On 23 May 2025, the Indian Supreme Court in K. Umadevi v. Government of Tamil Nadu broadened the interpretation of Tamil Nadu Fundamental Rule (‘FR’) 101(a), which only provided maternity leave to female government servants with less than two surviving children. The Court held that a female government employee in the state of Tamil Nadu could not be denied maternity leave for her third biological child. In doing so, the Court deepened the jurisprudence on reproductive rights under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution—but per usual, left untouched the crucial dimension of gender equality.

The Supreme Court interpreted FR 101(a) harmoniously with the provisions of the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 (‘MBA’), which do not restrict maternity benefits, including leave, to mothers only for two biological children. Relying on previous judgements in Suchita Srivastava v. Chandigarh Administration, Devika Biswas v. Union of India, X v. Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department, Govt. of NCT of Delhi and Deepika Singh v. Central Administrative Tribunal, the Court re-emphasised that the right to make reproductive choices is an aspect of personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution. The reasoning in Uma Devi is firmly rooted in a feminist conception of reproductive autonomy. Women cannot be penalised for the choices they make (which are anyway constrained by environment and circumstance). The purpose of providing maternity benefits is to honour women both as mothers and as workers; an artificial restriction by limiting this to mothers with less than two biological children hampers such a purpose. While this must be balanced with the state’s objective of population control, the burden of such an objective should not fall on the childbearing and birth-giving mothers.

While the judgement provides a tenable method to harmonise the MBA and other statutes governing maternity leave, the judgement only goes so far because it has not called for an amendment to the Tamil Nadu FR, nor has it recommended that similar statutes and rules in other states be revised or interpreted accordingly. Thus, relief to mothers in similar circumstances can only be provided on an ad-hoc basis by the judiciary. This makes the relief discretionary and thus inaccessible on a larger scale.

However, like many of the Court’s previous rulings on maternity benefits, this judgment suffers from a significant blind spot. Expanding maternity benefits without simultaneously providing for paternity leave, or parental leave more broadly, misses the forest for the trees. It entrenches, rather than disrupts, gendered caregiving norms. Unless the law actively promotes equal parenting, it continues to view child-rearing as the sole responsibility of women.

This is why maternity benefits and other provisions on childcare should be simultaneously rooted in a conception of relational care, rather than only relying on a freestanding conception of reproductive autonomy. The theory of relational care acknowledges that people are not isolated individuals exercising ‘pure’ autonomy but are interconnected and influenced by their relationships. Therefore, reproductive decisions must be cognisant of this context and recognise the interconnectedness of carers and the cared-for, while also ensuring that care labour does not unduly fall on a limited set of caregivers, generally women. Reproductive autonomy for women thus cannot meaningfully advance gender equality if it is tethered only to the expansion of female-burdened caregiving. Thus, the state’s initiative to actualise a woman’s reproductive rights should culminate in ensuring that the burden of the exercise of a positive choice to have a child does not fall solely on the woman but is equally shared by all parents.

The Uma Devi judgment is thus two-steps forward, one-step back. For reproductive rights to deliver true freedom, they must first be provided more expansively in all statutes regulating maternity benefits. Second, there must be a parallel push to all arms of the government to nudge structural change in caregiving. In law, this can look like robust, non-transferable paternity and parental leave entitlements.