s idea of the contradiction of secularism, in order to argue that Italy’s surrogacy ban, and the constituent regulation of reproduction represents both a re-entrenchment of the patriarchal subjugation of women and a contravention of liberal secularist and ‘individual rights’ discourses upon which European states like Italy nominally pride themselves.
Italy’s extended surrogacy ban places into focus very contentious debates surrounding the “nature” of the family that had been brewing within the nation for years prior. This is especially the case as the bill is regarded as targeting certain demographics of families such as those within the LGBTQ+ community (affectionately referred to as ‘rainbow families’ within Italian culture) (Paterlini). LGBTQ+ individuals often cannot produce children sexually by themselves either due to lack of genital complementarity or through transgender individuals being rendered infertile through gender-affirming medical procedures (Murphy; Tornello & Bos). To be fair, there are a variety of debates and ethical considerations surrounding surrogacy that have nothing inherently to do with these interrogations of family. Some note the potential for economic injustice or exploitation that emerges from paradigmatically wealthy and white people from the Global North (the demographic that most commonly seeks surrogacy) being able to enlist the reproductive labor of women and other birthing-people from lower socioeconomic classes and within the Global South (Deonandan et al.). Others regard surrogacy as promoting the objectification or commodification of pregnant people’s bodies by allowing their reproductive capacity to be purchased in a transactional sense (sometimes referred to derisively as “womb rent”) rather than within the contours of genuine affection or non-monetary motivation to bear children (Allan). To be clear, it is not my intention to rehash any of those debates here. In fact, one could theoretically concede all these arguments and yet still none of them would account for the fact that all these concerns seem to be far from the only factors underpinning the rationalization of the law among certain sects of Italian society. Instead, in a damning speech prior to the law’s passage, conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni revealed her proverbial hand when she deemed her advocacy for the law and other forthcoming policies as “preserving the traditional family” and “not the LGBT lobby” (Zampano and Santalucia) Such an obvious statement indicates that the Meloni and her majority party pursued the ban based on the notion that surrogacy enables the creation of gay parents who are regarded (somehow) as being inherently deficient or substandard, rather than any concern about. Beyond direct statements, however, the pretext of genuine humanistic view of the law is rendered questionable based on the totalizing provisions of the law itself. As expressed within Italy Magazine, the ban carries no exemption for altruistic or non-commercial surrogacy, despite the fact that this would ostensibly overcome objections about the commodifying or transactional nature of the practice (Ahern). Additionally, the provisions of the law could theoretically just ban surrogacy arrangements in impoverished/subordinated nations or screen surrogacy candidates for previous stable employment If the prospect of exploiting precarious and subordinated birth-givers is the only concern. And yet, the ban remains unnuanced and universal (Ahern).
This blatant attempt to encode the heteronormative traditional family comprised of man and women alone caring for their progeny directly calls into conversation Friedrich Engels’ critiques of the family. Engels (1884) contends that the monogamous family as it is known today emerged from a societal transition to patrilineal descent and the rise of alienable property. This in turn, restricted women to the subservience of a singular man as her exclusivity was necessary to ensure the paternity of any children through whom property would be inherited. Engels thus argues that the development of the family coincides with the subjugation of women as it produced a grave power imbalance by which men/patriarchs determined the flow of property and resources intergenerationally whereas women were relegated to reproductive vessels for men and carers of children. Such a spirit of patriarchal subjugation is definitely embodied within Italy’s surrogacy ban. By so stridently articulating the purpose of the law as gatekeeping children behind heterosexual intercourse, particularly within the context of a notionally nuclear family, the nation of Italy is reinforcing the notion that a woman’s role is with a man, and that she should only expect to be able to build a family by being bound to him. It is not surprising then, that this law suppresses queer family formation which presents a subversive alternative for this type of arrangement. Although certainly not infallible or unaffected by any shred of patriarchal influence, queer relationships, by their very nature, often defy the restrictive gender roles and expectations embedded within the traditional dominant male/female-submissive dynamic (Lamont). Additionally, by queer relationships encouraging a broader acceptance of diverse identities and life courses, queer love can reconstitute definitions of family formation in a way that reframes parenthood as a social obligation on the part of women to a voluntary endeavor based on the mutual desire and affection of the partners involved (Pralat). Thus, Italy’s surrogacy ban and its associated criminalization and marginalization of queer families reinforces norms of the capitalist monogamous family by compelling women and men alike to settle into heteronormative family arrangements if they want to experience the joy of having children. This deeply draconian dynamic foretells great danger in terms of reinforcing gendered property relations and divisions of labor which reinforces what Engels (1884) describes as economic subordination and control over property, giving men more control over financial resources. The ban and its provision of functionally making a male partner a prerequisite for a woman to have children and vice versa therefore legitimates Engel’s (1884) notion that the state deems family as oriented around the purpose “of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage…[who] should later on inherit the fortune of their father” rather than being able to cultivate ways of being beyond these male-centered structures. Thus, the surrogacy ban represents the liberal Italian state exerting control over the reproductive autonomy as a way of fighting against the putative gains of queer liberation. This indicates how in our present discourses, state power is wielded over reproduction in order to suppress resistance to patriarchy and male dominance over the family and property wherever it is being substantially challenged.
