(ANSA) - ROME, NOV 16 - Over 50 Italian couples are set to lodge legal appeals against the government's new law making surrogacy a universal crime, even when used by Italians abroad, the civil rights and right-to-die Associazione Luca Coscioni told ANSA after Saturday's news that the bill will come out in the Official Gazette on Monday.
    "We are ready to defend all couples damaged by this unjust and unreasonable law," said the association's leaders Marco Cappato and Filomena Gallo.
    "We will take our and their battle to the courts and to every appropriate venue, with the aim of re-establishing an opportunity offered by science, which a blind and brutal legislation seeks to condemn as a universal crime.
    "There are already over 50 couples from all over Italy who have turned to the legal team of the Luca Coscioni Association, worried about the consequences that this law could have on their family project".
    President Sergio Mattarella's signing he bill into law was "not surprising" since he has already signed other bills "in flagrant contrast with European norms like that on lab-grown meat which was later annulled by the EU, said Cappato and Gallo.
    The 50 couples, they said, are "couples who have just started the process, who have only signed the consent form in a foreign center or who have already had their gametes collected." Surrogacy is already regulated in 66 countries, they said.
    (ANSA).