Who gets to be a parent? Italy has decided on a simple answer: the straight and fertile. After an 84-58 vote, Italy has fully criminalised surrogate pregnancies, barring thousands of would-be parents from ever having children of their own. The reasons for the surrogacy ban are straightforward. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her party, the Brothers of Italy, oppose the “LGBT lobby”. They also want to enshrine the “dignity of the woman” in law, and they wish to discourage what League Senator Elena Murelli calls the “child trade”, protecting children from exploitation and unseemly parenting arrangements.

It is not clear that banning surrogacy accomplishes any of these goals. Opponents tend to argue that homosexual parents will be bad for the children they raise. It is certainly taboo, but the evidence that having homosexual parents harms children is at best weak. When I reviewed the evidence on the impacts of surrogacy on children’s outcomes in mid-2023, I found that the only outcome that looked to be meaningfully differentiated between children raised by homosexual parents and children raised in traditional families was that the children from homosexual families were more likely to themselves be homosexuals.

There are those who hold that homosexual parents are a problem even if they make fine parents. The reasoning here is quite pressing in the case of Italy, because one of the most convincing reasons for conservative Italians to reject homosexual parenting is that Pope Francis has denounced it. The Pope may have valid religious reasons for denunciation, but, curiously, when he remarked on the practice in 2015, his arguments seemed to be focused on child welfare rather than scriptural prohibition.

At the time, Pope Francis remarked that: “Children mature seeing their father and mother like this; their identity matures being confronted with the love their father and mother have, confronted with this difference [between the sexes].” But, unless researchers are missing a crucial outcome for him to base his case on, it seems Francis is just wrong: children do not need the example of a male and a female parent to mature normally.

If he were right, what should we make of couples with butch women and effeminate men? Or couples with two masculine or feminine, but still heterosexual partners? Plenty of couples feature men acting in feminine ways and women acting in masculine ways, and gay couples can feature parents acting whichever way too. Will the children of these arrangements turn out poorly because their parents don’t display typical sex differences in behaviour? What about the outcomes for the children of widowed mothers or fathers or orphans? Unfortunately for potential LGBT parents, Pope Francis’s word — however misinformed — is a more than sufficient justification for Catholic opposition to homosexual families.

Regardless of what Pope Francis thinks, homosexual parents should barely factor into the discussion of reasons to support or oppose surrogacy as they’re a slim minority among its users. The typical estimate provided for Italy is that 90% or more of the surrogacy-seekers are heterosexual couples. This is not very far from the estimates from other countries, although it should be noted that homosexuals are a growing portion of global surrogacy-seekers.

Some opponents of heterosexual surrogacy claim that it is an expression of vanity, a desire to offload ruining one’s own body with pregnancy to another woman, in exchange for money. This argument runs into a few issues, like how altruistic — uncompensated — surrogacies are a very common variety of it.

In fact, the top stated motive for surrogates is “the desire to help a couple have a family” (72% said this was “very important”). Compensation (31%) comes behind the “calling to help others in need” (59%), “the desire to bear a child” (49%), and “personal experience with infertility in my personal network” (39%), although compensation is rated as at least being “somewhat important” for 80% of surrogates. But critically, if a woman volunteering to be a surrogate needs the money, reputable agencies will probably disqualify her. The problem of financial exploitation is well understood enough for that to be common practice, making exploitation in surrogacy uncommon.

This is also why the extensive focus on protecting women’s dignity (namely the surrogate’s) is based on a faulty premise. The best proof of this comes from surrogate mothers themselves. As I noted last year, surrogates rarely express regret. In typical surveys, the overwhelming majority say they are satisfied with their surrogacy experience and also that they would do it again.

One potential source of indignity could be financial exploitation. There have certainly been surrogates who have been pressured into surrogacy because they needed money. There are others who have been pushed to abort a child they wanted to give birth to because the commissioning family no longer wanted it. These scenarios are rare, but they do not constitute a good argument against surrogacy anyway.

Instead, they constitute a good case for regulation. Certifying surrogate matching agencies and holding them, surrogates, and commissioning families to high standards are vastly better solutions to exploitative practices in a world where surrogates might be the only way for some families to have their own children, and especially given today’s abysmal fertility rates.

Another reason surrogacies are overwhelmingly not expressions of vanity is that the most common reason for them is infertility. Women with Müllerian aplasia, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome, and other obstetric impediments are the primary users of surrogates. In fact, in some places where surrogacy is legal, it can only be commissioned if infertility or other medical complications are indicated. Were it not for surrogacy, these women — who are generally well-to-do and tend to make for above-average parents — simply wouldn’t be able to have their own children.

It’s possible to argue that wanting your own genetic children rather than adopting is itself an expression of vanity, but it’s hard to humour that idea given just how absolutely innate wanting to care for your own children is. If following your instincts in whatever way you can is vain, then, yes, surrogacy is vain, even when it’s the only way to have a biologically-related child. Given how much of everyday life is driven by vanity — including, for some women, getting pregnant the normal way — one would hope this wouldn’t drive legislation.

At the end of the day, what Italy has banned is a pro-family agreement between consenting adults. The partners to these arrangements are those who want to allow others to have children and those who want to have children. Surrogacy is a practice that creates families and, if accepted, affirms that people should be able to have complete bodily autonomy. The only fully coherent opposition is based on religious reasoning of the sort that increasingly many people want to do without.

Pope Francis is right when he says a child is a gift. But he is wrong to say a child is a gift that can’t come about from surrogacy without hurting anyone.

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Cremieux Recueil is an independent writer. His writing can be found on Substack.

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