Italian LGBTQ+ Parents Face Hurdles in Building Families

Vincenzo Romano had only been a father for 26 days when in the middle of a warm California night on February 19, 2020, he was feeding one of his newborn twins, Nicola, while Nicola's twin sister, Anna, and Vincenzo's partner, Aniello Galantuomo, were sleeping. Of the two fathers, Vincenzo was the one responsible for night feedings, since Aniello—known to his friends as Walter—had undergone delicate bladder surgery a few months earlier in Milan, Italy, and therefore needed to rest uninterrupted every night.

Vincenzo and Walter had dreamed for more than 10 years of having a family of their own, and despite this scene finally coming to pass for Vincenzo, everything was about to fall apart in a matter of seconds.

Suddenly Walter woke up, called out to Vincenzo, and with an icy, almost petrified look, murmured, "Help me," and then lost consciousness. Walter was rushed to the nearest hospital, and the first person Vincenzo called was Danielle, their Californian surrogate mother who had carried their children, Anna and Nicola, for the previous nine months.

After a few hours Vincenzo was able to get in touch with the doctor at the ER who had treated Walter.

"It saddens me to have to tell you this over the phone. We did everything we could but the conditions were desperate," he told him, just before Vincenzo cut him off. "Is he dead?" On the other end of the phone a timid affirmative word threw Vincenzo into panic. "The Italian man? Are you sure?" Vincenzo insisted.

The sudden stroke that killed Walter that night was only the first of the unexpected torments Vincenzo would face shortly thereafter. As surrogacy in Italy is prohibited by law and punished with a fine ranging from 600,000 to 1 million euros and up to two years in prison, Walter and Vincenzo had traveled to San Diego to become parents.

Italian law does not allow a child to have two parents of the same sex at the time of birth. For this reason, like hundreds of other gay Italian couples who have flown to the United States and Canada over the past 20 years to have children, Vincenzo and Walter's plan was to have twins by the same surrogate mother, so that each of the twins could be recognized by the Italian bureaucracy as the biological child of at least one of the two parents, in order for them to pass through Italian customs without running any kind of risk.

This arrangement is the only way in which, once back home in Italy, Walter could have legally adopted Nicola, who is Vincenzo's biological son only, and Vincenzo adopt Anna, who is Walter's biological daughter only, namely through a lengthy bureaucratic process called "adoption for special cases." The process takes up to two years and requires exorbitant legal costs and the same-sex couple's willingness to receive unannounced visits from psychologists, social workers, police officers, and doctors. Yet, it is currently the only way for a gay or lesbian parent to be recognized by the Italian state as a legal parent of their non-biological child.

Essentially, this means that in Italy a gay or lesbian parent must navigate a complicated legal labyrinth to adopt their own non-biological child, fearing that the child may become an orphan in the event of the biological parent's sudden death.

Overwhelmed by endless bureaucratic hassles, such as blocked bank accounts and credit cards co-owned with Walter, red tape for the repatriation of his body to Italy, and all the paperwork for the newborns to be prepared for their departure, Vincenzo knew that his daughter, Anna, had suddenly become an orphan in the eyes of Italian law. In the 10 days leading up to his departure from California, Vincenzo lived with the anxiety that once he returned to Italy, Anna and Nicola would be separated, and Anna possibly placed for adoption, since her only legally recognized parent was now dead.

Danielle, her husband, and her children did not leave Vincenzo alone for a moment, helping him care for the twins while he spent hours on the phone with the Italian consulate in Los Angeles and with his lawyer in Italy.

"Danielle was the first person I saw after my husband's death. That is why I still suffer so much when Italian politicians say that American surrogate mothers are enslaved and give birth to children just because they need some money. I will never forget her powerful hug ... when I told her that Walter had died. She had just recently given birth and I sensed all her love and strength as a mother," Vincenzo told me while sipping coffee in his new home in Naples.

Needing more help, Vincenzo immediately called his father, Raffaele, with whom he had severed all relations 15 years earlier after Raffaele refused to accept that Vincenzo is gay, and Walter's sister Milena, who arrived on the first available flight.

