Having a baby through a surrogate has been illegal in Italy for nearly 20 years but Giorgia Meloni’s proposals would extend that prohibition to couples seeking to have a child in countries like the US, Canada and India where it is legal. The main destination for Irish people before the war was Ukraine.

“The penalties should apply for offences committed abroad,” the proposed law says.

Babies were being treated as “merchandise”, the backers of the new legislation said, in what was an “execrable example of the commercialisation of the female body”.

Advocates of the new law said that there had been a dramatic increase in recent years in “procreative tourism”, in which straight couples unable to have children, as well as gay couples, and single people had resorted to looking for surrogate mothers abroad.

“The recourse to this practice has dramatically increased and surrogacy is becoming a veritable business which, just to give an example, is €2 billion a year in India,” they said in presenting the draft law.