The Italian government has begun to strip same-sex parents of their legal connection to their kids. The shocking actions come after the country’s right-wing government announced in March that state agencies should no longer register the children of same-sex couples.
The Daily Mail reports that Michela Leidi and her wife Viola were one of the first lesbian couples to have their children’s birth certificates changed.
In January, Michela Leidi suddenly received noticed that she was legally being removed as the mother on her daughter’s birth certificate.
“I cried for ten days when I opened the letter,” said Michela told The Daily Mail. “It was as if I did not exist.”
The 38-year-old mother lives on the outskirts of Bergamo, a city in northern Italy with her 35-year-old wife Viola. The couple are some of the first targets of Prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s advancing anti-LGBTQ+ agenda. Meloni’s coalition pushes ‘conservative moral values’ throughout Italy and disapproves of same-sex couples parenting children. The coalition is going after other queer parents in the country and altering a child’s birth certificate to delete one same-sex parent.
Meloni recently went on record saying, “We want a nation in which – whatever each person’s legitimate choices and free inclinations – it is no longer a scandal to say we are all born from a man and a woman.”
Although recent studies show that two-thirds of Italians support same-sex parenting and adoption, Italian LGBTQ+ couples are banned from accessing reproductive medical treatment such as IVF and surrogacy has not been legal for almost 20 years. Despite the majority of Italians supporting same-sex parenting rights, more than half of Meloni’s supporters are opposed to adoption by same-sex couples.
According to LGBTQ+ Nation, Rainbow Families, a group that supports same-sex couples, believes the Italian government is going after same-sex parenting rights as part of a populist ‘witch-hunt’ that bucks the trend towards growing gay equality in most Western countries.
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