The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the three-month age cap for adoptive mothers seeking maternity leave has been widely framed as a long-overdue correction. It is that—just like it is also a reflection of the narrow, biology-first way in which motherhood continues to be defined in Indian society and, by extension, Indian law.
Under the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, as amended in 2017, adoptive mothers are entitled to 12 weeks of maternity leave, but only if the child is below three months old at the time of adoption.
On paper, that might seem inclusive for its recognition of motherhood that’s not defined by biology, especially in a country where mainstream movies espouse ideas like, “apna khoon toh apna hota hai—the Hindi equivalent of the saying, “blood is thicker than water”—like Good Newwz, a ‘modern’ story about ‘modern’ couples living in ‘modern’ cities, did at the turn of this decade.
In practice, however, the law excludes many adoptive mothers and children entirely, given how adoption timelines in India actually work.
When Law Collides With Lived Reality
In 2021, after adopting siblings, lawyer Hamsaanandini Nanduri’s two-person household became a four-person unit overnight. With her husband, she began parenting two kids who were, simultaneously, adjusting to completely new surroundings and people.
To navigate this all-consuming transition into parenthood that required her to build trust and stability from scratch, she was given just six weeks of leave. And that led her to challenge the existing law for its rather limited understanding of motherhood in the context of adoption.
Hamsa rejects the easy explanation of the law being just a product of bias though.
“I don't think it was a deliberate bias. I think it was a major lack of application of mind."Hamsaanandini Nanduri
That reading is, in some ways, more damning because it suggests that the problem isn’t mere prejudice alone, but the failure of systems to account for lives that fall outside their default assumptions. And that is, arguably, how exclusion sustains itself.
“The team that drafted this probably did not read the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) regulations or had no idea how CARA works,” she notes. Adoption in India is not an informal or immediate process, and rightly so. It is a highly structured legal process that is strictly monitored by the CARA, a statutory body under the Ministry of Women and Child Development, to protect the child's best interests.
Meanwhile, the law that was meant to support mothers seems to have been written in complete isolation from that reality, effectively sidelining adoptive parents without, perhaps, intending to.
Thus collapsing the moment it encounters real life, the law forces us to question what exactly is maternity leave meant to recognise?
What Is Maternity Leave Really For?
If it is framed as recovery from childbirth, then excluding adoptive mothers might be defensible within that logic. But that framing itself doesn’t take into account the fact that maternity leave is also about giving mothers the time to care, bond, adjust, and build a family with the kid—or kids—they have welcomed into their families. And biology itself has little to do with that.
However, as Hamsa points out, there is still “that common misconception that maternity leave is a paid vacation… time off to enjoy motherhood,” rather than recognition of the labour involved. And that labour does not magically become any less demanding just because a child is adopted.
The minimisation, of course, is reflective of how care work itself, when performed by women, is devalued. Even more so, when it cannot be tied to something visible and medically legible like childbirth. Grounding the issue in lived experience, Hamsa says, “Adoption is not a boarding service. It’s the integration of a child into the family.”
Caregiving is, after all, core to motherhood, and not just an add-on feature that people can choose to just opt out of. But, as one of the Instagram comments on an earlier interview by The Quint featuring Hamsa reads, “Biological mothers are given that privilege since they undergo labour pain and so much discomfort for [nine] months... Please don’t misuse motherhood for certain benefits.”
The Cultural Hierarchy of ‘Real’ Motherhood
This is reflective of a wider mindset that treats adoptive motherhood as a softer, less ‘real’ version of parenting that’s adjacent to, but not quite equal to, biological motherhood.
It is sustained through everyday narratives that condition even young children to casually tease their siblings by saying, “Tu toh adopted hai,” as if being adopted makes a child less than a biological one. Unaddressed, that same hierarchy surfaces everywhere from policy to perception to the cultural obsession with blood as the ultimate marker of belonging.
As such, this judgment serves as an acknowledgment that the legal system must expand its understanding of family and care. Advocate Bani Dikshit—Hamsa’s long-time friend and the lawyer who argued the case on her behalf—points out, law does not exist in isolation from social attitudes. “Law supplements society as society supplements law,” she says, adding that “it is a mindset change that will have to be undergone.”
Hamsa and Bani are both clear about the limits of what such a judgment can achieve on its own. “Law can amount to a great impetus,” Bani says, “but eventually it is institutionally and societally we will have to bring about a change.”
Echoing that, Hamsa adds, “I think we have a long way to go in general into understanding these concepts.” She, in fact, suggests that the full normalisation of adoptive parenthood, where such distinctions no longer need to be litigated, may be far off.
“This will not be a question… in the next century.”
That timeline—distant as it is—is a reminder of how deeply entrenched societal biases can be. And while the court can remove barriers, it cannot, by itself, dismantle the assumptions that created them.
A Legal Win, But a Longer Social Battle Ahead
Challenging frameworks born out of broader cultural landscapes, as this case demonstrates, is not a straightforward process. “Litigation is… a different commitment in itself,” Hamsa says, explaining how by the time the judgment was delivered, “We had already put in five years.”
Perhaps, the fact that she was a lawyer herself, and therefore, to some extent, aware of how the justice machinery functions helped her keep at it. She believes she was also fortunate to be represented by a friend who was familiar with the arduous journeys that litigations usually entail. “I was not behind a certain verdict. I had no urgency to win. When I started, this was just something that I had to do for my own satisfaction about a thing that bothered me deeply,” Hamsa notes.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t a moment worth celebrating, though, especially in the context of the adoptive mothers who are also employees. Their prospects of motherhood have been altered significantly and in a fairly concrete way.
“Today there will be no employer making these decisions because it’s not within their hands to deny this anymore. No adoptive mother will be at the mercy of her employer for something so basic."Hamsaanandini Nanduri
The significance of the Supreme Court’s judgment, then, lies not just in the immediate changes it has brought, but in the foundation it has laid to unsettle the understanding of motherhood itself in our society. By rejecting a provision that tied maternity leave to the age of a child rather than the act of caregiving, it has opened up the space to rethink how we define motherhood.
As Bani puts it, “It is a giant leap forward, but the first steps have been taken.”
This judgment is an early step in a longer shift, where motherhood moves beyond a strictly biological notion, to one that centers labour, care, and the ongoing work of building a family.
In other words, the law has caught up, slightly. But the imagination behind it still has a long distance to go.
(DevRupa Rakshit is a queer, autistic individual, ARTivist and independent multimedia journalist based in Bangalore. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)