Three days after Walter's death, Vincenzo obtained U.S. passports for Anna and Nicola, who by American law were automatically recognized as both his and Walter's children. Soon after, he drove for five hours to and from Los Angeles to meet with then-Italian Consul Silvia Chiave, who helped him with the repatriation of Walter's body. "After that day the consul called me every night to talk for hours and hours until I fell asleep. She wanted perhaps to keep me distracted for fear that I might get depressed and take my own life. We talked about all kinds of topics until I told her every night, 'Goodnight, Consul; I'm going to sleep now,'" Vincenzo said.

As agreed with his lawyer, Vincenzo and his sister-in-law, Milena, booked their flight back to Naples, Italy, with a stopover in Munich, Germany, so as to enter the Schengen area in the European Union in a more tolerant country where they knew not too many questions would be asked by the passport checkers at customs. Indeed, that is what happened, although during that flight Vincenzo could not sleep because of the anxiety he felt mounting.

"Perhaps the authorities in Germany had thought that my sister-in-law, Milena, and I were Anna and Nicola's parents, and let us in with no questions asked. When I finally saw the customs door with 'European Union' and the 12 stars on it, my anxiety calmed because my children were both safe with me," Vincenzo said.

Returning home to Naples without having slept for nearly two days, Vincenzo found his house flooded with relatives and friends offering both condolences about Walter's death and congratulations on the birth of the twins.

"I was devastated. I was surrounded by people who felt compelled to touch and hug me without even speaking. They were all displaying joy and sorrow at the same time, and I felt invaded. I just wanted to be alone and cry," he said.

His lawyer immediately filed the paperwork with the Naples Juvenile Court to have Vincenzo become Anna's "guardian," but his anxiety about losing her had not entirely waned. Formally being an orphan, Anna could have been claimed immediately by social services, which would have sent her within a few days to a public orphanage. Toward the end of February, however, Italy's government services, especially in the south, collapsed. COVID-19 hit Italy fiercely, and on March 9, 2020, then-Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ordered the first national lockdown, forcing all Italians not to leave their homes. Every public office shut down, and all social services filings came to a halt for at least four months. In July, Vincenzo was finally appointed as Anna's guardian. Although she was not legally his daughter yet, no one would be able to wrest her from him now.

The official adoption as Anna's father finally came in July 2021. Until that day, in order for Anna to have access to all the rights of any Italian citizen—such as a public pediatrician, her first vaccines, and nursery school enrollment—Vincenzo had to rely on the "the good graces and empathy of individual bureaucrats," telling them his story whenever he needed to get something done. He felt condemned to what he calls an "eternal and painful coming out" to secure Anna's rights and his rights as a father. 

To date, Nicola is still not recognized as Walter's son, and therefore has no right to an inheritance from his late father. Vincenzo and his lawyer have not yet found a way to secure that right, as no law in Italy would allow a dead gay man to be recognized as the father of a child born by surrogacy abroad.

Surrogacy, which has always been referred to by both moderate and extreme right-wing Italian political parties with the pejorative term utero in affitto ("uterus for rent"), has been illegal in Italy since 2004, and on October 16, 2024, Italy’s Senate approved a new law written by Congresswoman Carolina Varchi of the far-right Brothers of Italy—the party of Premier Giorgia Meloni—making surrogacy a "universal crime." The law had already been approved in July 2023 by the Chamber of Deputies as well.

This means that any Italian citizen who re-enters Italian territory after having children through surrogacy in countries where it is legal will be punished by up to two years in prison and a fine of up to 1 million euros. Currently, the only other "universal crimes" committed abroad for which Italian citizens are punishable in Italy are torture, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

"In general, gay and lesbian couples who want to have children already have to grieve the fact that they cannot biologically be parents. Italian gay and lesbian couples must then also process a second grief, which is that one of the two parents will not be a legal, state-recognized parent," said Nicola Carone, associate professor of developmental psychology at University of Rome Tor Vergata. Now that the law sought by Brothers of Italy is also approved by the Italian Senate, it will go into effect immediately, making the path of biological and adoptive same-sex parenting impossible in Italy. Varchi declined to be interviewed about her bill for this story.

"Superficially, Italy is a country founded on mothers, the womb, and childbirth. But more deeply, however, here we are dealing with an issue of sexism and machoism, where Catholicism finds fertile ground. The main problem is that in Italy wherever there is a pregnant woman, there has to be a man in control of her, and the difficulty women have in having abortions in Italy is explanatory of this," Carone said.

“We think we live in a matriarchal society, but to have the last word on women's bodies here are always men.”

