Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
The Secret and Sometimes Sinister History of Our Birth Certificates (with Susan J. Pearson)
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Introduction – 0:00
BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes. We're mapping the terrain of gender, sexuality, race, ability, friendship, family, and more in order to better understand ourselves and each other. Our guide in this episode is historian Susan J. Pearson.
SUSAN PEARSON: Birth certificates don't just record identity; they help create it. These documents began as part of an effort to improve public health, but they've transformed into a much more powerful tool the United States government uses to sort people by race, by family relation, by gender—granting recognition and dignity to some while withholding it from others.
BLAIR HODGES: Birth certificates help control who belongs, who's protected, and who gets left out. Susan J. Pearson is author of The Birth Certificate: An American History. It's a fascinating biography of a document that has quiet but incredibly far-reaching power. She joins us to talk about it right now.
Why Study the Birth Certificate? – 01:50
BLAIR HODGES: Susan Pearson, welcome to Relationscapes.
SUSAN PEARSON: Thank you so much for having me, Blair. It's great to be here.
BLAIR HODGES: I should admit that when I first saw a book called The Birth Certificate, I wondered how interesting it really could be. And as it turns out, the answer is, really interesting. It tells a much bigger story than you would expect, but I wouldn't have thought that to begin with.
So it made me wonder, what made you want to do this research to begin with?
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, good question. And I actually love the way you phrase that, that it's a document that tells a much bigger story than you might expect. And I think that's what attracted me to doing the history of the birth certificate.
I stumbled across the topic, actually, when I was getting my Ph.D., so many, many years ago when I was in graduate school. I was in the library gathering some sources for my master's thesis that I was working on at the time, and that led me into reading some of the documents that were published by the United States Children's Bureau in the early twentieth century.
And I came across this pamphlet that the Bureau had published in 1914, which was called Birth Registration: An Aid in Protecting the Rights and Lives of Children, or something like that.
And so I read their pamphlet, and it was basically saying that they were going to launch a campaign to try to achieve universal birth registration in the United States. And I was really surprised by that. When I read the pamphlet, I thought, wow, I'm kind of surprised that in 1914 not everyone in the United States had a birth certificate.
And I wonder why that was. I wonder what they did in order to give everyone a birth certificate. And it just really kind of sparked my curiosity.
I took it for granted that, you know, this was probably in 1999 when I came across this. And I took it for granted that in 1999, at the end of the same century, everyone had a birth certificate. I'd never thought about the fact that I had one, other than when I went to the DMV and got my driver's license, or I think I trotted it out to get a work permit when I was 15, things like that.
But, yeah, I just, like I said, took it for granted that this was something that everyone had. And seeing that pamphlet made me realize that this was a pretty recent state of affairs. And again, I was just very interested in knowing more about that story.
I was someone who was already interested in the history of childhood, the relationship between children and families and the state, and this seemed like another road I could go down to explore some of those same themes, but from a different angle and from the point of view of a document that is both extremely ordinary and quotidian and extremely powerful.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. The fact that that little pamphlet existed suggested that there was a time when people were trying to sell the public on it.
SUSAN PEARSON: Exactly.
Church and State By the Numbers – 05:09
BLAIR HODGES: It's fascinating to me how one little documentary discovery like that can spark a whole book.
Your research takes us back some centuries. In fact, it goes back to when churches were kind of the main place where someone's birth or even life would be recorded.
But then you say there was a shift toward more secular record keeping that started emerging in the 1600s. So just give us a brief snapshot of that. Your book doesn't spend a lot of time there, but I think it's helpful to see where that shift happened from church to state.
SUSAN PEARSON: Sure, I'm happy to talk about that. As you notice, I kind of go back to what historians call the early modern period. So, you know, from, say, 1500 to 1800. And during this period, in a lot of the Western world, churches would have been the main places where births and deaths and other rituals were recorded.
Church records were maybe actually recording things like baptism and burial, which is a slightly different thing than birth and death, but they're close in proximity to one another. And at that time, right, in Europe, most of the churches were also state churches, right? So even though churches were doing the registration, many nations had official state churches. So there was some kind of relationship between these church records and state records. Or the church records could serve as kind of public state records when necessary.
And that began to change, really, in the seventeenth century, when religious dissenters from England, the Puritans, left and came to what they considered the New World and landed in Plymouth, landed in Massachusetts, and created a commonwealth there.
And in their new commonwealth, they created the first system of civil registration in the Western world. They were excited and concerned to have civil registration because, as religious dissenters, their records of baptism and burial and marriage were not recorded by the Church of England, by the Anglican Church, which had been established by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century.
And so they didn't have records that they could rely on when they needed to establish facts about themselves, when they needed to prove, say, lines of descent for things like inheritance, or even to establish that a couple was married and that their children were legitimate.
So they wanted a civil form of registration that would not discriminate based on religion in order to get your name and your family affiliations in whatever the official record books were. And so that was an extremely innovative kind of practice that they set up.
Some of the other colonies, like Virginia, for example, kept a parish registry system until it became a state after the American Revolution. So there was a kind of patchwork in the colonies in British North America. Some of them adopted the civil registration system of Massachusetts. Others kind of imitated the parish-based registry system of England.
But, like I said, there was this new model on the horizon, which was civil registration.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And you talk about a number of documents that people would use and that historians might use as they go back to try to find out when people were born. Sometimes records were kept in Bibles or registers or special lithographs that people would have created to recognize a new member of a family or whatever.
And your book also talks about how documenting someone's birth or their life had implications for an individual's life, and it also had implications for kind of the collective, right? There was this idea of doing political arithmetic, for example, that I'd never heard of. Give us a sense of what that was about.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. So one of the reasons why even parish registry systems existed on the part of state churches was that nations in Europe, monarchs in Europe, wanted to know the size of their population in the early modern period.
This is a period that's governed by mercantilism, a kind of logic where all of these European nations like Spain and France and England and the Netherlands are going out and they're trying to conquer new parts of the world. They're engaging in kind of competitive trade overseas in this Atlantic world.
And the point of these empires and the point of the trade that they're setting up is really to kind of enhance the economic strength of any given nation. And there's an assumption that the larger population you have, the more wealth your nation can generate and the more profit will kind of accrue to the crown.
And so monarchs want to know: Is my population growing? Is it shrinking? How large is it? The population is a source of strength because it represents the number of laborers you have, right? So there's a kind of crude measure of economic productivity or the potential for economic productivity. It also represents the number of soldiers you have in this kind of competitive imperial system.
And so for both of those reasons, for sort of military strength and economic strength, monarchs become interested in doing what you mentioned, political arithmetic, which is to see: What is the size of my population? How many wealth-generating laborers do I have? How many soldiers do I have? You know, could I, if you're King George, could I take down France in a battle?
Right? And the only way to kind of assess that is to get some rough count of your population.
