The legal principle here is "presumption of legitimacy"--- unless the genetic father specifically, through a legal proceeding, steps up and asserts his paternity and willingness to be legally responsible for support, the two legally-married people are the parents of the child. That's English common law, with us since the 17th century. The early 20th century brought us a lot of innovations, like the idea that an unmarried woman can't just assert her babydaddy's identity on the birth certificate without his consent. (But birth certificates themselves weren't all that common in the US before about 1900.)
Another legal principle in the US is that birth certificates are prima facie evidence: rebuttable in court, but by default they're presumed to be truthful. New York State even has something to this effect on their birth certificates, at least the ones from the 1970s I've seen: "We're only documenting that this is what the mother/parents said at the birth. We're not saying it's true..."
The tear-off section for "sensitive" statistical data that shouldn't be tracked back to the person happened sometime in the 1930s, I think, and IIRC it was about tracking whether the mother had syphilis. The huge array of questions they ask now about prenatal care, drug use, etc, was an encrustation of the 1960s, mostly--- and California asks many more of those questions than the US Standard Certificate of Birth asks. And yes, you're right about the demographic section being irrevocably fucked now, since there's no good way to answer the demographics bits accurately without having a system that normalizes "genetic father" as separate from "legal father."
I've been trying to figure out how to describe this in my project, since the 2 basic purposes of birth certificates are 1) biostatistics and 2) identity regulation (at both the individual level and the constitutive level--- who your parents are, and how many parents you can have.) And it turns out that, particularly in matters of parental identity, goal #1 and goal #2 usually are diametrically opposed when kids aren't born into heteronormative nuclear families.
One of these days, I'm going to find someone who can explain for me how the government corrects its numbers to allow for the possibility that people are lying (strategically) about their baby-daddy on the confidential section. The statistical uses of birth data only work when the system can collect data that's correct enough to make up for falsification factors.
no subject
Another legal principle in the US is that birth certificates are prima facie evidence: rebuttable in court, but by default they're presumed to be truthful. New York State even has something to this effect on their birth certificates, at least the ones from the 1970s I've seen: "We're only documenting that this is what the mother/parents said at the birth. We're not saying it's true..."
The tear-off section for "sensitive" statistical data that shouldn't be tracked back to the person happened sometime in the 1930s, I think, and IIRC it was about tracking whether the mother had syphilis. The huge array of questions they ask now about prenatal care, drug use, etc, was an encrustation of the 1960s, mostly--- and California asks many more of those questions than the US Standard Certificate of Birth asks. And yes, you're right about the demographic section being irrevocably fucked now, since there's no good way to answer the demographics bits accurately without having a system that normalizes "genetic father" as separate from "legal father."
I've been trying to figure out how to describe this in my project, since the 2 basic purposes of birth certificates are 1) biostatistics and 2) identity regulation (at both the individual level and the constitutive level--- who your parents are, and how many parents you can have.) And it turns out that, particularly in matters of parental identity, goal #1 and goal #2 usually are diametrically opposed when kids aren't born into heteronormative nuclear families.
One of these days, I'm going to find someone who can explain for me how the government corrects its numbers to allow for the possibility that people are lying (strategically) about their baby-daddy on the confidential section. The statistical uses of birth data only work when the system can collect data that's correct enough to make up for falsification factors.