Even Pope Francis has labeled surrogacy as a "deplorable" act. In a speech at the Vatican on January 9, 2024, addressed to all the diplomats who are accredited to the Holy See, the pontiff described it as "a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of material need of the mother," describing children born through surrogacy as "the basis of a commercial contract." In the same speech, he urged diplomats to open avenues to criminalize surrogacy worldwide, without exceptions.

After nine days, Pope Francis received in a private meeting Massimo Gandolfini, one of the most influential Italian Catholic activists, who, for the past 10 years with his "Family Day" association, has been heavily lobbying the Italian Parliament against any kind of LGBTQ+ rights.

“To the same-sex couples who want to be parents we say that a child is not a right. None of us have a right to have a child, because the right to have a child simply does not exist. This means compliance with natural laws, which are being overturned today,” Gandolfini said in a Zoom interview. In April 2023, Gandolfini was appointed an adviser, within the Meloni government, to the Department of Anti-Drugs Policies, the Italian equivalent of the American DEA.

The only way a small fraction of same-sex Italian couples have been able to have their children recognized at birth has been through a few left-wing mayors of populous cities, such as Rome, Milan, Florence, Turin, and Padua. In what so far has been a legislative vacuum, those mayors have taken the risk and responsibility of conferring parental recognition on both members of the couple, ensuring their children the same rights as the children of straight couples. This was possible until January 2023, when the government led by Meloni called for an end to local mayors’ interference.

Those guidelines, although not codified in law, created a chilling effect throughout Italy that prompted even left-leaning mayors and registrars to refrain from issuing birth certificates to children of same-sex couples. A memo—signed by Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi on January 19, 2023 and sent to all Italian prefectures—even encouraged local officials to legally cancel birth certificates already issued by left-wing mayors. In it, he referred to a 2022 Italian Supreme Court ruling that the protection of children of same-sex couples can only be ensured through the "adoption for special cases" process, and not through the registration of the birth certificate by a local registrar or a mayor.

In the memorandum, Piantedosi referred to a ruling of the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation that on December 30, 2022, affirmed that the protection of a minor child of a same-sex couple can only be ensured through its "adoption for special cases." This is therefore the only means of securing two legal parents to a child of a same-sex couple, thus excluding the registration of the birth certificate by a local registrar or a mayor.

The December 2022 case is not the first time the Italian Supreme Court has ruled against same-sex parenting, since the Italian Parliament has never legislated on the issue. However, it is certainly the first time that a government has exploited such a ruling to block the only practice that until January 2023 allowed gay and lesbian couples to register a child with two parents already at birth, without asking the non-biological parent to embark on the process of adopting his or her own child, which can take up to two years, moreover only possible where a mayor of liberal ideals had taken responsibility for doing so.

"Until the September 2022 general election in which Giorgia Meloni won, governments were always disinterested in the children of same-sex couples, leaving it up to judges on the one hand and mayors on the other, letting the legal system find its own way in the absence of a law," said Angelo Schillaci, associate professor of Comparative Public Law at Rome's Sapienza University. 

"Making a birth certificate to a child by writing the names of two same-sex parents at the moment of their birth means recognizing rights to these children immediately, while for these right-wing politicians, with the "adoption for special cases" the government can control, examine and judge these families. Why? Because the parents are LGBTQ. There is a real bias, as if to say, 'We allow you to be parents of these children, but it is better to control you,'" Schillaci said, referring to the fact that in order to adopt their non-biological child, the LGBTQ parent must undergo a whole series of special home visits, including some medical examinations such as HIV testing.

The Milan prosecutor's office was the first to ask, in March 2023, the city’s liberal mayor, Giuseppe Sala, to stop registering birth certificates of same-sex couples’ children. Then, in the same month, prosecutors went after Padua Mayor Sergio Giordani, forcing him to surrender birth certificates of 33 children born to lesbian couples between 2017 and 2023 via in vitro fertilization (IVF), which in Italy is legal only for straight married couples.

"When I met these moms with their babies to register their births, their eyes were shining and I couldn't understand where the problem was. We have problems with wars, massacres, violence, and we are disputing here because two moms want to raise a child? It's time for Parliament to legislate," Giordani said.

