Italy

This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Italy — covering environmental policy, public health, civic innovation, and more. Each entry highlights measurable progress and the people driving it.

Two women holding a young child outdoors for an article about same-sex parental rights

Italy’s top court rules both same-sex mothers must appear on birth certificates

By / / Good News For Humankind

Same-sex parental rights in Italy took a landmark step forward on May 22, 2025, when the Constitutional Court ruled that both women in a same-sex couple must be legally recognized as parents of children conceived abroad through assisted reproduction. The decision closes a painful legal gap that left thousands of children without guaranteed ties to their non-biological mother. Centering children’s welfare rather than parental identity, the Court found that excluding co-mothers from birth certificates violates constitutional principles of equality and legal certainty. Italy now joins much of Western Europe in offering this foundational protection, though domestic restrictions on IVF for same-sex couples remain unresolved.

The Pope from behind, for article on women's voting rights Vatican

Pope Francis gives women right to vote in bishops’ meeting for first time

By / / Good News For Humankind

Women voted at the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops for the first time in October 2023, after Pope Francis rewrote the rules to seat them as full participants. Five religious sisters joined five priests as voting representatives for religious orders, and Francis appointed 70 non-bishop members to the synod, asking that half be women. The meeting itself grew out of a two-year listening process that gathered the hopes of lay Catholics across dozens of countries — one of the largest such exercises in modern religious history. For an institution two thousand years old, even a measured shift like this one suggests something powerful: when a church commits to listening widely, the question of who gets to answer becomes harder to set aside.