The legalisation of surrogacy would be “the final blow” against the family in Italian law, the head of Italy’s bishops’ conference has said, saying surrogacy “exploits the female body” and profits from the poverty of women.
Addressing members of the bishops’ conference, Genoa’s Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco said under a new law civil unions are implicitly identical to marriages, differing only in terms of terminology and some “easily circumvented legal devices”.
He also criticised how Italian politicians spent months tackling an issue that affects only a tiny percentage of the population when unemployment and poverty were growing, and spoke on the apparent inability of Europe’s governments to find a fair and coordinated response to the refugee crisis, and on international failures to address anti-Christian violence.
“In the world there seems to be a growing indifference to such violence as if the real problem was something other than the right to profess one’s faith without undergoing persecution and death,” he said.