Overview
- The ruling shields couples who had extracted gametes and frozen embryos before January 25, 2022, from the Act’s age limits of 23–50 for women and 26–55 for men.
- It defines the relevant ‘commencement’ of surrogacy as reaching the frozen-embryo stage, excluding cases that had only counselling, permissions, or gamete extraction without freezing.
- Relief was granted to three couples before the court, with similarly placed couples told to seek orders from their jurisdictional high courts.
- The court rejected the Centre’s push for retrospective application, noting there is no age bar for natural conception or adoption and emphasizing reproductive autonomy.
- The judgment does not decide the broader validity of the Surrogacy Act’s age bar, with wider constitutional challenges in the larger batch of petitions still pending.