An appeal has been filed in Turin attempting to overturn a 2014 result which allowed two women to be parents of one child. The ‘double motherhood’ was described as: ‘A violation of the fundamental principles of our legal system’ in the appeal.

The two women, one Italian and the other Spanish, were married and then divorced in Barcelona. While in Spain, they were legally recognized as a family, and both mothers may share in the concerns of the child. However in Italy they had to be reapply to be recognized as a family: a kind of recognition the Italian courts weren’t prepared to give. The Italian mother applied for and was successful at making both her and her ex-spouse mothers of the child, who was born in 2011 and conceived through artificial insemination.

Attorney General Marcello Maddalena, who signed the appeal, said the child violates the ‘fundamental’ idea that offspring should come from people of different sexes. ‘The ban on assisted procreation techniques for people of the same sex is [in the interest of] the public order,’ he wrote in the appeal.