Valentina Bagnara, 36, and her partner, Daniela Ghiotto, 44, have hung a massive banner on their balcony reading "Siamo tutte famiglie" ("We are all families") with each letter of the word "Families" written in a different color of the rainbow. Their baby girl, Caterina, born in May 2022, is on their kitchen floor playing with wooden puzzles. She greets her visitor with a roaring laugh proudly showing her still toothless gums.

Valentina and Daniela chose to travel to Aarhus, Denmark, so that Valentina could conceive Caterina through IVF. A single woman or a lesbian couple are not allowed by law to pursue this in Italy. Both of their eyes fill with tears as they describe their journey north to become mothers. "We went in front of the sea both before and after the insemination, and shouted at the top of our lungs the list of names we had chosen for our baby, to propitiate nature," Daniela said. "During the insemination itself we held hands, clutching between our palms an acorn we had picked in a forest near our home here in Veneto, symbolizing a potential oak tree. After the procedure, the nurse gave us a pregnancy test with a post-it note saying 'September 6, good luck.'" On September 6, 2021, Valentina was pregnant, and the dream of motherhood was even closer to becoming a reality.

Both from conservative Catholic, blue-collar families who reacted to their coming out as lesbians with shock, Daniela and Valentina have fought in their region—which historically has always been governed by the far-right League political party, today led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini—for LGBTQ rights, often drawing homophobic and Nazi-fascist threats during small Pride events. They now consider themselves pioneers of same-sex parenting in Italy, and are among the most vocal activists with "Rainbow Families," the only national association in Italy that represents and rallies for families composed of gay and lesbian parents.

"Ours was such a desired, expected, and symbiotic pregnancy that the people talking to us couldn't figure out which one of us was pregnant," Valentina says, recounting how absurd and complicated it had been for the straight couples they met in their prenatal course to understand how two lesbian women like them could decide to become mothers.

When Valentina gave birth to Caterina on May 19, 2022, Daniela was not entitled to take the 10 days of parental leave from work, which in Italy is a right provided only for fathers of straight couples. Caterina was born around 3:00am, and after two hours of " immeasurable joy," Daniela went to sleep around 5:00am, only to wake up at 7 to make it to the elementary school in the Padua province where she teaches Italian and English. When she returned to the hospital that afternoon to spend more time with Valentina and Caterina, a nurse who knew they were a lesbian couple would not let her into the maternity ward, telling her that only the fathers of the newborns had access.

"This is discrimination," Daniela says she shouted, walking into the ward, anyway.

After five days, Caterina’s birth was registered by Padua Mayor Giordani, who listed her two mothers on the certificate. This brought relief and hope to Daniela and Valentina, who had no idea that only eight months later, the prosecutor's office would ask the mayor to examine all birth records of children born to lesbian mothers, and then begin to send summons letters to all 33 couples.

"Since we now know how to defend ourselves very well and have big dreams about our rights, they started to attack our children because that's all there is left to attack. It's a raw nerve because there is no law protecting us. They are attacking our chance to be a family," Daniela says. As Caterina's non-biological mother, she is the one who, pending court proceedings, would be the one to lose all parental rights. Should the prosecutor's office win in the court case against the mayor of Padua, Daniela and all the other 32 non-biological mothers in Padua would have to begin the long and arduous process of "adoption for special cases."

In the time it would take to try to adopt their own children, those kids legally would have only one mom, leaving the non-biological mother no power to make decisions about the child’s health and life, no ability to leave that child an inheritance in case of her death, and no way to protect the child from becoming permanently orphaned if the legal and biological mother were to die.

Dread of such a scenario befell Anna, 38, and her partner, Caterina, 42, who had their two children, Ettore, 5, and Adele, 2 via IVF in Spain. When the couple learned in March 2023 that the Padua prosecutor's office would summon them to court over the validity of their children's birth certificates, they endured three months of stress while waiting for the court summons letter, which is notoriously green in Italy.

"Every day a mom would write in the 'Rainbow Families' WhatsApp group chat, 'My notification letter has arrived!' so I was at a point where every time the doorbell rang I had a panic attack. One July evening I came back from walking the dog and saw the mailman from afar approaching with green envelopes. I ran impatiently right away towards him, who clearly thought I was crazy," Anna says, chuckling bitterly and noting that the anxiety of that time caused a severe case of colitis.

