In a major victory for lesbian couples, Italy’s top court ruled this week that the same-sex partners of women who conceive via in vitro fertilization (IVF) have the right to be legally recognized as their children’s parents.

As Reuters reports, in a ruling announced on Thursday, May 22, Italy’s Constitutional Court found that it is unconstitutional to deny legal recognition to the nonbiological mother of children conceived abroad via IVF. Doing so, the court said, violates the children of lesbian couples’ rights to care, education, and emotional continuity from both parents.

Prior to the court’s decision, a 2004 law prevented the nonbiological mom in a same-sex couple from being registered as their child’s parent. But as the judges noted in their decision, confusion over the 2004 law has led to a patchwork of interpretations across Italy, with some mayors allowing nonbiological moms to be listed as parents on their children’s birth certificates while others only list the birth mothers.

“These divergent outcomes reflect a shifting social reality to which the legislature has yet to respond,” the judges wrote, according to Reuters.

In 2023, under the leadership of far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Interior Ministry began cracking down on cities that allowed both members of same-sex couples to be listed as “parents”— as opposed to “mother” and “father” — on their children’s birth registrations.

Thursday’s ruling, which strikes down part of the 2004 law, was hailed as “historic” by LGBTQ+ activists. Marilena Grassadonia, an advocate with the Italian Left opposition party, told Reuters that the decision “restores dignity and serenity to the many rainbow families who live in our country.”

However, the ruling did not extend the right to IVF treatment to single women or women in same-sex relationships. Under Italian law, only married heterosexual couples have the right to access medically assisted reproduction treatments like IVF. The court’s ruling only applies to women who seek IVF treatment abroad.

While same-sex civil unions have been legal in Italy since 2016, same-sex couples do not have the right to adopt, thanks in part to opposition from the Catholic Church. Surrogacy remains illegal as well, and restrictions preventing the adoption of “stepchildren” by nonbiological parents present major hurdles for gay fathers seeking to adopt children conceived via surrogacy abroad.

However, as Agence France-Presse reports, a court in northern Italy also ruled Thursday in favor of a nonbiological father’s right to adopt his child conceived abroad via surrogacy.

Chiara Soldatini, a lesbian mother who moved from Italy to Spain last year, celebrated the Constitutional Court’s decision. “I am happy no one will now be able to challenge the fact our son is our son,” she told Agence France-Presse. However, she noted that she would “only uncork the champagne when all those families with two dads can toast with me.”

“Now is not the time to settle,” she added.