A bit of sadism from the Italian Supreme Court. A couple in their 50s tried three times to adopt a child and failed, so they paid a woman in the Ukraine to have a baby for them.
Italy’s supreme court has ruled that a baby born to a surrogate mother in Ukraine cannot be kept by the Italian couple who paid for it and must be put up for adoption.
Under Italian law, the person who gives birth to a baby is legally its mother, and the use of surrogate mothers is outlawed.
I have my doubts about surrogacy, and maybe some about people in their 50s adopting, but yanking an existing baby away seems like a crap thing to do.
The mother in Ukraine refused to put her name on the birth certificate.
When the couple returned to Italy and tried to register the boy at the registry office, they were charged with fraud, La Stampa daily said, without providing details on how the would-be parents were found out.
Despite a request from the prosecution to leave the child in the Italian couple’s care, the court decided that the “child of no-one” – whose mother cannot be traced – must be put up for adoption.
Just pointless sadism.
This is the same country that has convicted geologists of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake.
So, Italy is trying to take the BullGooseLoony position away from the USA?
Gah! This is just callous, legalistic bullshit. Lawful evil, if you will.
I’m sure there’s absolutely no influence of the Catholic Church in this situation…none at all…nope…not even a little bit.
I found it quite amazing just how woo-soaked the Italians are. I mean, the iconography is everywhere and that’s one thing, but the people seem by-and-large to be perfectly content to buy into the church’s never-ending hokum. Miracles upon miracles, praying to saints to cure warts, anything and everything under the sun that’s superstitious. Italians have a quite different worldview, and the church is at the center of it all.
The Italian courts have never caught up with the re-unification. Even Mussolini couldn’t untangle the mess. Amanda Knox, and the Monster of Florence cases are the tip of an iceberg of frozen sewage.
There are problems with a law not allowing surrogate mothers under any circumstances, but given that law I don’t understand why you’d consider the court’s decision to be sadistic.
Adoption is very hard in most cases, so quite possibly many people who can be good parents are denied. But the main point of the difficulty is to protect the children from being adopted into “bad” families. We don’t know from the article anything about how potentially good or bad parents these couple would be, we just know that whoever handles adoption processes in Italy didn’t find them suitable three times. Maybe it was not justified, but there’s not enough information for us to know this. Not every person who is denied a request to adopt a child is being treated horribly and unfairly. And in any case even if making adoptions a lot easier is a good thing (which I think to a large extent it is) that’s still not the court’s fault.
So the court has to decide what to do with people who were judged not fit for adoption (by whatever criteria), who then went and knowingly and illegally (they wouldn’t have gotten a surrogate in the Ukraine without knowing it’s illegal in Italy) bought a child.
Yes, taking a child from people who want to love and raise it can be cruel. But do you really want to say that taking a child from people who illegally bought one cheaply abroad is always cruel and wrong?
Why, given the limited information we have from the article, would deciding to give the potentially-unfit parents permission to keep a child they illegally bought, would be the correct decision?
Why is it “sadistic” not to let people keep a child they illegally bought abroad?
Does the supreme court of cassation in Italy’s legal system even has the authority to say “no, they paid for the child, they can keep it. Fitness and the law be damned.” if it wants to? Its main purpose in appeals is to decide on interpretations of the law, so if the law is very clear on the surrogate being the mother then the case is essentially of people who claim to have bought a child abroad from an unknown (so can’t be talked with to check) mother and tried to register it as their own without going through any of the processes of adoption.
Or is there another link with more information I’m missing, that changes thing?