"This government is strong with the weak and weak with the strong. They went after the children, who are the most defenseless,” Giacomo Minozzi, 73, Caterina's father and grandfather of Ettore and Adele, says on the walk to the children's day care center, where he and his wife, Anna, pick them up every afternoon to take them to a playground.

“We are the grandparents who will be wiped out if the prosecutors win. This makes me feel bad because anything could happen to their biological mother, and these children would not be protected."

If Caterina loses her rights as a mother to her children, Giacomo and Anna would also have no right to leave an inheritance to the children and would need special permission just to be able to pick the children up from school or anywhere else. They would, in effect, become legal strangers to their grandchildren.

When Daniela, Valentina, Anna, Caterina, and all the other lesbian mothers in Padua finally appeared in court in November and December 2023, the judge decided to send the case to the Italian Constitutional Court, which will have until the end of 2024 to decide if their children's birth certificates are lawful. Should that Constitutional Court rule similarly to how it ruled in 2019—that is, asking Italy’s Parliament to adopt a law clarifying the matter as soon as possible—the case would be remanded back to the local court in Padua.

Given that Meloni's right-wing party has been in power for less than two years, it is unlikely that a new law legally recognizing the children of Italian gay and lesbian couples will be passed anytime soon. The Italian Parliament was unable to pass any kind of LGBTQ+ rights even with a center-left majority last session due to the influence the Catholic Church—which opposes those measures—has on political parties.

What has changed since last term, though, is the new leader of the Italian Democratic Party, Elly Schlein, who from September 2022 serves as a shadow prime minister in opposition to Meloni.

Openly bisexual, Schlein won her party's primaries with a very clear platform, which included the battle for full marriage equality (as opposed to civil unions), the modification and simplification of adoption regulations, and the legal recognition of children of same-sex couples. Since Schlein has led the party, some Catholic members have migrated to small centrist or independent parties as a sign of protest.

"The failure to legislate on this issue when the left was in power in the past years was a mistake, a serious mistake of the lack of courage of center-left parties that did not understand how social and civil rights are inseparable, because people discriminated against for who they are are people who work, create businesses, and pay taxes," Schlein said, admitting that although there is a unity of purpose within the Democratic Party regarding LGBTQ+ rights, "on the regulation of surrogacy we don't yet have a unified position."

Monica Cirinnà, a former senator, tried to change the culture of the Italian left on LGBTQ+ issues, eventually giving up after more than 10 years of political battles. She now lives in the isolated countryside of southern Tuscany, where she permanently retreated after the 2022 general elections. To her great disappointment, the Democratic Party decided not to run her again in a winning constituency for her party, thus knowing in advance that she would not be re-elected.

Cirinnà is the only politician in the history of Italy who in 2016 succeeded in having approved the one and only right that LGBTQ+ Italians currently have: civil unions. The civil unions legislation—which in Italy is iconically still known as the "Cirinnà Law"—was initially conceived as a marriage equality measure allowing the possibility of immediate adoption at birth of the partner's biological child. Because of political alliances, Cirinnà had to make compromises and agreements with the Catholic allies of the centrist parties, with whom then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was governing. Had her law been passed as she conceived it, all the children of same-sex couples in Padua, Milan, and other cities in Italy would be at no risk of losing legal ties to one of their parents.

"The night before my bill was to be voted on in the Senate, when I learned that Catholic bishops from all over Italy telephoned their respective senators, I understood that in order to pass at least the 'minimal right' of the civil unions I would have to sacrifice the children of same-sex couples, because that was what our Catholic and centrist allies did not want," Cirinnà told me. "What is shameful and what angers me the most is that after seven years we are still stuck at the lowest minimal right, and LGBTQ Italians only have civil unions."

Cirinnà, known for championing civil rights laments the legislature’s inaction and willingness to be on the wrong side of history. "Deciding not to decide is what the Democratic Party is still doing today. One day so many victims of this state-led hatred will ask us why we did not protect them enough."

When Walter died in February 2020 and Vincenzo found himself alone in California and seeking urgent help, Cirinnà mobilized all the LGBTQ+ associations she personally worked with in her terms as senator, trying to provide as much support as she could.

Vincenzo is still grateful to her to this day, and looking at his wedding ring on his finger, he said, "I keep this on my finger as a political manifesto in front of everyone, because I worked hard for it. When I was born, I did not have this right like straight people have. I earned this wedding ring through my struggles. It is mine. My children, too, only abroad could I have dreamed of them."