Tangled Italian surrogacy ruling: gay couple gets one twin each, and they can’t call them siblings

Fifteen months ago in California, a surrogate mother gave birth to twin boys. The babies were the sons of a gay Italian couple who had used in vitro fertilisation to have children.

But when the two men returned to Milan with their newborns, a clerk at the registry office refused to transcribe the babies’ birth certificates, barring the men from registering the boys as their legal children.

Cases like this have happened before in Italy, where surrogacy is illegal and Italian couples face problems in having babies born to surrogates abroad legally recognised as their own. What’s not common is the decision a court in Milan issued last week: Despite being twins, the court said, the two boys aren’t brothers.

After the clerk’s refusal, the couple in Milan had sued to be allowed to register as their children’s parents. The couple has decided to remain anonymous to preserve their privacy and the Italian media is not publishing their names.

At first a judge ruled against them, but the couple appealed and a new court partially granted their request. Because the men used separate semen samples to fertilise the eggs, the court said that each of them can now register his biological son as his own. But the babies cannot be recognised as children of the couple, nor are they to be considered brothers, even though they share the same genetic mother, who donated both eggs.

Despite this contradiction, Famiglie Arcobaleno, a nongovernmental organisation advocating the rights of same-sex parents and their children, has hailed the court’s decision as a “positive step.” “It’s the first time that an Italian court has established that a child’s best interest comes before (the legality of) how he or she was born,” the NGO’s president, Marilena Grassadonia,said in a telephone interview. The group has helped the two men in their court case.