X v. Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department, Govt. of NCT of Delhi
Issue
Whether the MTP Rules governing who may terminate a pregnancy between 20 and 24 weeks could be read to exclude unmarried women, and more broadly, whose consent and autonomy govern the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
What the court held
The Supreme Court held that the MTP Act and Rules must be read purposively to extend equally to married and unmarried women, that marital status cannot determine access to abortion, and that it is the pregnant woman alone who has the right over her own body and is the ultimate decision-maker on whether to terminate a pregnancy. The Court also held that, for the specific purposes of the MTP Act's provisions on pregnancy caused by rape, a married woman can become pregnant as a result of non-consensual sex by her husband.
What the court did not hold
That marital rape is a criminal offence. The Court explicitly declined to disturb the IPC's marital-rape exception, noting that a separate constitutional challenge to it was pending before another bench. It also did not create an unconditional right to abortion at any stage — the medical-board process, gestational limits and statutory grounds under the MTP Act continue to apply.
Why OIM cares
This is the clearest judicial statement of why a husband's consent has no formal role under the MTP Act: the Court grounds the entire framework in the pregnant woman's own bodily and decisional autonomy under Article 21, regardless of marital status, rather than in any model where the decision belongs jointly to both spouses.
Context
An unmarried 25-year-old woman sought to terminate a 22-week pregnancy after her partner refused to marry her. The Delhi High Court held that the relevant MTP Rule — which allowed termination up to 24 weeks for specific categories of women, including those with a “change of marital status” — did not cover her because she had never been married. She appealed to the Supreme Court.
What the Court actually did
The Court read “change of marital status” purposively rather than literally, holding it must extend to any woman whose material circumstances changed during pregnancy, married or not — reasoning that restricting the benefit to married women would rest on an assumption that only married women have sex, which the Court called constitutionally unsustainable. It grounded the whole framework in the pregnant woman’s own bodily and decisional autonomy under Article 21, stating in as many words that she alone is the ultimate decision-maker.
Where this sits in the OIM comparison
This is the clearest judicial statement of why a husband’s consent plays no formal role under the MTP Act: the Court didn’t just note that the statute doesn’t require it — it actively grounded the entire framework in a model where the decision belongs to one person, not two. The Court did carve out one deliberate limit: it separately recognised marital rape for the narrow purposes of the MTP Act’s provisions on pregnancies caused by rape, while explicitly leaving the criminal-law question — whether marital rape is a prosecutable offence — for a different bench to decide.