Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Reproductive Rights. the Point of View of Young Adults in Italy.

The desire to have children is a recent experience in which individuals choose whether, and when, to have them by controlling their procreative potential through contraception. In Italy, a large part of the public opinion and the catholic movements have brought the issue of parental desire back into the realm of the “right” to desire, clarifying that desire is not in itself a right. In fact, individuals with non-normative sexual orientations and singles are excluded from the right to parenting. The so called Cirinnà law, which came into effect in 2016, excluded the right to parenthood for homosexual persons, including the adoption of the partner's child, consistently with the already existing ban on homosexual and single persons from accessing assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). In doing so, it reinforced reproductive inequalities leading to a stratification of “legitimate reproducers” along a hierarchical ladder where at the top rungs, those of full legitimacy, we find heterosexual women and men in couples, while at the bottom rungs, those of exclusion, we find gays, lesbians and singles banned from the reproductive scene as “illegitimate” reproductive subjects.

ARTs have been studied in many of their components and theoretical implications in relation to kinship, redefinition of bodies, biological substances, reproductive cultures, donors’anonymity, and to some extent reproductive bioeconomics. However, the point of view of children born from ARTs and, more generally, young people, whose role is crucial both as donors and as potential future parents, have been under-explored so far. This contribution aims to fill this gap by presenting the preliminary results of a mixed-method research conducted among a sample of university students in Italy with the aim of investigating their views on the topics of ARTs, donation, anonymity, social freezing, riproductive rights and non traditional families.