19th Century Efforts to Modernize Record Keeping – 10:55
BLAIR HODGES: And the records were spotty, despite the fact that these people really wanted to know the numbers. You take us up to the nineteenth century. Let's look at Lemuel Shattuck. This is a reformer in Massachusetts around the 1850s. So this is, like, 170 years ago. And he really wanted to fix the problems that he saw with spotty record keeping.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, Lemuel Shattuck is, you know, definitely a touchstone in the book. As you say, he's a nineteenth-century American reformer. He lives in Boston, so he's in Massachusetts, which, as I noted earlier, set up the first civil registration system in the Western world.
And yet, as Shattuck's kind of looking around in the early 1800s, he's seeing that although Massachusetts as a commonwealth, and now as a state, has in theory had some kind of registration laws on their books for over 200 years, in reality most births go unregistered.
And so the state of Massachusetts doesn't actually know that much about its population. So, you know, just from this kind of basic political arithmetic sense, it doesn't know how many people are being born in the state. It doesn't know how many people are dying. It doesn't know if babies born in the state are more likely to live or die, and basic facts like that.
And for someone like Shattuck in the early nineteenth century, he's really influenced by a kind of rising worldwide interest in statistics, which is a kind of new science, a new method in mathematics.
And there's a lot of faith on the part of people who are interested in statistics that if you can collect the right kind of information about human life, you will be able to discover the underlying laws that govern social life, population health, and individual health.
And so it's really a kind of proto-social scientific point of view that's emerging in this early nineteenth-century period. And so for men like Shattuck, they just think, well, look, you know, we can't do anything unless we have the basic data, right? The most basic element of doing any kind of statistical collection or analysis is to have the basic data. And they realize they don't have it.
BLAIR HODGES: And public health, you know, was a really big driver for this. Infant mortality was high. It played a big role. And I was fascinated to see how attitudes started to change about infant mortality. And you can see that in the fact that people were pushing for birth registration. They wanted birth registers so they could start to work on infant mortality.
SUSAN PEARSON: Absolutely. Even in the early nineteenth century, people like Shattuck realize, or they suspect, that infant mortality might be higher in places like Boston and New York City, these congested modern cities which are kind of, you know, growing really rapidly, don't necessarily have proper sanitation. There aren't a lot of regulations about buildings and how many windows need to be in a tenement house and things like that.
And so they see that there's the kind of immiseration of human life in these urban areas that's occurring. And so they are interested in public health reform. And as you're saying, infant mortality is one of the kind of indices that they focus on as, you know, how healthy is a community.
And one of the ways to measure that becomes: What is the infant mortality rate? As the kind of canary in the coal mine that tells you whether this place is healthy or whether it's unhealthy, what kind of sanitary reforms might be necessary to better support human life.
Tracking and Improving Public Health – 14:44
BLAIR HODGES: Right. There's this shift from sort of looking at God's will or thinking about—I mean, no one was ever happy about infants dying, but it was also kind of perhaps a little more accepted as just a natural thing that happened.
You trace this shift to this attitude of, actually, wait, there are more of these deaths than there should be, and maybe we can do something about it using numbers. The problem, of course, is how they were keeping track of the numbers was not great, right?
So this reformer is like, all right, let's change the system. What kind of things did he want to see happen? What did they do in Massachusetts?
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, Shattuck really urged the Massachusetts state legislature to pass new vital statistics registration laws that would kind of change the way that registration was done.
And there were a few different elements to this. Like I said, Massachusetts's system was already a civil system, so he didn't have to change that. But one thing they did was they decreased the amount of time after a baby was born that you would have to register a birth. So you might have had a month beforehand. Now it's supposed to be done within ten days.
They also shifted the responsibility for who's responsible for registering the birth, right? I mean, that's one of the big kind of sticking points in any registration system, is there needs to be someone whose job it is to get this done and someone who takes the job seriously.
And so another way that Shattuck helped Massachusetts reform its system was to move from a system where basically the head of the household, most likely the father of the child, would be responsible for walking down to the town clerk's office and saying, a baby was born in my house on such and such a day, and this is the name, right? And these are the names of me and my wife.
To one where the birth attendant was responsible for registering the birth. So that could be a midwife, it could be a physician, it could be the head of household, depending on the circumstances, right? But the idea was that it's usually going to be a midwife or a physician who's attending the birth. And if you have someone who has a sense of professional responsibility to do this, then it might happen more frequently.
And then subsequent laws would also penalize birth attendants. There's a punishment for them if they don't do it, right? And so there becomes an ability to enforce the law, which really had been absent before as well.
The other big change that Shattuck makes in Massachusetts is to urge the state to move birth record keeping from the domain of the secretary of state to the state board of health. And this sounds like a very kind of bureaucratic, uninteresting move, but if you unpack it, it's actually conceptually quite important because—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this was huge.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean—and this is part of what you were talking about, right? The way that this new interest in vital registration really comes out of an interest in public health.
And so they are saying this isn't record keeping that's like a ledger book that will be used in a legal way, right? Which is kind of why it had been in the purview of the secretary of state, like recording, you know, transactions on deeds and titles for houses, right? It's about property transmission, you know, and kinship so that you can document patterns of inheritance and property transmission, right?
But Shattuck's saying that's not the highest and best use of this system, and it's not the most important thing about this system. The most important thing about this system is that it's the source, it's the basis for the data that will allow us to understand the health of the population. And so it needs to be governed by a state board of health.
And so Massachusetts creates a state board of health and then puts vital registration inside that entity instead of the secretary of state. So, like I said, I mean, it's down in the bureaucratic weeds, but it's actually kind of a sea change in thinking about why are we recording this information, right? And it gives a new purpose for registration.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And what people will notice is the question of authority didn't go away. Like, all the legal implications that you mentioned that put it in the legal side of things didn't go away when they transferred this and kind of created a new authority over the lives of American citizens.
This allowed for greater government intervention into people's lives. And you give some specific examples of this. For example, these eye drops that would help prevent blindness or vaccines. And so questions of public health, which have legal implications, can be affected by these boards of health, these people that are appointed, not elected by the public, right? And that's a big shift too.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so it's a shift toward a kind of model of government where the government is taking responsibility for, you know, sort of the health of people, their bodies, right? And saying that it is the job of the government to make sure that we're healthy and that we can survive infancy and things like this.
And it goes along with other types of movements, like efforts to regulate labor and workplace safety and things like that, that are nascent but kind of coming into fruition in the nineteenth century, and particularly at sort of the local and state level. It'll be a while before the federal government acts in these arenas.
But at the local and state level, you're getting these reformers who see what's going on around them and say, well, maybe we can start making rules about this and sort of regulations to kind of try to make sure that people have kind of healthier lives.
And so once you have birth registration, you have this sort of entering wedge, I think, for other kinds of public health activities that local and state governments might be interested in.
Right. So you mentioned the blindness prevention. So infants whose mothers had syphilis, for example, which was not incredibly uncommon in the nineteenth century, or more common certainly than it is today, right, might have had infected eyes when they were born. And so doctors discovered that if you put silver nitrate drops in an infant's eyes after birth, you could prevent blindness from this infection.
But if you didn't do the drops, then the chance of blindness goes way up. So this campaign against infant blindness started to kind of piggyback onto the increasing registration of births by saying, well, let's make the birth attendants, who, after all, have to fill out the birth registration form under these new laws, let's make them check a box on the birth certificate that says whether they used these drops or not.
And so there's a way that the state can sort of instruct birth attendants just through the fact that it now has this form and they have to fill it out. They have to check boxes, and it can sort of give them instructions, give them reminders now that this kind of piece of paper exists that's going to be in the delivery room or be filled out shortly after the birth.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And it would also impact how people paid attention to poorer classes. For example, they noticed infant mortality was higher among certain populations, and so they could plan more interventions into those, so set up appointments with single mothers, for example, where they noticed the infant mortality rate was a lot higher.
But again, this points back to greater government intervention. And this is the tension I think we're going to see throughout the book. It's addressing really important issues, but you're also going to face resistance from some people, from some citizens, who resent that and who kind of push away from it.
Obstacle: Midwives and Doctors Resist State Regulations – 22:50
BLAIR HODGES: But another obstacle that was unexpected as I'm reading along is that midwives and doctors weren't always on board at first when they're supposed to be the ones registering births, which surprised me. It seems intuitive that, of course, we would want to keep a record of this stuff. Why were midwives and doctors and even some registration officials resistant to this?
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, I think I was surprised by this as well. But it ends up being kind of a whole chapter of the book, which is about why one of the kind of weak spots in the system, as it's created in states in the early nineteenth century, is that, you know, you can pass a law that says it's the job of the midwife or doctor, the birth attendant, to fill out the birth certificate, but it doesn't mean they'll actually do it, right, even if you threaten to punish them.
And so one of the reasons that physicians in particular were resistant to filling out birth certificates is that some of them viewed it as a form of uncompensated labor that the state was asking them to do. And they didn't think that was fair. They thought that if they were filling out these forms, which, after all, they didn't ask to have that job—it was imposed on them—and they thought, well, you know, we ought to be paid twenty-five cents every time we fill out this form because you're giving me an additional job, but you're not giving me additional pay for it.
And then, you know, even some registration officials felt that way. Very often registration officials at the local level were men who had multiple kinds of civic or municipal duties. They might be the tax collector and the city registrar and also operate, you know, a general store on Main Street in town.
And sometimes they were given the job of vital registration by a state legislature that just sort of tacked it on and said, well, we're going to give this job to all the existing tax collectors in the state. So instead of creating a new infrastructure for vital registration, they just laid it on top of some other kind of infrastructure that they already had.
And so they just gave people more work to do but didn't necessarily increase their pay. So there was always this question of uncompensated labor that both doctors and some registration officials felt.
With midwives, the situation was a little different. In most states, midwives were unlicensed by the state. And in some states, it was actually illegal to practice midwifery. And so they were flying a little bit under the radar of state governments, local governments. And so filling out birth certificates required them to admit that they were practicing something which might be illegal.
Yeah, so that was the case in some states. And then a lot of times, midwives, as I said, were not necessarily professionals, but were older women in communities who just had a lot of experience attending births and were trusted and known in their neighborhoods and in their communities as good birth attendants.
And so they were not necessarily educated. They might be illiterate and so unable to actually fill out the forms. Some of them were not fluent in English. So very often immigrant communities, for example, would rely on women from within their own language or national or ethnic community to deliver their babies.
So you might have, you know, say, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a very large German population in the nineteenth century, and many people may not have spoken English or spoken English very well, may not have been literate in either English or German. So midwives from those communities maybe couldn't read the forms, couldn't write.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And maybe we're even suspicious of them too. Like, hey, we're just trying to deliver babies.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, we're just trying to deliver babies. And if I give you my name, you know, are you going to come knock on my door and start asking me what I'm doing? And so there's both kind of fear as well as just maybe a lack of skills in certain cases.
Obstacle: Reluctant Parents – 27:09
BLAIR HODGES: We mentioned another obstacle that people faced. Not only were the people that were recording birth registration sometimes reluctant or maybe wanted compensation that wasn't there, whatever, but also getting the public more on board could be tricky.
And so they had to develop ways to get parents more interested in it. And you talk about how they tied it to parental love, basically, which also kind of changed how birth certificates appeared as well. I loved this part.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. One of the things that reformers in the Census Bureau and the U.S. Children's Bureau tried to promote in local communities, and these, you know, women's groups and other organizations tried to promote in local communities, was the idea that every parent should not only make sure their child's birth is registered, but should actually have a copy of the birth certificate and, you know, kind of glue it into the baby book, keep it along with all the other keepsakes and reminders of the baby's development.
And, you know, the baby book itself, right, is a kind of new thing in the world that shows this increasing investment in parenthood, in parental love, in kind of, you know, tracing the baby from beginning to end. And so inserting the birth certificate into that document, right, is a way of saying that this is just as important, just as essential, as all of these other important milestones developmentally that your child is going to go through.
That this is a kind of foundation of who they are. And when you get them registered at birth, you're setting them up for their future. You're setting them up to attend school, to be able to marry, to be able to prove their citizenship, maybe to be able to ensure that they get their inheritance properly.
All of these kinds of things that look toward the child's future are laid on a foundation that's created by the birth certificate and by the parent knowing that it's done, knowing that they have a copy of it that they can access whenever they need it.
BLAIR HODGES: And they could make it more beautiful to kind of make it a keepsake as well, right? And that could maybe help spread the word for people too.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. A lot of hospitals and municipal bureaus of vital registration in the early twentieth century, as they're kind of trying to promote birth registration, go the extra mile. They spend a little extra money to make the birth certificates that they give parents really beautiful, embossed or embellished documents that they imagine will either be pasted into the baby book or might even be framed and put up on the wall in a family's home next to the family pictures.
And they hope that if parents put them up on the walls, then neighbors will see them and think, oh, well, that's really nice, you know, gee, do we have one of those for our child? We better make sure that the baby's birth is registered and maybe we can get a nice birth certificate to hang up on our wall too.
And so it's seen as kind of an advertisement for the value and importance of birth registration to actually make the objects themselves interesting, beautiful, and something that a family would take care to know where it is at all times.
The Federal Government Gets Involved for the Kids – 30:19
BLAIR HODGES: Right. You're seeing a patchwork of things happen state to state. And it seems like that was also part of the problem, is there wasn't any kind of universal, agreed-on standard of how this was supposed to work.
And you start to see the federal government, the federal level of involvement, pick up here. What was happening to get more federal attention on this issue?
