A heated debate is taking place in Italy over the recognition of civil unions both for heterosexual and homosexual couples. At the end of January the Senate began to take into consideration the last bill proposed by Senator Monica Cirinnà. Actually, the present legislative, political and cultural debates focus more on the stepchild adoption provision than on the civil union proposal: non-heterosexual parenting, indeed, is the most problematic issue.The above discussions have been strongly biased by the moral panic spread by the Catholic Church and conservative political forces, which are accusing Cirinnà’s bill of encouraging surrogacy practices.The debate on surrogacy is also splitting the LGBTQ and feminist movements along different lines: the assimilationist approach to citizenship and civil rights versus critical reflections on the limits of homonormative legislative change; the defense of exploited non-Western women’s body versus women’s right to reproductive choices and self-determination.Our aim is to address the tensions and trade-offs in such debate, through the preliminary analysis of original fieldwork material gathered in Rome during Spring 2016 through semi-structured interviews conducted with associations, lawyers, politicians and scholars, as well as with LGBTQ parents.This research is part of a larger European project called INTIMATE, funded by the ERC and based at the Centre for Social Studies (Coimbra). INTIMATE’s main aim is to investigate how axes of reciprocal influence coming from private and public dimensions impact upon the micropolitics of partnering, parenting and friendship in Italy, Portugal and Spain.

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