Italy’s constitutional court has upheld a long-standing ban on single women undergoing treatment for in vitro fertilisation, dealing a big setback to many who aspire to have babies amid the country’s deepening demographic crisis.
Under existing rules, only heterosexual married couples are eligible for IVF in Italy, including in private clinics. This has forced many women who are single or in a same-sex partnership to travel to Spain or the UK for fertility treatments, a much costlier and more complicated endeavour.
In its ruling on Thursday, the court rejected the plea that Italy’s decades-old ban on assisted reproduction treatment for single women was discriminatory and impinged on their fundamental rights to equality, health and freedom to start a family. A lower court previously found the argument had legal merit.
But the judges ruled that lawmakers could change legislation to make IVF more widely available.
“There are no constitutional obstacles to a possible extension by the legislature of access to medically assisted procreation to families other than those currently permitted, including specifically single-parent families,” the court said.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has long warned about the country’s deepening demographic crisis, with the population ageing rapidly and fewer babies born every year.
Yet the ultraconservative coalition remains committed to the “traditional” family, even though Meloni was herself raised by a single mother, and parted ways with her own daughter’s father in 2023. The prime minister has repeatedly insisted that every child has the right to both a father and a mother.
Filomena Gallo, a lawyer who represented the single women challenging the IVF ban, expressed disappointment that the court bounced the matter back to parliament. Lawmakers have so far shown little interest in updating the rules first adopted two decades ago when the late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was in power.
“This is a missed opportunity to overcome discrimination against single women,” said Gallo, who has described the rules as outdated. “The ball is therefore in parliament’s court.”
But the constitutional court, in a separate ruling on Thursday, delivered a major victory to women in same-sex partnerships who have had children through IVF abroad, often with one partner providing the egg and the other carrying the pregnancy.
Until now, Italy has recognised only the birth mother as legal parent, denying the other partner any rights over their own genetic children, or forcing them to go through a lengthy adoption process.
The court called such an approach unconstitutional and ruled that two women who undergo IVF together abroad, with each other’s consent, must both be recognised as the child’s legal parents.
Activists hailed the judgment as a major victory, upholding the idea that children can have two mothers — regardless of rightwing political slogans to the contrary.
“It is a decisive blow against the reactionary and obscurantist policies of the Meloni government,” Alessandra Maiorino, an activist with the populist Five Star Movement wrote on X.
Alessia Crocini, president of Rainbow Families, which represents same-sex parents, called the ruling “a light of hope” at a time when LGBT+ rights are under attack.
However, Italy’s powerful and arch-conservative Pro-Life and Family association expressed outrage, accusing the constitutional judges of exceeding their authority, and calling the idea that a child can have two mothers “an existential lie”.
“No one is the child of two women,” the group said. “We all have a father . . . the judges have decided to legalise the theft of the father.”
Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome