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. So that piece of federal involvement becomes really important. And as you were saying, throughout the nineteenth century, this fairly piecemeal process of trying to kind of get vital registration, and birth registration in particular, to be a functioning system, because it's sort of, you know, Chicago's trying to do it, the state of Illinois is trying to do it.
Large cities have their own systems, and states are also passing new laws or trying to enforce the laws they have. But under our Constitution, the federal government has no authority to do vital registration. And so it's really one of those powers that's left to the states under the Constitution.
But there are increasingly, toward the end of the nineteenth century, new types of kind of civic organizations that start to lobby the federal government to try to do something. So you get the American Medical Association, the creation of the American Public Health Association in the 1870s, an organization that's called the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality gets founded in the late nineteenth century.
And all of these organizations see that there's a real problem. Again, the problem is that we cannot collect basic information about the population, right? We can't know the infant mortality rate because we don't know how many babies are born each year and we don't know how many die. So you can't get the numerator, you can't get the denominator, you can't know the rate, right?
And you don't know how the population's growing, who's having children, whether the population's growing through immigration or natural increase, increase through reproduction, right?
So they are trying to figure out ways that the federal government can sort of put its finger on the scale and try to tip the balance toward making a system that functions, even though it has no authority to actually do anything.
So in 1903, Congress creates a permanent Census Bureau. Of course, the United States has a census every ten years.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So they could tie that to the Constitution, right? Like, that was constitutionally mandated.
SUSAN PEARSON: The census is mandated, right? Because you have to do this population count every ten years because that's how we figure out representation in Congress, right?
So in 1903, a permanent Census Bureau is created. So it's kind of like, well, is there something the Census Bureau can do? Because the Census Bureau, after all, is interested in the size of the population and it counts everyone every ten years, but it doesn't, again, have authority to do registration.
And then in 1912, the U.S. Children's Bureau is founded. And as I said then, you know, at the beginning of our chat here, they launch a campaign to promote birth registration in the states. And again, it's really just kind of—they can't, you know, require states to pass laws. They can't require states to do things.
But the Census Bureau and the Children's Bureau both take the tools that they do have and try to assist the states in creating better registration infrastructure, right?
So one of the things, a really simple, basic thing that the Census Bureau does once it's formed, is it creates a standard certificate of live birth.
BLAIR HODGES: Here we go.
SUSAN PEARSON: It creates a standard form, right? Like, here's a form created by the Census Bureau, so it's available for every state to use. They can't require that the states use it, but they hope that the states will, and they hope that all the states that take that form and use it will also send them back transcriptions at the end of every year so that there will be a kind of federal data collection, a federal aggregation of what's being filled out on these forms.
So again, they can't require it, but they say, if you use this form and you send us back a copy, we'll pay for the postage. We'll make it easy for you.
And the Children's Bureau also does things to try to make birth registration easier and more functional in the states. So they try to mobilize volunteers to promote birth registration in their states and in their towns, right?
So they get groups of women, organized groups of women in women's clubs, to go out and canvas neighborhoods, knock on people's doors, and ask, do you have children? Are your children's births registered? If they're not, I've got a form right here with me. Let's fill it out.
Or to do what they call birth registration tests, which was to do the same thing, go around, knock on people's doors, ask, is there a child who's under the age of one in your family? If so, you know, was the birth registered?
And then they would go back and check that information against the local registration systems and see how accurate the local registration systems were. They could see, you know, we found one hundred babies that were born in Des Moines, Iowa, last year. Well, there's only twenty-five that are registered. So now we know the birth registration rate in Des Moines: twenty-five percent. That's not very good.
So we can use that. We can talk to the newspapers about it. We can have local speakers talk about it, things like that. So they found ways to give tools to local communities to try to assess the state of their registration, to try to promote it publicly to people as something that was valuable that they should care about.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. So now we're seeing local groups, organizations, people on the state level, and people on the federal level. They're all working together more and more to get on the same page with birth registration.
And we're going to head into the twentieth century here. We're talking with Susan J. Pearson, a professor of history at Northwestern University, author of the book The Birth Certificate: An American History.
Child Labor at the Turn of the Century – 36:44
BLAIR HODGES: All right, so it's the turn of the century. What's going on here? Things are going to start shifting in terms of the reasons why people want birth registration.
So we talked about public health. That was a big reason. But now child labor is going to become an impetus for registration, and that's going to raise a bunch of new problems.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yes. The U.S. Children's Bureau, who I already mentioned—one of the things that actually leads to the formation of the Children's Bureau is a kind of nationwide movement to promote child welfare that stretches from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.
And these child welfare reformers are very concerned not only about infant mortality, but about child labor, which is on the rise, particularly in urban areas. You have lots of immigration to cities across the United States, both on the eastern seaboard, but also, you know, you have these kind of brand-new cities which are growing through huge amounts of immigration. Places like Chicago and Cleveland and Cincinnati and Detroit, right?
And as the United States is industrializing, as there's all these immigrants coming in, child welfare reformers get very concerned about rising child labor and see that the new forms of industrial labor that children are performing seem particularly unhealthy, right? As opposed to helping your dad, you know, harvest corn on a farm or something like that.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
SUSAN PEARSON: The more traditional kinds of work that children have always done in families. So children have always worked, but children haven't always worked in factories. They haven't always worked in coal mines. They haven't always worked in more intensive commercial environments.
And that was what was changing, and that was what seemed quite alarming to child welfare reformers. So they were pretty successful in passing various kinds of child labor restrictions, again at the state level.
But what they quickly discovered is that it was really difficult to enforce child labor laws because there was no way to know how old anyone actually was. Most people didn't have birth certificates.
BLAIR HODGES: And there was incentive for people not to be honest about it, right?
SUSAN PEARSON: There was an incentive for people to lie!
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
SUSAN PEARSON: Mostly, you know, you're talking about people who are seeking work, right? Whether it's children that are doing it because their parents are telling them they have to, or it's children who would rather do that than go to school. But there's, yeah, there's an incentive to not tell the truth.
So this kind of combination of thinking that people have an incentive to lie about their age with the kind of inability of state law enforcement agencies to actually determine children's ages created a huge problem for anyone who thought that children should not be working or wanted to be able to restrict it to, you know, you can't work until you're fourteen or sixteen or, you know, whatever the particular regulations might be.
And so the same kinds of people that were interested in knowing about and preventing infant mortality and thinking that birth registration is useful for that increasingly come to see that birth registration would also be really useful in enforcing child labor laws, because here would be a kind of objective document that would just really easily establish when a person was born and whether they're eligible to work.
And so these campaigns for birth registration and against child labor kind of dovetail around this issue of birth registration.
BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about how this is a shift in evidence, in what people would accept as evidence, a shift away from things like family testimony and community testimony toward documentary evidence and an increase in state authority.
And that was a really big shift that you trace there, that shift away from relying on a family and community to this documentary evidence provided by and regulated by the state.
And then in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act makes birth certificates, like, the evidence, right?
