Two men wanted to start a family. Soon, they could be outlaws.
“Mamma mia!” exclaimed Luca Capuano, feigning surprise as his rotund infant, Paola, slurped another spoonful of her favorite mush, a concoction of rabbit and fennel home-cooked by her other dad, Salvatore Scarpa.
Soon, they hoped, they’d be cooking for more in this kitchen, where Mount Vesuvius looms outside a rear window. The same California-based surrogate who gave birth to Paola last year had agreed to another embryo transplant. The new pregnancy would complete their dream of a family of four.
It could also make them outlaws.
“They don’t consider us a family,” said Capuano, 47, referring to the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. “They consider us criminals.”
Italy bars same-sex couples from adopting children in most circumstances or accessing fertility treatments. Like many countries in Europe, it also bans the practice of surrogacy within its national borders. That stance has prompted couples like Capuano and Scarpa, 30, to arrange to have children using surrogates abroad — often in the United States, with its comparatively liberal policies.
But now, under Italy’s most right-wing leadership since World War II, the government is targeting international surrogacy, as part of what LGBTQ+ activists decry as a war on same-sex parenthood.