In late 2024, Italy’s decision to criminalise surrogacy abroad for its own citizens places the country in an American debate where reproduction is not only a moral question, but also a field of law, medicine, markets and personal autonomy. The formal act is narrow: Law No. 169 of 4 November 2024 amends Article 12 of Italy’s 2004 assisted reproduction law so that surrogacy committed abroad by an Italian citizen can be prosecuted under Italian law. But from the United States, where surrogacy exists within a fragmented but highly developed legal and medical ecosystem, the Italian case becomes something larger: the image of a European country trying to project a national moral order beyond its borders.
The Senate’s final vote on 16 October – 84 in favour, 58 against and no abstentions – was reported by American news coverage less as a technical amendment than as a marker of Giorgia Meloni’s conservative social agenda. AP, a mainstream American wire service read by a broad public and by local newspapers across the United States, framed the measure through two facts especially legible to American readers: Italians could face up to two years in prison and fines up to €1 million, and the law would apply even when the procedure takes place in countries such as the United States or Canada, where surrogacy can be legal.
That last point is what gives the story its American charge. In Italy, the law speaks the language of protection: women’s dignity, children’s rights, resistance to the commodification of the body. In parts of the American reading, however, the same measure appears as something more intrusive: a state telling its citizens that a family arrangement lawfully organised in California, Canada or another permissive jurisdiction remains morally and criminally punishable at home. The Italian border, in this interpretation, is no longer only territorial. It becomes ethical.
The contrast is sharpened by the American legal landscape itself. The United States has no single national surrogacy regime; laws vary by state, and specialist legal guidance is often necessary. The American Bar Association has described this variability as a source of uncertainty for intended parents, surrogates and children, while the American Society for Reproductive Medicine treats gestational carrier arrangements as ethically justifiable when they include informed consent, legal advice, health care and psychological support.
This does not mean that the United States reads surrogacy only through liberal acceptance. The country has its own moral conflicts over reproduction, sharpened in 2024 by battles over IVF and embryo status. But the American institutional vocabulary is different. It tends to ask whether the contract is enforceable, whether the surrogate is protected, whether parentage is clear, whether clinics and lawyers manage risk properly. Italy’s vocabulary, by contrast, now elevates the practice into the category of a crime that follows the citizen abroad.
The numerical scale also changes the perception. Assisted reproductive technology is a structured medical sector in the United States: CDC data for 2022 reported 435,426 ART cycles performed at 457 reporting clinics, resulting in 98,289 live-born infants, about 2.6 per cent of all infants born in the country. Gestational carrier pregnancies remain a small subset, but ASRM notes that between 2017 and 2020 they represented 13.7 per 100,000 deliveries nationwide. Against that background, Italy is not seen merely as banning a marginal practice. It is seen as rejecting an entire legal-medical architecture that American professionals have spent years trying to regulate rather than abolish.
Two practical examples make the reputational effect clearer. The first concerns Italian citizens who travel to North America for surrogacy because domestic law does not allow it. For American clinics, agencies and family lawyers, the Italian law creates a new layer of cross-border risk: a procedure valid under local rules may expose the intended parents to criminal consequences once they return home. The second concerns same-sex couples. AP’s coverage stressed that the ban formally applies to all couples, but that advocates see it as especially severe for gay families in a country where same-sex marriage is not recognised and adoption routes are limited.
From this angle, the Italian measure produces a double image. To conservative observers in the United States, it may confirm Italy as one of the few Western democracies willing to give legal force to a traditional conception of motherhood and family. To liberal, legal and reproductive-rights circles, it presents Italy as a country where the state’s moral definition of family can override individual reproductive choices even when those choices are made abroad.
The American lens is therefore not simply hostile or admiring. It is structurally different. In the United States, surrogacy is entangled with markets, private medicine, state-by-state regulation and the language of rights. In Italy’s new law, the same practice is absorbed into a national moral boundary. What becomes visible is not only Meloni’s conservatism, but a broader Italian posture: a country that often seeks international credibility through moderation in Europe and foreign policy, while asserting a much harder identity line on the family.
The result is a peculiar external portrait. Italy appears neither isolated nor irrelevant, because the issue belongs to a global argument over reproductive technology, parenthood and the body. But it also appears unusually willing to transform a domestic moral principle into an extraterritorial criminal signal. In the American reading, the Italian family becomes more than a private institution or a political symbol. It becomes the place where the state marks the limits of modernity, even when the journey to parenthood has already crossed the Atlantic.