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, right. That 1938 federal legislation, the Fair Labor Standards Act, creates kind of national child labor laws and says proof of age is required. And the best proof of age, our first choice, is the birth certificate.
It's kind of like when you go to the DMV today and you can have documents from column A and documents from column B. And the documents from column A are considered to be better documents. You need fewer of them. If you don't have any documents from there, like a birth certificate or a passport or a Social Security card, right, you've got to assemble a whole bunch more documents from column B in order to prove that you are who you say you are.
And so the child labor laws that were passed at the state level beginning in the twentieth century and then finally at the federal level in the 1930s adopt this same kind of system, or really actually innovate this kind of system, where they rank-order what counts as good evidence about the facts of your identity.
And so in 1905 in New York State, this is the first state where they rewrite their child labor law to say what will count as evidence of age. And they get rid of their old system, which was a system based on parental affidavits, right, where a parent walks in and says, here's Johnny. Johnny's fourteen. You gotta be fourteen to work, so Johnny can work, right?
And the parent—it's an affidavit system—they swear to the truth of their statement in front of a notary public, but there's no documentary element to it at all, right? It's an oath, essentially.
And that was considered completely good legal practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I talk in the book about how, in courts of law, for example, when age was an issue in a court case, direct testimony is considered superior to documentary evidence, right?
So if you walk into the courtroom and you put your hand on the Bible and you swear to tell the truth, and then you give statements about your own age or about someone else's age, that's considered to be direct evidence, whereas a document would be considered sort of secondary or secondhand information.
And so these child labor laws are really flipping that one hundred and eighty degrees, turning that completely around to say that actually the oath, the direct testimony, is less—it's an inferior form of evidence to a document, right? And particularly, as you noted, state-produced documents, which these kind of reformers think, well, these are disinterested, neutral, objective.
The documents that we might have relied on in the past, like the family Bible or things like that, well, those come from the people that we don't trust, who we think might lie about their children's ages. So we don't want to take those as evidence unless there's no other choice.
And again, if we take those as evidence, we're going to have to have three or four different sources of information that all agree with each other about somebody's birth date. Whereas one birth certificate is prima facie, in legal terms—and it's written into the laws that it's prima facie proof of age.
The Ongoing Invention of Race – 44:24
BLAIR HODGES: We're seeing now a shift away from the idea of birth registration and birth certificates being intended just for public health and public good and this type of thing, or tracing populations. Now it's starting to become an identity document, something that actually legally identifies a person as an individual, not just part of a larger collective.
And it's going to be more and more of an identity document as the years go on. And that's going to raise some new problems here, right?
One fascinating aspect of your research is how this uncovers the ways that race has been socially defined through American history, right? So marking race on this document started to further define what race was.
There's a lot of assumptions packed into what it means to be a particular race. And the birth certificate and birth registration played a big role in how that looked.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yes. As you mentioned, birth certificates become really instrumental in this sort of consolidation of racial categories in the twentieth-century United States, and also instruments in the kind of allocation of rights and privileges according to race, which, as we know, is part of the story of twentieth-century laws: Jim Crow laws, segregation laws, laws regulating interracial marriage, things like that.
And so it's taken for granted, from the very first kind of federal standard certificate of birth created in 1903 through most of the twentieth century, that the race of the parents and the race of the child would be information that you would collect and that it would appear on the face of the birth certificate, right? It's just considered a basic fact of identity.
It's also something that these public health officials are interested in knowing about as well. Like, how does infant mortality break down by race? How do other kinds of public health issues vary by race?
And so this is both, from a statistical point of view, something that these public health reformers want. But then, as I say, everyone is kind of under the assumption that racial categories are real and they're just basic facts of identity that should be included on the documents.
And so then, when states like Virginia and other Southern states begin in the early twentieth century to pass more and more restrictive laws about things like school segregation, public accommodations like rail cars and theaters, and also prohibit interracial marriage, as in the case of child labor, right, the enforcement of these laws is going to depend on easy access to information, trustworthy information about who people really are.
A Tool of Segregation – 47:11
BLAIR HODGES: And when you say trustworthy, this speaks again to that issue of family testimony versus government documentation, right? Because people had an incentive not to want to be classified as Black people, for example, if it meant that they couldn't marry someone that they loved, or it meant that they or their children couldn't attend a school that was better than another school or whatever.
So there were these incentives. And then you had these just extremely racist activists like Walter Plecker, for example, who want to use these documents, really want to nail down a definition of race, document it, control it, be the judge of it, so that they can control all of the choices that people can make.
This is where we see the rise of this idea of one drop, like when they're identifying someone by their race.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. So Walter Plecker's the state registrar in Virginia. He has a very long tenure. He's appointed state registrar in 1912, and I think he serves in that post till 1946, when he dies. So he dies in office.
And during his time as state registrar, he is really instrumental in the architecture of Virginia's racial segregation laws. He's one of the people who helps get the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 passed through the Virginia state legislature.
The Racial Integrity Act is the law that will be overturned in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia. Among other things, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 defines racial classification, right? Creates the one-drop rule that if you have one drop of Black blood in you, then you must be classified as nonwhite for purposes of marriage, schooling, and all these other kinds of state entitlements and rights.
BLAIR HODGES: And let me say, before that they would say, "oh, you're one-sixteenth or one-eighth." Like, they would basically try to find a genealogical trace to a person. And they had it to where, okay, if you were one-sixteenth, you could have these privileges, or if you were one-eighth, you could have these privileges.
Now Plecker was saying, forget all that, forget all that. Any connection at all. Any connection will do it.
Which, by the way, let me just point out, is complete nonsense because genetically speaking, most people today have some connection to Africa or to Black people.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, you would be hard-pressed to find a lot of people through 23andMe or whatever ancestry DNA tests who could really—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like Plecker himself probably had "one drop."
SUSAN PEARSON: But he just wouldn't have known that.
The older rules, and rules in other Southern states as well, had other kinds of fractional amounts: one-eighth, one-sixteenth, one-fourth, right, to meet the definition of the dividing line between white and Black for legal purposes.
And this 1924 act is really an effort at kind of complete racial purity, as you say. It's a kind of fantasy, but it's something that Plecker and other activists are quite invested in.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, he started policing certificates themselves, right? Like, he went out to change people's actual records.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. And so he sees the state Bureau of Vital Statistics as really kind of the main instrument for the enforcement of the Racial Integrity Act because he has control, through the Bureau of Vital Statistics, over all the state documents: the marriage licenses, the birth certificates, the death certificates.
And so by using these and triangulating them with other documentary evidence—so he uses old census records, he uses old militia records, he uses old tax records stretching back a couple of centuries in Virginia to assemble genealogical information about the population.
And he doesn't do it for the entire state. That would be too huge a job. But what he does is he focuses on counties in the state that he believes have been the sites of racial mixing for centuries. And he in particular identifies in those counties surnames of families that he thinks have engaged in racial mixing.
