The Legal Battel Over LGBTQ+ Adoption Rights: Challenging Discrimination, Re-Imagining Family, And Ensuring Every Child A Loving Home
- IJLLR Journal
- Nov 30, 2025
- 2 min read
Ankita Parida, Birla Global University
ABSTRACT
The legal struggle for LGBTQ+ adoption rights evidences an important intersection of constitutional equality, human rights, and child welfare policy. While international discourse increasingly acknowledges a variety of family structures, many legal systems insist on limiting adoption to heterosexual married couples through statutory language and policy interpretation. This exclusion perpetuates discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity; it denies LGBTQ+ individuals the opportunity to create families while making children worse off by not providing them with a potential stable home. In India, despite landmark judgments like Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, 2018, decriminalising same-sex relationships, and NALSA v. Union of India, 2014, laying down the law on the rights to gender identity, adoption laws, including the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, and HAMA, 1956, do not recognize adoption by same-sex or transgender couples explicitly. The 2023 Supreme Court judgment in Supriyo v. Union of India refused to grant queer couples joint adoption rights, stating that any reform will be legislative and not judicial. Civil society critics argue that such restrictions are warranted on grounds of social readiness and child welfare concerns. International research, however, consistently establishes that the capacity to parent rather than the gender or sexuality of the parents determines child development outcomes. Lack of legal clarity, social stigma, and administrative biases persist in occluding LGBTQ+ access to adoption. The struggle then is not just a struggle for parental rights but for children's right to a family, dignity, and security. Meaningful reform pertains to statutory amendments, non-discrimination guidelines for adoption agencies, awareness-building, and comparative engagement with international best practice. The movement for LGBTQ+ adoption rights finally represents a deeper commitment to equality, inclusivity, and the remaking of family within the ethical frame of the modern constitutional democracies.
