The Birth Certificate

November 1, 2021
A study of the development of the birth certificate. "The single act of registering a birth...serves two functions: it creates real-time population knowledge and a technology for personal identification," writes Northwestern history professor Pearson. She adds that it wasn't until 1933 that American states more or less agreed that these made for good reasons to issue records of live births. But even at the dawn of World War II, 60 million Americans were undocumented. Birth certificates were more common along the East Coast than in the interior. Reformists concentrated in Eastern cities were interested in using these documents to help control child labor (by proving that exploited workers were too young to hire legally) and monitor mandatory school attendance. Naturally, in an America wedded to libertarian notions that oppose state control, such efforts were contested, and even today there is no required national birth certificate (though there is a standard federal form), as there is in practically every other country in the world. Indeed, the strongest parts of this absorbing study point to the political uses to which birth certification has been applied. This involves, of course, the Trumpian conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, which itself has antecedents: Birth certificates were rarer among minority populations than among Whites, and of course these papers became instruments allowing people to vote, go to school, purchase property, and the like. Later uses and misuses of the certificate include schemes to restrict the use of restrooms to those that "corresponded to the sex on...birth certificates" and keep paperless Black Americans from claiming pensions while providing scammers with opportunities to sell forged birth records. None of this helped with that "real-time population knowledge" desideratum. Pearson also looks at the positive aspects of the certification efforts in providing key data, which would not have come about without the work of private citizens in support of government-fueled science. Fundamentally of interest to scholars, but an accessible, lively study of how a now-standard record came about.

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