Beyond the observation that the Italian surrogacy ban excludes and stigmatizes non-normative families, thus reifying the patriarchal family and the subjugation of women, it is also worth noting how the Italian state even forms a basis for regulating reproduction in this way in the first place. Specifically, as Mayanthi Fernando (2014) notes, Italy engages in a form of “secular cunning” (1) whereby the state moves through contradictory imperatives by simultaneously espousing the value of removing religion/spirituality while simultaneously surveilling and intruding on people’s innermost sexual and religious lives. Although Fernando initially theorized this concept within the context of Muslim French women and state intervention into their personal/intimate lives, (e.g. veils, divorce proceedings, etc.) an analysis of this paradox of secularity holds similarly applicable in this case of Italy’s reproductive regulations. Italy is at least nominally a secular state. Since the ratification of the country’s 1948 constitution, the nation hosts no official state religion. Additionally. laws and official government actions are not allowed to draw upon religious doctrine (Ferrari & Ferrari). Accordingly, Italian civic society is supposed to be organized around what is referred to as the “public/private” divide, whereby the actions of the government are held completely separate from and held not to interfere within the individual lives of the Italian citizenry. Sexuality and reproduction should ostensibly be held as a prime example of this divide, as the most deeply private interactions of people are seemingly the most personal and intimate type of affair that occurs out of the purview of state interference. However, the sentiments expressed by the architects of this law clearly demonstrate the contradictory imperatives of secularity at play in this debate. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was once again condemned by her own words when she stated in public commentary of the surrogacy ban that the practice of surrogacy was “a symbol of an abominable society that…replaces God with money” (Davies). Rather than an earnest belief in the ethical qualms that surrogacy poses for birth-givers, this type of rhetoric clearly indicates a sense of wanting to keep Italian births consistent with the tenets of a certain religion or in line with the supposed will of a God. Thus, just as with Fernando’s research, the surrogacy ban reveals the cunning of secular power. Specifically, this case makes people’s reproductive activities—a domain that paradigmatically private and intimate—the subject of public debate/penalization and surveillance. But even further, it enshrines the traditional family under Christianity a central standard to which the state governs people’s adherence. I find it worth noting that this is the same nation/government that has at various times surfaced concerns about Italian Muslims endangering secularism and proposed banning of Islamic veils and restrictions on the constructions of mosques accordingly (Conti). Although one may regard this dynamic as mere hypocrisy, it in fact reflects something much deeper. Specifically, by violating the public/private distinction that is fundamental to secularity, the Italian state invokes not just an incidental hypocrisy, but in fact preserves an internally consistent logic of upholding the salience of secularity whenever convenient to suppress the communal power of subordinated religious/cultural groups such as Muslims while simultaneously undermining/contravening secularity when necessary to re-entrench patriarchal subjugation and gendered relations of property whenever they are potentially threatened by non-normative ways of being. Indeed, what is most striking about this reality is the unambiguous way in which secularity, a doctrine nominally based in equality, is in fact mobilized to construct and maintain the hierarchy between men and women and between Christians and “others.” In continuation of both past colonial and patriarchal narratives/regimes of power, women, Muslim, and queer people’s bodies are symbolically rendered public spaces over which agendas of freedom, secularism, privacy, and hegemony are imprinted.
Overall, the surrogacy ban reflects a contemporary moment at which liberal states like Italy are going through renegotiations of the liberal social construct which enable them to reoccupy a space that is seen as challenged by pluralistic cultures, religions, sexualities, and other ways of being. It is in this moment that we can see the family and the reproductive subject emerging as a site of regulation and a social unit of reproducing social schemes of inequality that empower men over women. Additionally, we can see the cunning of secular power that inscribes normative sexuality and normative religiosity by contravening the private/public distinction. Acknowledging this reality allows us to see an emerging frontier of resistance that women, queer people, and otherwise marginalized people alike will have to confront henceforth, and invites discussion about what strategies, movements, and analytical frameworks are necessary for enacting resistance to these dominant regimes in pursuit of a more just and equitable society once and for all.
Works Cited
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