For many couples, the pressure to have a child can become a difficult part of married life. But can a woman’s inability to conceive be treated as a failure of the marriage?The Madras High Court has made its position clear: being childless by itself cannot amount to cruelty, and a wife cannot be blamed simply because a couple is unable to have a child.According to a report in Bar and Bench, a Division Bench made the observations while dismissing a husband’s appeal seeking divorce on the ground of cruelty. The family court had earlier rejected his divorce plea.The Court said that marriage cannot be viewed only through the lens of having children.“Marriage cannot be reduced to the sole object of procreation. A spouse cannot be treated as having failed in the matrimonial relationship merely because the parties did not have a child,” the Court said.
The couple had been married for years
The couple got married in June 2007. The husband alleged that while their marriage was peaceful initially, things later changed.He claimed that his wife humiliated him, suspected him when he returned late from work, frequently left their matrimonial home and refused matrimonial companionship.He also alleged that in June 2016, she publicly called him impotent, assaulted him with footwear and later with a broom, removed her thali, tore their photographs and left the matrimonial home.The wife denied these allegations.She told the court that she had undergone surgery for a uterine fibroid and had also undergone treatment in the hope of conceiving and continuing her married life.The High Court found that the allegations of assault, humiliation and abandonment had not been satisfactorily proved.It also pointed out that simply repeating allegations does not make them established facts. “Unproved allegations, when accumulated”, cannot automatically become proved cruelty, the Court said.
The fertility treatment also mattered
The Bench particularly considered what the woman had gone through in her attempts to conceive.Fertility treatment can involve hormonal injections, repeated scans and blood tests, invasive procedures, physical discomfort and anxiety. There can also be the emotional strain of going through repeated attempts, with hope followed by disappointment.The Court said the wife’s decision to undergo such treatment went against the claim that she had abandoned the marriage or deliberately avoided matrimonial life.“When a wife, despite knowing the physical and emotional hardship involved, willingly undergoes such treatment in the hope of bearing a child and preserving the matrimonial relationship, that conduct cannot, by any stretch of imagination, be treated as a rejection of the marriage or as cruelty towards her husband,” the Court said.The Bench added that repeatedly undergoing treatment showed that she had not simply given up on the marriage.“A woman who repeatedly subjects herself to painful treatment in the hope of building a family with her husband cannot simultaneously be portrayed as a person who has abandoned the matrimonial bond.”
‘Marriage is more than having a child’
The Court also acknowledged that being unable to have a child can be emotionally difficult for both partners. But the physical burden of fertility treatment, it noted, is borne by the woman herself.The Bench referred to the anxiety before a medical report, the pain involved in treatment and the emotional roller coaster of hoping that each attempt might work.In other words, the Court said these experiences cannot simply be reduced to allegations of cruelty in a divorce case.The husband also argued that the couple’s long separation showed that their marriage had effectively broken down. The Court did not accept that as enough to establish cruelty, particularly since the wife continued to express her willingness to resume matrimonial life.The husband’s appeal was therefore dismissed, and the family court’s decision refusing to dissolve the marriage was upheld.At the heart of the judgment was a simple point: not having a child does not, by itself, mean that either spouse has failed at marriage.
