Italy’s Senate voted 84-58 to extend a ban on surrogacy to apply worldwide.

While surrogacy was prohibited in Italy twenty years ago, many Italians did an end run around the law by engaging in surrogates in commercially lucrative contracts in places like California, USA, or places where standards are more lax such as Belarus and India. Ireland now has one of the most permissive surrogacy laws in the world.

Such ‘surrogacy tourism’ by affluent Europeans has recently been banned in a number of Asian countries, but this is the first time a European Nation would criminalise its own citizens for hiring surrogate mothers abroad.

Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, commented that it was a “common sense rule against the commodification of the female body and children”, adding that “human life has no price and is not a commodity to be exchanged”.

Eugenia Roccella, Italy’s Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Family, said that “people are not objects, children cannot be bought and parts of the human body cannot be sold or rented”. She continued, “this simple truth, which is already enshrined in our legal system, where the aberrant practice of surrogacy is a criminal offence, can no longer be circumvented”.