And so what he does is, for those surnames in those particular counties, he creates family trees that he keeps in the office. And so anytime a document gets filed with the Bureau of Vital Statistics that contains one of these surnames—so whether it's a birth registration or a new marriage license or death certificate—he will look at how that person on that document is being racially classified, and he will check it against his family trees that he's created.
And if he thinks that document is trying to tell what he regards as a lie about the person's race, he will refuse to file it, and he'll write to that person and say, you're lying. You're saying that you're white. You're not. And I'm not going to issue a birth certificate for your child. I'm not going to issue this marriage license until you agree to change it.
And so he gets into—you know, he's taken to court, or the bureau's taken to court, a few times. It wins some, it loses some. But it's really a pretty radical and disruptive practice because he is trying to rewrite the racial history of the state of Virginia.
And oftentimes he's taking people who have what scholars call a racial reputation as white in their communities and saying, you're not actually white, and so your children aren't white, your grandma wasn't white, your grandpa wasn't. And this is really, you know, unsettling to the people that it happens to and does create some amount of backlash. But he's never taken out of office. It's never undone.
And just as a kind of side note, the Racial Integrity Act and the practices of Plecker are inspirational to the racial laws of Nazi Germany. They take inspiration from the kind of classification, the one-drop rule, the documentary systems.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. So this was pioneered and was exported from here.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, it was exported.
BLAIR HODGES: Americans tend to want to think of Nazi Germany as sort of coming up with their own ideas or ways of doing the horrors that they did. But yet we see it actually happening in the United States.
And again, it's another example of a shift from public and community knowledge to documented state knowledge, where someone could say, look, I'm white, I've been white my whole life, my family's white. And then he comes along and says, oh, actually, far back, you know, decades ago, I found this last name of a person who married in your line and they had a drop, so you do too.
It also completely erased Native Americans as well because, in his view, all Native Americans had at some point become, you know, become Black, basically.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. So that was one of the innovations of the Racial Integrity Act. Before that 1924 act in the state of Virginia, you could be regarded as Indian, Black, or white.
And there were a lot of families that claimed Indian ancestry. And Plecker thought that this was a fiction that was meant to cover up the fact that they were mulattoes, as people would have said at the time, and that it was a kind of end run around sort of mixed race—yeah, which means mixed race—and that it was a kind of end run around what he wanted to have as a very Black-white binary system of race in Virginia.
And so the Racial Integrity Act, among other things, essentially eliminates the category of Indian in the state of Virginia. And so a lot of the people that he refuses to register are people who have previously been registered, you know, in previous marriage certificates, on death certificates of ancestors, and things like that, as Indian.
And so they continue to try to do that, and he says, no, you can't do that anymore. Because, as you've mentioned, right, I can go back here and say that in 1853 your great-great-great-grandfather was listed on the, you know, militia muster as a free Negro or something like that. And so you're pretending to be Indian when really you're mixed race, white and Black, and that makes you Black.
Pushing Back Against White Supremacy – 55:57
BLAIR HODGES: Right. So birth certificates really become an important tool of white supremacy at this point. And so they became a really important civil rights issue over time. And states were using them to enforce segregation, to prevent interracial marriage, and to deny other benefits from people.
How did people of color respond to this and push back to take back some power from a birth certificate that was used for white supremacy?
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, so there's kind of a few different ways that I found that African Americans and other kinds of marginalized groups began to push back against these practices.
One of them was to try to limit the administrative uses of birth certificates. So one of the biggest ways that birth certificates functioned as a tool of discrimination outside the Jim Crow South was in employment.
So even in the sort of northern cities and states, it was increasingly common after World War II for employers to want to see your birth certificate when they hired you. They would want to do this for a few different reasons, but one of them is because now we have Social Security and employers have to kind of pay into Social Security.
And so Social Security, like child labor, is an age-based system. And so employers want to see proof of your age when they hire you so they know that when you turn sixty-five, or when you become eligible for Social Security or a company-sponsored pension.
But African Americans start to complain to organizations like the NAACP and fair employment practice offices that are set up in states after World War II as well, that employers are using birth certificates and the requirement to show them as a condition of employment to discriminate against African Americans and not hire them.
So, say, when you apply for a job, turn in a copy of your birth certificate, and then everyone who applies for a job who's African American won't get an interview or won't get hired, right? Because their birth certificate shows that they're Black.
But it also worked in another way to discriminate against African Americans because African Americans were much less likely to have their births registered in the first place. So that made it harder to get a job, period.
So, like I said, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations try to get states, through their fair employment commissions, to write rules that you can't make a birth certificate a condition of employment, for example. So there are these kind of incremental changes at the state level.
There are also campaigns by civil rights organizations in conjunction with the federal government to try to promote birth registration among African Americans and Native Americans, who are kind of the most under-registered groups in the middle of the twentieth century, so that they won't face these kinds of bureaucratic obstacles to getting access to things like employment and schooling and Social Security and other kinds of benefits.
But then finally, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights organizations and activists just start saying, you know what? We don't think that birth certificates should actually record the race of people on them, so let's get rid of it, right? The only reason to have it there and the only thing it does is to serve discriminatory purposes.
BLAIR HODGES: And you'd see conscientious objectors put "human" in the race space.
SUSAN PEARSON: Exactly, yeah. It seems like, as near as I could tell from my research, it really kind of trickles up from these grassroots conscientious objectors who are usually Black doctors, but sometimes Black parents.
So I found a couple of cases of Black doctors who refused to fill out the race box on the birth certificate. They, like you said, would write "human" or just refuse to fill it out. And then they were getting in trouble with the state bureau of health, right, and kind of arguing back and forth about this.
And then you see cases as well of Black parents who say that they insist that the birth attendant not record the race on the birth certificate. And so there's some controversies about that in places like New York City, where they really go head to head with the Metropolitan Board of Health in New York City about this.
And so New York City actually capitulates in the 1960s to these kinds of parent protests, parent-led protests, and says, okay, fine, we'll take race off the face of the birth certificate. And then that eventually gets adopted on the standard certificate of birth that's issued by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1968.
Long Form Birth Certificates – 01:01:00
BLAIR HODGES: And even that's complicated too, because when you get back to the public health needs, it could be useful to track race precisely because you could see different rates of employment or different rates of disease or infant mortality or maternal mortality.
And so there were reasons why it might be helpful to have race on birth certificates, and there are also extremely white supremacist and racist reasons to have it on there. So they kind of came up with these compromises, as you say, maybe to put it in a different section or put it on the back.
In fact—and correct me if I'm wrong—but this is where, when people talk about Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate, calling it a long-form birth certificate actually can be traced to these kinds of negotiations that changed, like, well, what is a long-form birth certificate? Well, you can trace it to these developments here, right?
SUSAN PEARSON: Exactly. There didn't used to be a long-form birth certificate, a short-form birth certificate. There was just one. And when you got a certified copy of the birth certificate, you got the exact copy that was filed in the office.
