Reproductive Autonomy as a Fundamental Right: Reassessing Bodily Integrity, Privacy, and Gender Equality under the Indian Constitution

Indian courts now speak of reproductive autonomy in the vocabulary of fundamental rights, yet the statute through which most reproductive decisions are actually made still conditions abortion on medical opinion rather than on the pregnant person’s choice. This paper examines that gap. It traces the right’s doctrinal construction from Suchita Srivastava to X v. Principal Secretary and A (Mother of X), and asks which of three constitutional foundations (bodily integrity, decisional privacy and sex equality) can best carry it. The argument is that bodily integrity and privacy, though indispensable, are individualist in a way that leaves the State wide latitude once proportionality is applied, and that the courts have been slow to treat the burdens of compelled pregnancy as a question of equal citizenship under Articles 14 and 15. Read through an equality lens, problems as varied as late-term gestational limits, coercive sterilisation, two-child norms, the marital rape exception and eligibility rules in surrogacy law share a common structure. The paper closes with a reconstructed account in which autonomy supplies the content of the right and equality fixes the intensity of review.