Workshop on ‘Constituting Pregnancy: Rights, Reproduction and the Indian Constitution’ | By M.K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law, NLSIU & University of Bristol

The M.K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law, NLSIU and the University of Bristol, UK, are organising a workshop on ‘Constituting Pregnancy: Rights, Reproduction and the Indian Constitution,’ a forthcoming monograph from Dr Gauri Pillai, on Saturday August 30, 2025. The workshop will be held between 9 am to 5 pm at the Allen and Overy Hall, Training Centre, NLSIU.

The workshop is open to members of the NLSIU community with prior registration. Please register to confirm your attendance by completing the form available here.

About the Author

Dr. Gauri Pillai is a Lecturer-in-Law at the University of Bristol, UK. Previously, she was a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence and an Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where she was Managing Editor of the Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog. She studies pregnancy and reproduction through the lens of public law, exploring core questions on constitutional rights and structures at a time of democratic backsliding and constitutional regression.

About the Workshop

The workshop will engage with the central arguments and insights from the forthcoming monograph with the Cambridge University Press. It will bring together academicians, researchers, lawyers, and civil society members with expertise in constitutional law, gender justice, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Each session will focus on specific chapters of the forthcoming monograph, using them as prompts for wider conversations on advocating reproductive justice within the contemporary legal and political climate in India and globally.

About the Monograph

Constitutions are key battlegrounds for reproductive claims. Yet, most constitutions contain no explicit mention of pregnancy or reproduction. What do constitutions do, when faced with a claim concerning pregnancy on which they are silent? How is pregnancy – at once a unique bodily state and a marker of group vulnerability, a private expression of self and a socially valued function – characterised and adjudicated within these matrices? Can such a complex experience be captured by structures rarely built to contain it? In short, how is pregnancy constituted – and how should it be?

Constituting Pregnancy explores this question through the lens of the Constitution of India, mapping the beginnings of what could be a new chapter in India’s reproductive politics. It argues that pregnancy can and should be constituted by reading the rights to privacy and equality in synthesis, advancing Indian constitutional law, and simultaneously intervening in a pressing global debate on framing constitutional reproductive rights.