Book Review: The Birth Certificate: An American History by Susan J. Pearson

Abstract

For many Americans, the birth certificate is a valuable document, but only for the purposes of obtaining other “official” documents (driver’s license, passport, marriage license, etc.). Most of us rarely look at our birth certificates, but keep it protected as it is “proof” that we exist and deserve consideration by our government. Citizenship rests upon the birth certificate, and yet citizenship is also constructed within the birth certificate, with each box and space filled with purportedly objective information. Susan J. Pearson’s newest book, The Birth Certificate: An American History reveals the fraught history of this simple document. She examines how the birth certificate has always been about who qualifies as “American” and who does not. What many social groups and political agencies portray as a simple representation of the truth of one’s existence and identity is instead, in Pearson’s work, a complex, layered, and contentious system of categorizing individuals into a country of valuable and valueless groups. Pearson illustrates that over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “The more birth certificates came to serve as proof of identity, the less stable their ‘facts’ became.” (124) Pearson set out to trace the creation, development, and challenges to the American birth certificate and did so with admirable depth, creating a book very rich in sources. She opens on mid-nineteenth-century Boston where statistician and public health reformer Lemuel Shattuck presented his plan for systematized and universal vital registration in his state in the 1850s. Like many other white men of influence at this time, Shattuck believed that with enough data and the right numbers, populational health, strength, and value could be determined. Linking vital registration to the changes in childbirth, racial anxieties, and colonialism, Pearson investigates the myriad individuals and organizations in the last half of the nineteenth century who advocated for “accurate” birth recording of some kind. Pearson is able to add another important consideration to the commonly known narrative about the shift in birthing attendants in the United States from midwives to male physicians over the course of the nineteenth century, as birth certificates favored educated males over women who had less access to literacy and official avenues of paper bureaucracy. As states moved to pass birth registration laws, supporters found that convincing doctors, midwives, families, and others who might be involved in a birth to shift their practices accordingly was more difficult than they supposed. The United States Children’s Bureau, formed in 1912, stepped in to fill this role and worked tirelessly to spread the gospel of birth registration across the nation. As popular concerns of Progressive-Era club women, public health officials, and physicians striving to gain a professional monopoly, infant survival and child welfare emerged as problems to be solved by the state. The Children’s Bureau viewed accurate birth registration as crucial to these solutions. They could not ascertain the true threat of infant mortality (especially divided along racial lines) without knowing how many infants were born. They could not propel legislation against child labor without having a true measure of the age of each child. The Children’s Bureau was joined by many other organizations involved in decreasing both infant death and child labor (such as Book Reviews