In a significant judgment, the Kerala High Court directed authorities to include the father's name in the birth certificate of a child born through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), even though the relevant column was left blank earlier due to a misunderstanding between the child's parents.
Court's Observation on Child's Welfare
Justice P V Kunhikrishnan issued the ruling while allowing a petition filed by the parents of a 14-year-old girl. The petition challenged an order of a grama panchayat secretary rejecting their request to add the father's name to the child's birth certificate. The court observed that the issue was not one of paternity but of posterity. For a child, the blank space against the father's name in a birth certificate is not merely an empty column but a question mark over her legitimacy, a whisper of stigma, and a wound inflicted by her parents' past conflict, the court said.
Background of the Case
The petitioners submitted that the girl was born in 2012 through IVF treatment while they were in a relationship. Due to a dispute between them at the time, the father's name was omitted from the birth certificate, which recorded the child as being born to a single mother. Subsequently, the couple got married and had another child, whose birth certificate carries the father's name. They later obtained an order from a family court declaring them to be the biological parents of the girl. Based on that order, they applied to have the father's name added to the girl's birth certificate. However, the application was rejected on the grounds that the birth had originally been registered under the single-parent category and that the father's name could not be incorporated later. Aggrieved by the decision, they approached the High Court.
Legal Reasoning
Noting that the Registration of Births and Deaths Act contains no specific provision permitting such a correction, the court observed that its role was not to count commas, full stops, or blanks in statutes and rules, but to ensure that the law does not become an instrument of psychological cruelty against a child who was never at fault. Accordingly, the court directed the authorities to issue a fresh birth certificate incorporating the father's name.
