Since 2004, Italy has banned the buying and selling of children — surrogacy — within the nation’s borders. Now, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is working to prevent Italians from buying and selling children outside of the country. According to the mainstream media, this is a bad thing. That is, the ban is bad — buying and selling babies at will is apparently a human right.
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Meloni visited the United States in late July to be diplomatically wined and dined — er, ice-creamed and sniffed — by President Joe Biden. The New York Times seized upon the opportunity to brand the conservative prime minister as a shorter, blonder Benito Mussolini. (When all you have is a hammer, everyone’s a fascist.)
One point against Meloni (in the Times’ telling, at least) is her effort to outlaw Italian involvement in international surrogacy. In the media, surrogacy has been treated as a compassionate miracle option for couples who can’t — or choose not to — bear a child themselves. But a closer look at the practice reveals that there’s nothing compassionate or miraculous about surrogacy.
Unlike adoption, surrogacy entails the purchase of a human life. The child-seeking couple enters into a contract with the surrogate mother, renting out her womb to carry a child to term. In some instances, one or both members of the child-seeking couple donate eggs or sperm for the embryo’s creation; in others, the child is created from gametes purchased from total strangers.
Most media coverage of surrogacy features elated purchasing parents and a glowing surrogate mother — if they even mention her at all. But the realities of surrogacy are much darker than the mainstream media wants to admit. Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, has found that the majority of surrogates are low-income women who enter into surrogacy contracts as their main source of income.
The surrogacy industry preys upon desperation, offering some sense of financial stability to women who have nowhere else to turn. Unsurprisingly, the industry flourishes when society falls apart. Just look at Ukraine.
Last week, left-leaning website GrayZone shone a spotlight on the exploitation endemic to Ukrainian surrogacy. “Business is booming for the surrogate baby industry, which requires a steady supply of healthy and financially desperate women willing to lease their wombs to affluent foreigners,” GrayZone reports.
Ihor Pechenoha, medical director of surrogacy giant BioTexCom, put it into even starker terms: “We are looking for women in the former Soviet republics because, logically, [the women] have to be from poorer places than our clients.” Earlier this year, he told Spanish magazine La Marea that “all those who work as surrogate mothers do so out of financial hardship.”
Torn apart by war, Ukraine has emerged as the world capital for surrogacy, controlling at least 25 percent of the international market. When women in a war-torn nation have families to feed and few ways to put food on the table, they are left with little negotiating power, and the surrogacy industry holds all the cards. The industry is riddled with human-rights abuses (human trafficking, for one), and former BioTexCom surrogates have spoken out about the company’s horrific treatment of pregnant women.
But from the outside, companies like BioTexCom keep up appearances, catering to Western sensibilities — or insensitivities — regarding surrogacy.
Meloni’s efforts to prevent Italian citizens from engaging in international surrogacy aim to decrease the demand for exactly the kind of surrogacy schemes ongoing in Ukraine. But the mainstream media has been quick to protest. Meloni’s proposed ban is, according to them, an attack on the human rights of LBGTQ Italians.
That’s right. The Left only sees surrogacy as a human-rights issue when someone says you can’t buy a baby.
Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a puff piece about the travails of gay couple in Milan seeking to start a family via surrogacy while Meloni’s “fangs are showing.” The couple purchased their son through a Seattle-based surrogate, which means that the boy has birthright American citizenship, complete with the American birth certificate and American passport.
Prior to the child’s flight to Italy, Meloni had “ordered municipalities to obey a court ruling made in December and stop certifying foreign birth certificates of children born to Italian same-sex couples through surrogacy.” (Or, more simply put, Meloni enforced the law, as interpreted through Italian courts.) When the baby arrived in Italy, he was treated like an American, not Italian, citizen. Now, he must undergo the same immigration process as any other non-Italian person. This is, to the New York Times, clear proof of Meloni’s alleged anti-LGTBQ agenda.
Meloni’s allies, however, see things differently. Facing the reality of surrogacy head-on, they have not been shy to speak the truth about the abusive practice. “We strenuously say no to the sale of children,” said Italian lawmaker Maurizo Lupi. “Surrogate maternity is the most extreme form of commercialization of the body.”
Elisabetta Gardini, another figure in Meloni’s party, called surrogacy a “uterus for rent [that] outrages the dignity of women and tramples on the rights of children.”
Italy’s stand on surrogacy is a breath of fresh air in an American political landscape that continually confuses human rights with the ever-evolving project of leftist ideology. And as the surrogacy industry continues to skyrocket — by a projected 25 percent annually in coming years — it’s important to keep the story straight amid media madness.
Buying and selling children is always wrong, full stop.
Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Traverse City, Michigan. Follow her on Twitter at @mfmyler.
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