Amendment To Surrogacy Rules:
The Indian government has amended the Surrogacy (Regulation) Rules, 2022 and allowed married couples to use an egg or sperm of a donor in case one of the partners is suffering from a medical condition.
Recent Amended Provisions:
- It allows surrogacy with donor gametes if either spouse in the intending couple is certified by the District Medical Board to require donor gametes due to a medical condition.
- This implies that couples still cannot opt for surrogacy if both partners have medical issues.
- For divorced or widowed women opting for surrogacy, it mandates the use of the woman’s own eggs alongside donor sperm.
- This overturned a previous amendment made to the rules in March 2023 that banned the use of donor gametes.
Major Provisions of the Amended Surrogacy Rules:
- The March 2023 amended rules only permitted the use of the intending couple’s own gametes, barring couples with specific medical conditions from having biological children through surrogacy.
- These restrictions caused distress and challenged the right to parenthood for affected couples.
- It faced legal challenges in the Supreme Court by a woman with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome, a congenital disorder causing infertility.
- The Supreme Court expressed skepticism regarding the efficacy of these regulations, asserting that such rules undermined the fundamental objectives of surrogacy.
