Why Supreme Court struck down the 3-month cap on maternity leave for adoptive mothers

The court held that mothers who adopt a child “shall be entitled to maternity benefit for a period of twelve weeks from the date the child is handed over to her.”

In doing so, the court addressed the broader question of what the law recognises as motherhood.

What the law said

The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, and its successor, the Code of Social Security, 2020, were both amended to include adoptive mothers within the scope of maternity leave. The carve-out was that only those women who adopted a child below the age of three months would qualify for twelve weeks of leave.

Section 60(4) of the 2020 Code states that “ a woman who legally adopts a child below the age of three months or a commissioning mother shall be entitled to maternity benefit for a period of twelve weeks from the date the child is handed over.”

The petitioners argued that the three-month cap was “artificial and violative of Article 14”. They said a woman who adopts a four-month-old baby has the same caregiving responsibilities as one who adopts a two-month-old. The child still needs to be fed, held and introduced to an entirely new environment. The mother still needs time away from work to make that happen.

The government responded by saying that women adopting older children could use the crèche facilities at their establishments. The court found this “seemingly appears to be lucrative” argument to be deeply flawed. The statutory obligation on an establishment to provide crèche facilities arises only when there are 50 or more employees, leaving a large number of smaller workplaces, and women working in them, entirely outside its scope.

What motherhood means

The bench noted that children raised in institutions often show higher stress levels and disrupted bonding responses, underlining the need for early, consistent care. Beyond biology, the bench relied on the ordinary meaning of “maternity” as the “state…of being a mother,” not something tied to only childbirth.

The bench also relied on developmental research to underline that early caregiving is crucial for a child’s emotional development, and that children in institutional care often present with higher stress (cortisol) and disrupted bonding hormones like oxytocin, which are directly linked to emotional regulation. The bench concluded that early caregiving has positive effects on children and therefore the law cannot treat bonding time as optional, or make it contingent on how old the child was when they came home.

The bench said, ” A mother takes birth the day a child comes into her life.”

Why the three-month limit was impossible to meet

Under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, and the adoption regulations framed by the Central Adoption Resource Authority, a child cannot be placed for adoption until they have been declared “legally free” for the process. That declaration itself takes time, something that the law had not accounted for.

If biological parents surrender a child, the law gives them a mandatory two-month window to reconsider. For orphaned or abandoned children below the age of two, authorities must spend at least two months tracing biological parents before any adoption proceedings can begin. Only after these periods expire can the legal process formally begin, and even then, additional steps such as including a child study report, a medical examination report and a referral to prospective parents are needed.

The bench held that “by the time the child is legally placed with the adoptive mother, the statutory age limit would, in most cases, stand exhausted.” The statute “ostensibly confers maternity benefit upon adoptive mothers, yet the benefit remains largely inaccessible in practice.”

The government said that the adoption process had been sped up by giving district magistrates the power to issue adoption orders. The court rejected this framing directly and held that “the expedition cannot be pursued at the cost of essential safeguards.” The cooling-off periods and tracing requirements exist to ensure no child is separated from their biological parents without due process.

“The time taken in the process of declaring a child legally free for adoption is not a procedural ‘formality’ but a necessary component of a careful and responsible adoption structure.”

Enforcing the importance of legislative responsibility, the court said “the duty of the law maker does not end with the mere articulation of a right or benefit. The enforceability of that right is equally important.”

Constitutional provisions

Under Article 14, a classification between two groups is valid only if it rests on a real, meaningful distinction, an “intelligible differentia”, and if that distinction has a rational connection to what the law is trying to achieve. The court found neither condition satisfied here.

Women who adopt children older than three months are, in every relevant sense, in the same position as women who adopt younger infants. “Their roles, responsibilities, and caregiving obligations” are identical. The distinction the law drew was “artificial” and “palpably unreasonable”.

The bench also pointed to a cliff-edge problem in the statute’s design. While mothers adopting children younger than three months received twelve weeks of leave, mothers adopting children even a day older had no benefits extended to them. The bench said, “This approach does not reflect the real-world requirement of care and nurturing, which does not come to a sudden halt upon the attainment of a certain mathematical number, but gradually tapers with the proper integration of the child with the new environment”.

Under Article 21, which protects the right to life and personal liberty, the court read in a right to reproductive autonomy that extended beyond biological parenthood. “Reproductive autonomy, therefore, cannot be narrowly understood as being limited to biological reproduction alone. Adoption, too, represents a conscious and meaningful exercise of the choice to create and nurture a family.”

By imposing an arbitrary age limit, the law “denudes such adoptive mothers of the ability to meaningfully exercise and enjoy their right to decisional autonomy, dignity, and bodily integrity.”

On the question of bonding

The court broke down the purpose of maternity leave into physical recovery after birth, time to develop an emotional bond between mother and child and the process by which the child integrates into the family.

For biological mothers, these three phases overlap. For mothers who adopt, the first component is absent, and the second and third remain, and they may require more deliberate effort. The arbitrary age cap, the court held, “deprives adoptive mothers of children older than three months of the opportunity required for the effective fulfilment” of these two remaining components.

The court paid particular attention to two groups that the law had most severely failed. Children with disabilities, it noted, “often wait considerably longer to be adopted as compared to other children”.

The processes for identifying suitable parents and completing formalities take longer, making these children almost certainly beyond three months by the time they are placed. Confining maternity benefits to children below that age would “operate to the detriment of children with disabilities” and “discourage prospective parents from adopting children who require their presence during the initial period of adjustment”.

For single adoptive mothers, the gap was even starker. “Unlike in a traditional family setup where caregiving responsibilities may be shared between two parents, a single adoptive mother bears the entire responsibility of integrating the child into the family environment while simultaneously discharging her professional obligations”.

On what maternity benefits are actually for

The court pointed to what is called the “Wollstonecraft Dilemma”, the tension between expecting women to be caregivers and expecting them to participate equally in paid work. Citing ILO data, the court said that when paid work and unpaid domestic work are taken together, employed women work longer hours on average than employed men.

In the court’s framing, maternity benefits are “an expression of treatment grounded in equity”, not charity, but an institutional acknowledgement that caregiving has economic value and that absorbing all of it without support is a structural disadvantage imposed almost exclusively on women.

On paternity leave

Going beyond the immediate question before it, the bench spoke at length about the need for paternity leave and why its absence is a problem that is faced by everyone involved– the mother, the father andf the child.

“Parenthood is not a solitary function performed by one parent but rather a shared responsibility in which each parent contributes to the child’s holistic development,” the court said.

A father compelled by professional obligations to stay away during the early months misses something that cannot be recovered. This presence cannot be “scheduled for a convenient time or compensated for later”. The court said that “proximity is not identical to presence,” noting that a father who is physically near but professionally disengaged cannot truly participate in the formative experiences of infancy.

The court took note of Rules 43A and 43AA of the Central Civil Services (Leave) Rules, 1972, which already provide fifteen days of paternity leave to male government employees, including for adoption. But it said the concept remains “less recognised” in the broader workforce. It acknowledged the Paternity and Parental Benefit Bill, 2025, a private member bill seeking eight weeks of paternity leave, and made a direct request to the Union, urging “the Union to come up with a provision recognizing paternity leave as a social security benefit”.