“[W]hile governor Massachusetts, Romney refused to issue birth certificates to gay parents of new-born children. He threw as many administrative obstacles in their way as possible, in an effort to show his disproval for parenting that he didn’t morally agree with. Imagine. Mitt Romney made gay parents go to a high level government official, with each and every child, in order to simply get a legal birth certificate.”—Romney refused birth certificates for legally wed gay parents (via robot-heart-politics)
Is it really awful of me to say that I think that birth certificates, for the sake of the child’s future health security, needs to include the names of the actual biological parents? Like, a birth certificate doesn’t matter in terms of who is going to raise the kid - and we should probably come up with a different form that states who the actual real-life parents are for every kid - we need to be able to know who’s genes the person has in order to find their family history and help them if some medical need arises.
Also need to note that adopted kids don’t have that. And it probably hurts them quite a bit. What if they can’t find organ donors who match, or don’t know their risks for certain disorders and therefore never get tested and their kid ends up harmed?
That’s not how birth certificates work, though. Birth certificates currently are about whom the state recognizes as a child’s legal parents, and actually, it does matter in terms of who is going to raise a child and about state-sanctioned legal benefits of the parent-child relationship. Determining the biological parentage is not the primary purpose of birth certificates at all. As you noted, when a child is adopted in any other situation, a new birth certificate is issued and the old one is sealed, often without any chance the child could access the original. We shouldn’t have two separate systems for children adopted by heterosexual couples or gay couples. In cases where the biological father is not present or a participant, it is also likely that his name will not be included on the birth certificate at all.
Not being able to find organ donors or not knowing their risks for biological disorders is an obvious issue with this. Being able to discover your adoptive parents’ identity might be helpful in that scenario. However, in the case of many adoptions today, much of that information is already communicated by the biological parent to the adoptive parent(s), and one of the reasons for sealing the original birth certificate is to protect the biological parents’ privacy. This is one of the downsides of adoption.
But this isn’t the purpose of birth certificates, which are legal—not medical or scientific—documents.