And nowadays, like you said, with the Obama controversy, we all know there's a difference between a short form and a long form. And that really does grow out of these compromises.
It actually first happens with controversies over recording illegitimacy. So it used to be the case that if you were born to unmarried parents, right, your birth certificate would say that you were illegitimate right there on the face of it, underneath your name.
And so every time you had to trot it out to, you know, enroll in school or get a driver's license or do whatever—
BLAIR HODGES: Or if your parents hid it from you, and then all of a sudden—
SUSAN PEARSON: And then you found out, right? Yeah. Or you might have grown up with a man that you thought was your father and it turned out he wasn't, right? So it could be an occasion for the revelation of what would have been regarded as a shameful thing.
BLAIR HODGES: Social stigma was huge.
SUSAN PEARSON: Social stigma was huge, yeah. And so again, these kind of child welfare reformers start to think, well, even though we love birth registration and we want to know how many children are illegitimate, we also really feel like we're punishing children for, you know, the sins of their parents, things that aren't their fault.
And now that birth certificates are identification documents and people have to get them out and use them all the time, we really ought not to make children disclose these facts about themselves just so that they can go to school or get a job.
And so what they do is they come up with essentially the first version of the long-form birth certificate, where they create a dotted line at the bottom of the birth certificate, and underneath the dotted line goes the information about legitimacy.
And that is only ever kept in the Bureau of Vital Statistics offices, right, so that they can get the statistical information in the aggregate. This number of illegitimate births happened in Providence, Rhode Island, last year. This percentage of the births were illegitimate. But you can't connect it to any particular individual when they have to show their birth certificate.
BLAIR HODGES: Is that still the case then? Do they still track that?
SUSAN PEARSON: They do, yeah. That's still the case.
BLAIR HODGES: But it's not connected to people's names?
SUSAN PEARSON: It's not connected to people's names.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
SUSAN PEARSON: There's all kinds of stuff nowadays. I mean, the amount of data that's sort of below the dotted line now is quite voluminous.
They'll collect information about whether you smoked during your pregnancy, and there's all kinds of questions that get asked when the birth attendant comes in and fills out the form in the hospital there. But all that stuff is just aggregate information, right? It's not tied to the particular child.
But this kind of compromise solution is already around, and then when this debate breaks out over racial classification, the same solution is adopted, which is, well, we do, like you said, want the aggregate information because maybe we want to know if rates of infant mortality are higher in Puerto Rican communities or African American communities. We don't want to give up knowing those kinds of things.
But at the same time, racial classification is really being used in stigmatizing ways for the most part. So race gets dropped below the dotted line and becomes part of that long-form birth certificate rather than the short form. And so that's the compromise that activists and state officials kind of can both live with.
Colonizing Indigenous Folks – 01:05:42
BLAIR HODGES: And that was also a big deal because of the way it impacted Native Americans. And your book spends a good deal of time talking about how the federal government early on was interested in registering Native Americans, which was also problematic in many ways.
For example, Native American naming practices were different. And so all of a sudden they were expecting Native Americans to start changing the ways they even named their babies or when they named them or what names were, how they worked.
And so there was this really colonial element to it. But the United States was pushing this because it was trying to figure out what to do with Native Americans in terms of territory, in terms of what their rights were in the United States, how to treat them. So that seemed to be a pretty important part of the overall story, the way that birth certificates impacted Native Americans.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. And it's a kind of interesting part of the story also because, like I was saying earlier, you know, the federal government doesn't have any authority to register births except in the case of Native Americans.
Because for most of U.S. history, the federal government has dealt directly with Native Americans as kind of sovereign entities, right, that it makes treaties with. And so it has these direct relationships that are not mediated through the system of states.
In the case of Native Americans, it really is actually the one who's responsible for kind of counting and registering Native Americans in ways that it isn't for any other part of the population. And so there is really, like you said, this colonial element to registration. The federal government, when it makes treaties with Native American groups early in the nineteenth century, for example, usually makes some kind of agreement to give out annual annuities or rations of food and goods, right? And so that's going to be based on knowing sort of who's in the group, who's entitled to these things, who's not.
And so it becomes interested in creating things like tribal rolls, which are a kind of list of names. On this day we're going to establish the tribal roll under this treaty obligation, and then we can add and subtract people from the tribal roll because we want to know, okay, if you have children, then they also become entitled to annuities and rations, right? On the other hand, if people die, then we don't owe them anything anymore.
And so that's a very kind of early interest that the federal government has in knowing who particular Native Americans are, who's being born, who's dying.
And then later, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the federal government adopts a policy of allotting land to Native Americans. So it had, up to this time, kind of operated reservations for Native Americans. There still are, of course, Native American reservations in the United States. But the federal government makes a big push to actually try to break up reservations and to break up tribes in general.
And it wants to kind of assimilate the Native American population into the U.S. population as a whole. And it thinks the best way to do this is to take tribal land and allot it to individuals as kind of privately held land, right? And so it starts giving out tracts of land, forty acres for a family.
And as part of that project of allotment, again, vital registration becomes really central to that because the federal government wants to know who's in a family, right? And so it wants to—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it changes Native American views of families.
SUSAN PEARSON: Right, right. Which often don't conform to a kind of Anglo-American-derived nuclear family structure, right? There's extended families. They may be matrilineal and not patrilineal, which just doesn't work on, you know, marriage forms, birth certificates, things like that.
So there's a lot of kind of shoehorning and twisting Native American practices to fit the kind of boxes on the forms. So, you know, when allotment happens, allotment commissioners will show up on tribal land and they'll say, okay, you know, we're setting up shop here and everybody's going to get in line and they're going to come tell us—you know, you're going to show us who's husband and wife here and what children belong to these people, right?
And we're going to record all of that stuff. And from that we're going to give you a marriage certificate, we're going to give you birth certificates for your children, so that we can understand who this property belongs to and how it can be legally transmitted.
So, you know, a wife could inherit land, a son could inherit land, a daughter could inherit land, but only within the kind of family structures that make sense in Anglo-American law. So they have to kind of, like I said, shoehorn Native American family structures into those. And it really is an act of sort of colonial domination in some ways to do that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I think it's a key theme of your book, the fact that birth certificates and birth registration are ways that society creates identities or controls identities.
And so as we read your history, you're showing how the documents have changed. You're showing how the processes of making them and what they say has changed. You're showing how the underlying purposes for them have changed over time and that the identities they describe have also changed over time.
It's really a history of change over time.
Discrimination Today – 01:11:35
BLAIR HODGES: It's especially important and relevant today because birth certificates are still contested ground. Your conclusion raises the issue of bathroom bills, for example, that were proposed in 2019, where a state like North Carolina wants to restrict bathroom access to people according to their sex or gender at birth on their birth certificate, and that was in 2019.
