An appeals court has ordered Italy to recognize a German adoption that gives a 4-year-old child one mother and two “fathers” as his legal parents, the first such ruling of its kind in Italy.
On May 12, Italy’s Court of Appeal in Bari made public a decree ruled on January 21, 2026, according to which a German adoption involving a child born to a woman and later adopted by the “husband” of the biological father must be recognized under Italian law.
“It is a ruling that grants protection to new forms of shared parenthood, which is not in conflict either with Italian law or with the superior interest of the child,” attorney Pasqua Manfredi said in comments reported by the Italian press.
The child was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on December 17, 2021, to a woman described in court documents as a longtime friend of a same-sex male “couple” who had been together for more than a decade and “married” in Germany since 2019. The boy was initially registered as the child of the biological mother and biological father, but, in late 2022, a Berlin court approved adoption by the father’s “husband” under German law.
In October 2024, the men asked an Italian municipality in Apulia, southern Italy, to register the German adoption order, because the biological father is registered as an Italian citizen abroad. Local authorities refused, arguing that the circumstances indicated a possible “secret surrogacy,” which is prohibited under both Italian and German law. Court records show that municipal officials claimed there remained “legitimate suspicion” that the child had been carried “on behalf of intended parents,” which is to say, via a surrogate.
The appellate judges rejected that argument after reviewing German judicial and social service documents. According to the ruling, Berlin social workers visited the family home on October 10, 2022, and reported that “both men had exercised parental responsibility since the child’s birth and had provided daily care, assistance, and education.” The judges also stated that the biological mother consented to the adoption and maintained regular contact with the child and the two men who were effectively raising him.
The judges further noted that the child continued to see his mother and maternal siblings and that relations between the two households were described as “warm and affectionate.” German social workers also observed what they called the child’s “serenity” and described the conduct of both the father and his “husband” as “attentive and appropriate.”
The decision relied in part on previous Italian Supreme Court rulings concerning the recognition of foreign family-law judgments. The appellate court cited precedents establishing that foreign adoptions involving same-sex “couples” may be recognized in Italy, provided that no surrogacy agreement existed and that the recognition “does not violate international public order.”
Italy is gradually aligning itself with prevailing Western legal and cultural standards on family, parenthood, and bioethics, despite nominally conservative governance under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The judgment did not emerge from parliamentary legislation approved by the current government, but from the interaction of appellate courts, European legal principles, international private law, and a judiciary increasingly willing to recognize foreign family arrangements once they have already been formalized abroad. In practice, this means that even governments rhetorically opposed to progressive anthropological reforms often face structural limits when confronted with transnational legal precedents and the autonomous power of the courts.
The dynamic echoes developments previously seen in the United States and parts of western Europe, where judicial decisions gradually normalized legal categories that had initially lacked broad democratic or legislative consensus.
In Italy, courts frequently invoke constitutional principles, European jurisprudence, and the “best interests of the child” standard to justify the recognition of family arrangements created outside the country. Although Italian law prohibits surrogacy, it would be a mistake to reduce the complexity of such cases to that single aspect.
Indeed, the Italian ruling raises profound anthropological and moral concerns even apart from the surrogacy question. Classical Catholic teaching holds motherhood and fatherhood not merely as social or emotional functions, but as realities rooted in nature, sexual complementarity and gender hierarchy, and according to the procreative end of marriage.
Consequently, a child – as daily experience and observation show – instinctively perceives in the father and the mother two complementary models and functions, both essential for his or her emotional and psychological development.
The loss of this family order, understood as the stable union of a man and a woman open to life, lies at the root of many imbalances and psychological disorders that children then carry throughout their lives.