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Latest Surrogacy News
Italian Senate OKs
Fertility Restriction
Italian Senate OKs Law That
Restricts Fertility Treatments to Heterosexual Couples
ROME Dec.
11
The Associated Press
— Italy's Senate
approved tough new rules Thursday restricting fertility
treatments to heterosexual couples who live together and
are of childbearing age.
The law also bars egg
or sperm donation, as well as the use of surrogate
mothers, and rules out treatment for gays, single people
and elderly women.
It forbids freezing
embryos for use at a later date including after a spouse
has died and says no more than three embryos can be
created at one time and all must be implanted in a
woman's womb.
The legislation,
previously passed by the lower Chamber of Deputies, also
outlaws experiments on embryos, such as cloning or
tinkering with their genetic makeup.
It imposes tough
sanctions: Fines of $363,000 to $726,000 for using
donors, and 10- to 20-year jail terms and fines up to
$1.21 million for doctors who try to clone humans, news
reports said.
The law was bitterly
criticized by members of the center-left opposition, as
well as some female lawmakers and the country's largest
gay rights group.
Until Thursday's law,
fertility treatment was largely unregulated, with
couples, including women in their 60s, flocking to Italy
from abroad to take advantage of the vacuum in such
areas as upper-age limits for recipients of donated
eggs.
For 20 years, the
fierce resistance of Roman Catholic legislators to any
compromise had prevented Parliament from passing a law
regulating fertility treatment.
But with a center-right
majority in place, the Senate passed the law 169-92,
with five abstentions. The text must return to the lower
chamber for a purely technical reading, after which it
can be signed into law.
However, as soon as the
Senate gave its OK, some legislators including
Alessandra Mussolini, who has long battled for women's
rights, announced a petition-signing effort to hold a
referendum to overturn the law.
Other lawmakers
announced a national protest to voice their opposition,
and a leading Italian fertility doctor, Severino
Antinori, promised a legal fight, arguing the law
violated Italians' civil rights.
When the lower chamber
passed the law last year, the European Society of Human
Reproduction and Embryology criticized it, saying it
could endanger the lives of women and their babies since
all three embryos must be implanted in the uterus and
cannot be frozen for later use.
In traditional
fertility treatments, doctors give women fertility drugs
to stimulate their ovaries to produce more eggs than
usual. They then harvest the eggs, fertilize them to
create embryos, and implant one or two in the womb. They
freeze the others to use the next time, if the first try
fails.
Without embryo
freezing, the only other proven approach is to harvest
eggs each time. The procedure is painful and overdoing
fertility drugs can cause problems for the woman.
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