There was some pushback against it at that time, and it seemed like maybe that would go away. But as we've seen here recently, this issue has only become more pressing since then, and people want to use birth certificates to control gender identity and to restrict rights.
So again, we see birth certificates as a source that can unlock or give access to rights and inclusion, but can also be used for surveillance, control, and exclusion.
Give us—I'm interested in your thoughts about the current state when it comes to the new issues surrounding trans people.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, I thought a lot about this because, as you say, the issue around trans rights and the way that birth certificates are used as kind of a mechanism to regulate gender identity, right—the latest kind of wave of legislation has more to do with the issue of sports teams, right? Less bathroom bills and now it's, you know, these—or healthcare treatment.
BLAIR HODGES: Or healthcare treatment, right.
SUSAN PEARSON: To legislate, you know, you can only play on a girls' sports team, right, if you were assigned a female sex at birth. And we can figure that out by looking at your birth certificate, right? And in some states that—which, by the way—
BLAIR HODGES: Which, by the way, assumes that that recorded fact has some sort of factual truth to it instead of recognizing intersex people or recognizing people with different chromosomal makeup. So again, it assumes everything that it's supposed to be proving.
SUSAN PEARSON: Right, exactly. And so in that sense it functions like the sort of one-drop rule in Virginia, which is to say it's got a very binary system at its base, right? Because you can only choose male or female on the birth certificate box, just the way Walter Plecker said, well, you can only choose Black or white. There's no Indian, right? I'm not giving a kind of third space. We're not going to have that.
And so this is operating, you know, in the same way from the get-go, right? Never mind the fact that people can also change their birth certificates in many states. There are people who have the ability, for example, to change their birth certificates for a variety of reasons, right?
You can change your name on your birth certificate. You can, in many states, actually change the sex designation on your birth certificate when you're an adult if you are a trans person, right? And states have different requirements about kind of what criteria you have to meet in order to be able to do that.
But I mean the basic point, right, is that these sort of bathroom bills, the sports bills, all assume, as you noted, right, that the truth on the birth certificate is stable, right? It's valid from day one and it remains stable over time, and that's why we consider these important, authoritative, objective documents, right?
And I think, you know, to the extent that my research has given me a point of view on birth certificates that I think most people who haven't done all this research and spent years and years thinking about the history of birth registration might not have, is to say that, in fact, what the history of birth registration shows is that these documents have always been in the business of creating truths that are social in nature.
And that's to say both that they have social impact because of what we do with the documents, but also that the categories on them themselves, right, are social and political. And the fact, as you alluded to, right, that we've changed the content of birth certificates, we've changed the boxes on the certificates over time, goes to show that.
We changed the recording of legitimacy, we changed the recording of race. We also changed how adoption is represented. We didn't talk about that, and I don't go into it in great detail in the book, but nowadays, if a child is adopted, they are issued a birth certificate which says that their adoptive parents are their parents, right? There's no indication anywhere on the face of the birth certificate that there's not a biological relationship between the people named as parents and the child.
So in a biological sense, that document is a lie, but we are okay with that.
BLAIR HODGES: You can call it that.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. I mean, you could call it that, right? But it tells another kind of truth.
BLAIR HODGES: Or we accept the truth. Exactly.
SUSAN PEARSON: It tells a different kind of truth. It tells a truth that's social about who is in this family.
BLAIR HODGES: About parents. Yes.
SUSAN PEARSON: You know, who are the people that are raising this child? Who has assumed responsibility for this child, right? So it tells that truth. But that's a change we made because we wanted to protect adoptive families and adoptive children, right?
And just the way we made a change because we wanted to protect illegitimate children, we wanted to protect minoritized populations from discrimination through their public documents, my basic point is that we can make these changes. We have made them.
And so it's up to us to decide, as a matter of policy, what values we want these documents to reflect because they aren't frozen in time. And the boxes can be removed, they can be changed. We can add them, we can take them off, we can put them below the dotted line, above the dotted line. We have choices.
BLAIR HODGES: That's Susan J. Pearson, professor of history at Northwestern University and author of the book The Birth Certificate: An American History, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:17:57
BLAIR HODGES: All right, Susan, I want to play a little game here at the end that we like to do on the show. It's called Regrets, Surprises, or Changes.
And this game basically lets you think about your book now because it's in the rearview mirror, although you're still probably doing work that's related to it and stuff. But as you think about this book, is there anything that you regret about it that you would change about it, or anything that really surprised you in the process of making it?
And I leave that open to you to decide which path to take because you might have a good story for one of those categories. So regrets, surprises?
SUSAN PEARSON: I think my biggest surprise in writing the book was how important birth certificates were in the history of race and white supremacy in the United States. I didn't actually know that part of the story when I started my research for it.
I knew, because I had come onto the topic through the Children's Bureau pamphlet, I knew that part of my story would be about kind of child welfare campaigns, interest in infant mortality, child labor restriction, things like that. But I wasn't aware when I started the project of the history of people like Walter Plecker or of the importance of vital registration to the implementation of policies related to Native Americans at the federal level.
So those were some of the big surprises for me. And I have a whole list of things that I wish I had covered in this book that I didn't, including doing more stuff with adoptive birth certificates, doing more with immigration and immigration control, but—
BLAIR HODGES: You also touched on sovereign citizen stuff. And I think that could have been a whole chapter!
SUSAN PEARSON: And I could have done a whole chapter that really brought things more up to the present and not just done an epilogue.
So I do think there's more to know and more to say about this topic. But as a finite human being, at a certain point I kind of had to stop the research and stop the writing. But I haven't stopped thinking about these issues.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I think it really sets researchers and the public up really well to think about the current issues surrounding birth certificates and especially with gender and sexuality issues.
I think your book does a good job giving us historical parallels to think about what we're doing with these documents and how they can be used to harm and how they can change and how we can use them to help people flourish as well.
So, as you said, I mean, publishers tend to have page limits or something like word—okay, word count limits or something. So, yeah, time is finite, page numbers are finite. But this is a history that you've written here that stretches into the past and really points toward a lot of future possibilities as well.
And I have to say, when I first got the book, I hoped it would be enjoyable. To think about the history of the birth certificate might sound boring, but I have to say, to me it was not. This book was very fascinating and also has a lot of things to say about the present moment.
It's not just ancient history. It's not just old history. These are living issues that we're still dealing with today.
SUSAN PEARSON: Well, thank you. That's all music to my ears. And I really appreciate your invitation to come and talk about the book and appreciate your engagement with it.
BLAIR HODGES: Thank you so much. Again, that's Susan Pearson, and we talked about The Birth Certificate: An American History. You can find a link to that on our website.
All right, Susan, thanks for spending the time with us.
SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah, thanks so much for the invitation.
Outro – 01:21:42
BLAIR HODGES: That's it for this episode of Relationscapes. If this is your first time with us, welcome to the journey. I hope you'll check out some of the other episodes while you're here.
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Mates of State provides our theme music. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.