Eugenia Roccella

Eugenia Maria Roccella (born 15 November 1953) is an Italian journalist and politician, who has been serving as Minister for Family, Natality and Equal Opportunities in the Meloni government since 22 October 2022. She is a member of Brothers of Italy (FdI).

In the 2008 Italian general election, Roccella was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where she has represented several parties on the political right. She opposes abortion and same-sex unions. in 1986, and was the mayor of his hometown from 1991 to 1992. Her mother Wanda Raheli was a feminist painter. Roccella graduated in Modern Literature from the Sapienza University of Rome. She ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for her father's party in the 1979 election.

In 2007, Roccella was the spokesperson of Family Day, a demonstration in favour of the traditional Catholic family.

Political positions

Roccella has described herself as a conservative feminist and a post-feminist. She is opposed to abortion, saying "I am a feminist and feminists have never considered abortion to be a right". She also opposes in vitro fertilisation, and in 2013 founded Di mamma ce n'è una sola (There's only one mother), an organisation against surrogacy. In the 1970s, she supported abortion, and wrote a book titled Aborto, facciamolo da noi (Abortion, let's do it ourselves).

In 2018, Roccella said that she would work to repeal the recognition of same-sex civil unions in Italy, which had been legalised two years earlier. She opposed the Scalfarotto and Zan bills that supported LGBT rights in Italy, describing the latter as a curb on freedom of expression.

In 2023, Roccella stated that psychologists affirm the need or right for children to have a father and a mother, as opposed to same-sex parents. Her statement was rebutted by the psychological profession, first through the representatives of their professional boards in several Italian regions, then by the president of the whole national board, David Lazzari. The government she is part of ordered for Milan city council, led by mayor Giuseppe Sala, to cease registering same-sex couples a legal parents, an action it had practiced since 2018 in the absence of a national law. Roccella said that the order did not come from legislation but from a Supreme Court of Cassation decision on the matter, which opponent mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri said only applied to registering two mothers in the case of surrogacy.

Roccella opposes euthanasia. She was Undersecretary for Health in 2009 during the controversy surrounding Eluana Englaro, a woman who spent 17 years in a persistent vegetative state because the state refused her family's wish to remove her feeding tube. Roccella said that if Italian law did not permit the sale of a moped without written documentation, it should not permit the right to die without written documentation.

Personal life Her husband Luigi Cavallari went missing on 27 June 2026 in Lake Vico after jumping from the boat he was in; his body was found on 4 August. He was 84.