Italian babies should carry both parents' family names, top court rules
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Loading... - Bertha Friedrich
- 28 Apr 2022
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A top Italian court ruled Wednesday that newborn children should by default carry both parents’ surnames — not just the father’s, as had been the status quo.
The Italian Constitutional Court in Rome said that automatically assigning children just the surnames of their fathers was constitutionally illegitimate.
The court said parents should each have a say in their child’s surname as it constitutes a “fundamental element of personal identity.” Going forward, a child will take both parents’ surnames, with mutual agreement on the order of the names, the court said.
But the child could take only one of the parents’ names, if that is what the parents chose, the court said — which would for the first time make it broadly possible for children to solely carry their mothers’ last names.
The rule should apply to children born to married and unmarried parents, as well as adopted children, the court said.
At the center of the case that was brought before the court is a family of five, whose two older children carried only the mother’s last name.
The father and mother sought to give their newborn child the mother’s last name as well, to align with the baby’s older siblings, but their request was denied, because the law at present had only allowed for the father’s surname or both surnames to be assigned, said a representative for Domenico Pittella, a lawyer for the family.
Pittella said in a statement to The Washington Post that the ruling was a “landmark judgment” in Italy that “acknowledged that it is in the best interest of the newborn child that the choices of his parents” dictate his name, rather than being “imposed by an outdated model of the patriarchal family.”
It is standard for Italian women to keep their last names, and it is typical for mother and child in Italy to have different surnames — a situation that is similar in countries such as South Korea. The court’s ruling would align Italian naming practices with those of countries such as Mexico, where children’s surnames are often composed of the father’s followed by the mother’s. Read More...
