Kerala High Court Requests Separate Registration Forms For Children Born Using Assisted Reproductive Technologies

While Justice Sathish Ninan granted the petition of a woman who conceived through IVF, he ordered the respondents to take appropriate steps to establish separate and distinct forms for registration of births and deaths, as well as certificates for children born through such conceptions.

This breakthrough arose as a result of a petition filed by a lady who conceived through IVF, disputing the necessity under the Kerala Registration of Births and Deaths Rules, 1970 to include the father's information. The Court agreed with the petitioner that a woman's freedom to make reproductive choices has been recognised as a fundamental right in India.

She argued that keeping the field on the certificate needing the father's identity blank would violate the petitioner's and her kid's right to privacy because the fact that the child was born out of marriage constitutes personal information.

The Court found that there was no justification or purpose in forcing the petitioner to give the name of the father in the form provided for birth and death registration because this right was acknowledged in the regulations for ART clinics with very few exclusions.

So far mostly as single woman mother's right to conceive through ART techniques is recognised, the State is required to provide suitable forms for registering births and deaths of children delivered through such methods, as well as issuing of birth/death certificates, according to the Court.

The petitioner had been in the eighth month of her pregnancy, the court ordered the State to 'immediately' take the appropriate steps to have separate forms recommended for the registration of births and deaths, as well as the allocation of certificates, in cases involving idea through ART methodology of a single parent mother.

To avoid such forms from being used to settle scores in 'family feuds,' the court stated that applicants can even be required to provide an affidavit stating that she is a single mother conceived via an ART technique, as well as a proof of the medical record in support of her claim.