Is it a 'Birth' Certificate or Certificate of Title?

Jane

Birth certificates have become legal instruments, reflecting ownership of children rather than parentage. In surrogacy-friendly California, birth certificates of children created in vitro with “donated” eggs and sperm, born to surrogates identify those who paid for the creation as the parents. In the Brave New World of “assisted reproduction” these children depend on the kindness of their legal parents and surrogacy clinic policies to learn whose DNA they carry.

Meanwhile, a Sydney court has suggested that a sperm donor’s name be included as a third parent on a birth certificate--at the same time disallowing it.  The donor’s name (Neil Richards, 58, of Sydney), was placed on the certificate when the child, now 10, was born to Jesse Star, 49. He has contributed to her support and he and his family have a “close and loving relationship” with her. However, a law enacted in 2009 granted parental rights to those who were partners of mothers at the time of a child’s birth. The mother’s former partner, Sofia Marita, sued to have her name replace the sperm donor’s name on the birth certificate. Star and Marita separated in 2006. Judge Stephen Walmsey reluctantly ruled recently in the former partner’s favor (Marita), but proposed a Solomonic “split the baby” solution. “No doubt a provision for registration of a third parent for a situation such as this one might be a neat answer to the problem this case presents.”

REWRITING BIOLOGY

Closer to home, a gay male couple, Oren Adar and Mickey Ray Smith, are suing to have their names placed on the birth certificate of a boy born in Louisiana, whom they adopted in New York where they live. Although Louisiana law provides for issuing amended birth certificates when children are adopted, the registrar and director of vital records, Darlene Smith, refused to issue an amended birth certificate because Louisiana law prohibits unmarried couples from adopting. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the registrar’s decision; Adar and Smith are asking the U. S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

As these recent cases attest, adoptive and parents of test-tube babies,and parents of children born to surrogates have come to think of birth certificates as certificates of title, signifying ownership of children, rather than providing information regarding the child's true parentage. William Pierce, former president of the National Council for Adoption which opposes legislation allowing adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates, wrote in a 1999 affidavit filed in a lawsuit over an Oregon adoptee rights' law: “One of the policy reasons for the decision to amend birth certificates and seal adoption records is to send a clear message to all concerned that the child now belongs in the adoptive family for all intents and purposes (italics added).

States enacted laws mandating the recording of births at the urging of the federal Children’s Bureau in the early 20^th century “both for reasons of statistical accuracy and as part of an effort to reduce infant mortality. Having a public record of a child’s birth would alert public health authorities and private charitable agencies to families in need of medical care."  Because adopted children were stigmatized as likely illegitimate, state vital statistics registrars were given authority to create new birth certificates showing adoptive parents as the parents and to seal the original certificates from the prying eyes of the public; later, after adoptees began to search for their parents, states passed laws barring everyone including adoptees from access to their original birth certificates. (E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters, 1998) Currently, only a handful of states allow adoptees  the right to access their original birth certificates .

ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE FALSE FROM THE BIRTH
Although, to my knowledge, no one has suggested it, it seems plausible that states which allow mothers to consent to adoption before the birth of their children (currently Washington, Hawaii, and Alabama) may enact laws allowing adoptive parent’s names on original birth certificates, eliminating what some undoubtedly consider a bureaucratic step. Like donor-conceived children, adopted children would have to depend on the goodwill of others to learn their true parentage.

Since it’s unlikely that states will change course and require birth certificates to contain the names of biological parents, states should enact laws creating registries with the names of biological parents to be made available to children when they turn 18. Children, after all, are not automobiles or pieces of real estate, but human beings with a fundamental desire to know their origins. If these recent decisions are an indication of the future, it may become even harder for whole groups of people to discover who they were born to, and whose genes they carry. Indeed, it is a Brave New World.
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See also: Sperm donors in the news again

Family Matters is an excellent history on how adoption records became sealed, and the movement to unseal them.