Regarding the Judgment of the European Court on heterologous fertilization

The recent ruling of the Strasbourg Court has established that banning heterologous in vitro fertilization does not in any way constitute a violation of human rights.

With this ruling, from a legal point of view, the Italian law 40 is indirectly endorsed, which prohibits, in the context of the process of medically assisted procreation, the use of male or female gamete donors unrelated to the couple. Furthermore, this pronouncement puts a stop to the forcing of human rights that have often been made to coincide with the desires and will of individuals and offers the opportunity to highlight relevant legal and anthropological aspects related to the theme of the family. We need to rethink the fact that medically assisted fertilization transforms the very meaning of parenthood. In particular, the heterologous does not offer the guarantee to the unborn child of being thought of within an exclusive interpersonal relationship and violates his right to know his family identity. Parenthood is fragmented into a multiplicity of figures: the biological parents (the so-called "donors"), the pregnant mother, the social parents. The State certainly cannot become an accomplice in this fragmentation of relationships. This sentence guarantees an authentic meaning of privacy, defending, at least in principle, as a socially relevant value the link between social identity and biological identity beyond a model of pure pragmatic efficiency.

In view of the upcoming World Meeting of Families, the University Centre for Bioethics emphasizes how the issue of new reproductive technologies requires us to take up and deepen the human and cultural meaning of parenthood.