A 35-YEAR-OLD Italian woman provoked a storm of outrage with the news that she is acting as a surrogate mother and expecting two boys in a pregnancy involving five people.
A gynaecologist, Dr Pasquale Bilotta, has said that he had implanted two eggs from different women and fertilised by separate men in the surrogate mother.
He said both female donors were Italian. The surrogate mother, identified only as "Angela", was three months pregnant.
The Health Minister, Ms Rosy Bindi, who this week announced a temporary ban in Italy on all forms of human and animal experimentation linked to cloning, was aghast.
"We have crossed unimaginable boundaries," she said.
Dr Bilotta said that the operation was carried out in Switzerland because the Italian medical body forbids surrogate motherhood in its professional code of conduct although there is no legal ban on the practice.
Dr Aldo Pagni, the president of the country's medical council, said the fact that Dr Bilotta had gone abroad did not absolve him and he should face sanctions in Italy. He also called for government legislation to prevent future cases.
Father Gino Concetti, a moral theologian whose views are close to those of Pope John Paul, said the pregnancy was "a new step towards madness" and urged a ban.
He said surrogate motherhood was "a blatant violation of natural maternity and a grave offence against personal dignity which calls for conception in a dignified manner and by natural means by a couple united in regular matrimony".
The Catholic Church opposes all forms of artificial human conception, including test-tube fertilisation and surrogate motherhood, as well as experimentation on embryos.
"Two children are being born as the offspring of five adults, of two fathers and three mothers. Here the whole concept of the family, of brothers and of twins has been blown to pieces," La Stampa newspaper declared. "They are children of science and that is it.
"Angela", a mother of two children aged eight and 10, told newspapers that she had decided to help two childless women "out of love" and was not being paid anything more than her expenses.
"It is an act of humanity," she said, adding that after the birth she did not want to see the babies and had not wanted information "about the parents.
She said she was a Catholic but had no difficulties in reconciling her faith and her decision.
"The Church can say what it wants. 4 remain a Catholic, I believe in God and don't understand why a person should be condemned for trying to help others," she told La Repubblica. The only ethically unacceptable thing would have been to take money for what she was doing, she declared.
The reaction was not completely hostile. Ms Rosanna Della Corte, an Italian who had a test tube baby at the age of 62 in 1994 in a case that caused a similar storm, said the case of "Angela" was a beautiful miracle of science although she opposed surrogacy.
"A woman is not a machine, she is a mother," she said. "If I were that woman in Rome, once the babies were born I would keep them rather than hand them over."