New Delhi, Feb 23, 2024: The Supreme Court has protected the right of parenthood of a woman, suffering from a rare medical condition, by staying the operation of a law which threatened to wreck her hopes to become a mother through surrogacy.
The woman, known only as ‘Mrs. ABC’ for anonymity sake, has the Mayer Rokitansky Kuster Hauser (MRKH) syndrome. Medical board records showed she has “absent ovaries and absent uterus, hence she cannot produce her own eggs/oocytes”. The couple had begun the process of gestational surrogacy, through a donor, on December 7 last year.
However, a government notification on March 14 this year amended the law, banning the use of donor gametes. It said “intending couples” must use their own gametes for surrogacy. The petition was filed in the Supreme Court challenging the amendment as a violation of a woman’s right to parenthood.
“The amendment which is now coming in the way of the intending couple and preventing them from achieving parenthood through surrogacy, we find, is, prima facie contrary to what is intended under the main provisions of the Surrogacy Act both in form as well as in substance,” a Bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan held in a recent order.
