On Tuesday (March 17), a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan delivered judgment in Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India striking down the three-month age cap on adopted children under Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020. The provision enables a woman who legally adopts a child below the age of three months to claim maternity benefit for a period of 12 weeks from the date the child is handed over to her. The decision marks a huge relief to adoptive mothers, besides building a constitutional architecture around adoption, reproductive autonomy, and the welfare of children. It also ends with an explicit legislative nudge to parliament on paternity leave – technically obiter, but impossible to ignore when it appears in a reportable judgment of this court.The provision under challenge had a deceptively simple structure. When parliament extended maternity benefit to adoptive and commissioning mothers through the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 – a provision later subsumed into the Code on Social Security, 2020, which came into force on 21 November 2025 – it qualified the entitlement by reference to the age of the adopted child. Only a woman who adopted a child below the age of three months was entitled to twelve weeks of maternity benefit. A woman who adopted a four-month-old received nothing. The petitioner, an adoptive mother of two children who filed her petition under Article 32, challenged this cut-off as violative of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, among other grounds.The court’s equality analysis is its most technically rigorous contribution. Applying the two-pronged test of intelligible differentia and rational nexus drawn from State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar (1952) and the under-inclusiveness doctrine elaborated in State of Gujarat v. Shri Ambica Mills Ltd. (1974), the Bench found the three-month threshold wanting on both counts. The object of maternity benefit – to support the transition into motherhood, safeguard the welfare of the child, and enable continued participation of women in the workforce – applies with equal force to an adoptive mother regardless of whether her child is two months or five months old. Confining the benefit to one group while excluding the other, without adequate justification, rendered the classification both irrational and under-inclusive. The government argued that a child older than three months does not carry the same intensive dependency on the caregiver, and that creche facilities under Section 67 of the Code offered an adequate alternative. The court was unpersuaded on both counts: the creche obligation arises only in establishments with 50 or more employees, and a facility for daytime care is self-evidently not a substitute for the sustained presence of a mother during the initial period of family integration.Particularly lethal to the government’s position was the court’s workability analysis. The Bench set out in granular detail the adoption timeline prescribed under the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, and the CARA Regulations, 2022. In the case of a surrendered child, the reconsideration period alone consumes 60 days; for abandoned or orphaned children below two years, the minimum timeline to referral runs to over 70 days, and for older children to well over a 100. The court’s conclusion was brisk: by the time a child is placed with adoptive parents, the three-month age window has, in most cases, already elapsed. The provision was “illusory and devoid of practical application.”The Union had responded that empowering district magistrates to issue adoption orders would accelerate the process, but the court rejected any suggestion that procedural expedition could be purchased at the cost of safeguards designed to protect the biological family’s rights.The court’s treatment of Article 21 is its most constitutionally expansive move. Drawing on its landmark precedents, the Bench held that reproductive autonomy is not confined to biological reproduction. Relying on Suchita Srivastava v. Chandigarh Administration (2009) and K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the judgment affirmed that decisional autonomy in matters of family formation – including adoption – falls squarely within the protected zone of personal liberty. An adoptive mother denied maternity benefit because her child was four months old is, in effect, penalised for choosing a non-biological path to parenthood, which strikes at the heart of reproductive autonomy.The Bench declared adoption as a conscious and meaningful exercise of the choice to create and nurture a family, falling within the broader spectrum of decisional autonomy guaranteed under Article 21. The consequence is significant: legislative provisions that deter or penalise adoptive parenthood without adequate justification are now constitutionally vulnerable. Adoption is treated not as a welfare mechanism but as a fundamental personal choice entitled to constitutional respect.The court drew support from a notable range of foreign jurisprudence. The South African Constitutional Court’s 2025 judgment in Werner Van Wyk v. Minister of Employment and Labour, which struck down a two-year age cap in South African adoption leave law, was directly relevant. The European Court of Human Rights’ ruling in Topčić-Rosenberg v. Croatia on the denial of maternity leave to an adoptive mother provided further support. The House of Lords decision in In re P & Ors. (2008) was cited for the proposition that bright-line rules which ignore the individual welfare of the child cannot withstand constitutional scrutiny.The remedial order is, however, where the judgment most invites scrutiny. Rather than declaring the age limit unconstitutional and remitting the matter to parliament, the court rewrote Section 60(4) in its operative paragraph, reading out the three-month condition entirely. A woman who legally adopts a child – at any age – is now entitled to 12 weeks of maternity benefit. The Supreme Court noted that South African court, faced with an analogous problem, had declined to do this, leaving it to the legislature to design a constitutionally compliant replacement. The Indian court’s approach produces a cleaner outcome for litigants but conflates the judicial and legislative functions. Parliament might reasonably have chosen a different threshold – six months, or a year – rather than none at all. As the rewritten provision now stands, it extends the benefit to adoptions of school-age children, a consequence the judgment does not address and which may itself generate fresh litigation.The closing section on paternity leave is technically obiter but registers a clear institutional position. The court noted that CCS Leave Rules provide only 15 days of paternity leave for government servants, briefly referred to a recent private member Bill proposing eight weeks, and urged the Union to enact a statutory provision recognising paternity leave as a social security benefit. Taken together, the judgment advances three propositions that will endure beyond the specific facts. Beneficial legislation must be practically accessible, not merely formally enacted. The constitutional protection of reproductive autonomy extends to non-biological modes of family formation. And the welfare of the adopted child is not discharged at the moment of placement – it is a continuing obligation that the law must actively support. Whether parliament chooses to reassert its role by legislating a more calibrated age limit, or allows the court’s rewritten provision to stand, will determine whether this judgment ends a controversy or merely transforms it.The doctrinal debate: Is this legitimate?The “reading-in” remedy occupies contested ground in comparative and Indian constitutional theory. Critics argue it crosses the separation of powers line – the court is not merely interpreting parliament’s intent but substituting its own policy choice. For instance, parliament could have chosen a graded maternity benefit framework (e.g., 12 weeks for children under 3 months, 8 weeks for children 3–12 months, etc.) rather than the flat 12-week entitlement the court has now imposed on all adoptive mothers. By choosing a specific formulation, the Court foreclosed other constitutionally valid legislative options.On the other hand, in Hamsaanandini the court could point to the fact that the rest of Section 60(4) – the 12-week period, the trigger date, the mechanism – is entirely Parliament’s creation and survives intact. The court excised only the constitutionally infirm phrase and retained the legislative architecture. This makes it closer to the Blue Pencil Rule of severability (cutting out the objectionable words without rewriting the remaining text) than to Vishaka-style wholesale judicial legislation.