“A new slavery for women, whose commercial elements reveal an “inhuman character, states an article in the Italian edition of L’Osservatore Romano of March 5, 2017, in which the author, Lucetta Scaraffia does not mince words regarding the recent order of the Court of Appeal of Trento, which recognized two men as parents of two twins born of a surrogate mother. In face of “grave faults” and a “profoundly misogynist act” of Gpa (Gestation for others), the author states that “the alarm” should be raised, in recognizing two men and two twins born of a surrogate mother. In face of the “grave errors” and the “profoundly misogynist” tone of Surrogacy (AAP), she encourages raising the “alarm.”
“The fact strikes a woman like me, a feminist, that in a moment such as this in which so much energy and so many voices are committed in lamenting, rightly, violence against women, there are instead so few women who lament what is happening against them on the fundamental plane of maternity. That is, that the sale of the feminine body – traditionally limited to sexual services or, for a time, to nursing – is extended to the woman’s whole body, to her insides, to her uterus, and to a long time – the nine months of a pregnancy.”
Describing Gpa as a “new slavery,” Scaraffia adds ”the painful legal conditions imposed on woman – such as accepting abortion if the clients so decide, for example, or already having children so that the woman is less attached to the child she bears in the womb – do but reveal in the main the inhuman character of the transaction.”
A Cruel Act
Lucetta Scaraffia analyzes also the choice “never to use the egg of the mother that rents, but to acquire it from another woman.” According to her, what stems from this is “that the maternal figure is definitively destroyed, splintered in pieces.” “In this operation of a commercial type, it is “a profoundly misogynist act,” which “wishes to be ennobled by a desire that cannot be considered a right for anyone,” she adds.
“Everyone knows that two fathers do not substitute a mother, just as two mothers cannot substitute a father,’ she affirms, adding “If life sometimes imposes on human beings to coexist from the beginning with this serious lack, a remedy must be sought. But to create the lack voluntarily – and what is more protected by the law — only to fulfill the desire of two adults — is truly a cruel act.”
“And the culture that surrounds us, which insists on interpreting this abnormal situation as a result of progress that advances, almost as if it were animated by one’s spirit, and therefore uncontrollable, is staining itself with grave faults,” comments Scaraffia, who concludes by raising the need to launch the alarm: “And it is above all women, who are the most harmed by these absurd manipulations, who must fight to defend themselves and the children.”
