Supreme Court Declares Two-Child Penalties Obsolete Amid Demographic Shift
India's highest court has ruled that laws penalizing families with more than two children rest on a vanished demographic premise, rendering such statutes constitutionally suspect. The judgment invites legislatures across states to repeal or amend provisions that have long governed access to public office and welfare benefits.
A constitutional bench of the Supreme Court has held that the rationale underlying two-child norms, the fear of runaway population growth, has collapsed in the face of plummeting fertility rates across the country. The court observed that the total fertility rate has fallen well below replacement level in a majority of states, making coercive population controls not only unnecessary but actively harmful to women's reproductive autonomy and social equity. This rupture in legal doctrine strikes at statutes in at least a dozen states that bar individuals with more than two children from contesting local elections, holding government jobs, or receiving subsidized rations.
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