Meloni and Schlein naked and pregnant in Milan street art

(ANSA) - ROME, MAY 22 - A new work by contemporary pop artist and activist aleXsandro Palombo appeared in Milan on Monday portraying Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Democratic Party (PD) Secretary Elly Schlein naked and pregnant as a contribution to the ongoing surrogacy debate in Italy.
    In Power Is Female in the central Piazza San Babila the two leaders are featured standing back to back cradling their pregnant bellies.
    On Schlein's there is a label in English reading 'My uterus, my choice', while on Meloni's there is another reading 'Not for rent'.
    "Giorgia Meloni and Elly Schlein share a historic opportunity, namely to be at the top together and to discuss directly without worrying about male interference on issues that concern the female sphere," said Palombo, who is also responsible for the two murals showing the Simpson family before and after deportation to Auschwitz that appeared on the side of Milan's Holocaust Memorial on January 27, 2023.
    "This opportunity may strengthen the path toward gender equality, emancipation and self-determination," he added.
    Surrogacy has become a hot topic in Italy since Meloni's right-wing government instructed city mayors through the local prefectures to stop registering the children of same sex couples using a procedure based on the transcription into Italian civic registers of the foreign birth certificates of children conceived via surrogacy, which is illegal in Italy, or assisted fertility, which is only available to heterosexual couples here.
    Meloni's Brothers of Italy (FdI) party has also called surrogacy "worse than paedophilia" and filed a bill that would prosecute Italians who resort to using surrogate mothers abroad, in countries like Spain and the US where it is legal, making it a "universal crime".
    Schlein has pledged to fight what she has described as an "unprecedented attack on the rights of boys and girls" who are children to same-sex parents and said she is "personally in favour" of surrogacy. (ANSA).