On Thursday, the European Parliament approved an amendment to the 2022 report on the rule of law in the European Union in which it condemned the Italian government for asking all mayors to stop transcripting the birth certificates of children born abroad with the gestation for others (the GPA, the pregnancy carried by one person on behalf of others, used by single people, heterosexual and homosexual couples). The amendment just approved says:
This decision will inevitably lead to discrimination not only of same-sex couples, but also and above all of their children.
The amendment mentions “the instructions given by the Italian government to the municipality of Milan to no longer register the children of same-parent couples”: in reality, the Italian government has not issued specific instructions to the municipality of Milan, nor has it addressed only families with same-sex parents.
The circular to which the amendment refers had been sent to all the Italian prefects, therefore not only to Milan, and concerned the birth certificates of those born with GPA: therefore also children of the many Italian heterosexual couples who made it abroad, given that in Italy it is an illegal practice for anyone. In Milan, the prefect had then extended the request to female couples who resort to assisted fertilization abroad with another circular, in which he had asked to omit the non-biological parent in the birth certificates of children of same-sex couples born in Italy (on those born abroad the prefect had not expressed himself and had said he had to do further investigations).
The amendment just approved in the European Parliament was proposed by the liberal group Renew Europe, which includes MEPs from Action-Italia Viva, the party of Carlo Calenda and Matteo Renzi. The amendment says that the actions of the Italian government, according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989, constitute “a direct violation of the rights of minors”. For this reason, the amendment invites the Italian government to “immediately revoke” its decision.
