ROME’S annual Pride parade wound its way through the Italian capital on Saturday, providing a colourful counterpoint to the national government’s crackdown on surrogate pregnancies and same-sex parents.

About three dozen floats joined the event, including one celebrating what LGBTQ activists dub the “rainbow families” of same-sex couples with children.

Earlier this year the government, headed by far-right Premier Giorgia Meloni, told municipal officials to register only the biological parent when recording births — refusing the other parent in a same-sex couple.

Among those defying that order was Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri, who said he had registered the birth certificates on Friday of a boy, born in France, to an Italian woman and a French woman as well as a girl, born in England, whose parents are Italian-English women.

Such registration automatically enables the non-biological parent to do a range of parental actions, from authorising medical treatment to picking the child up from school without special permission.

The government’s comfortable majority in Parliament recently approved, at the preparatory commission level, a Bill that would make it a crime for any Italian to use surrogacy, even abroad, to have a child. 

Italy allows same-sex civil unions but not marriage. Italy also doesn’t allow single citizens to adopt children.

One of the thousands of Pride participants, musician Emma Ascoli, noted some other nations allow surrogate births and that “also heterosexual people resort to surrogacy, but while it wasn’t something related to LGBT people’s rights it was a non-issue.”

Italy’s courts at times have ordered municipal officials to register both members of a sex-same couple as the legal parents of a child born abroad. And the nation’s courts have repeatedly urged lawmakers to update legislation to reflect changing social norms.