Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Children Suffer When Birth Certificates Lie
The purpose, rather, is to document the relevant facts of your birth. Who gave you birth and who fathered you? Where were you born, and when? These facts are of public importance. The government needs to know them because the government is charged with protecting your life, and that means letting fathers and mothers do their job.
Your place of birth determines citizenship. Your birthday determines when you can go to school, and when you can drive. It determines when you can vote and when you get Social Security. More importantly, your birthday determines the years that your parents protect you from yourself, from your own immature decisions. And during those years, it keeps the government from interfering in your upbringing because nobody can care for you better than your own father and mother.
Speaking of father and mother, your birth certificate names them so that everybody knows who has the God-given responsibility to care for you. Of course, this can change through subsequent adoption and custody arrangements. But those situations only arise if the parents on the birth certificate abdicate their duties.
This is important. Unlike adoption and custody, which are determined by courts, birth certificates are determined by nature, and take precedence. By naming your father and mother, the government is not creating your family, but recognizing it.
These thoughts about birth certificates come as I am pondering two cases before the courts. One is from Arkansas, the other from California. Both have to do with the most basic information on a birth certificate. Who is your father? Who is your mother?
C.M. v. M.C was filed before the California appellate court in January. It is about a woman who hired out her body for surrogacy, and the man who used it. A 50-year old single male, living with his elderly parents, purchased eggs from anonymous donors and, using his own sperm, conceived thirteen people in a petri dish. Three of them were transferred to a woman from California, hired to carry them to term.
But then, he changed his mind. His father, who owned the house where he lived, said that he would not allow babies under his roof. Then the “buyer,” a postal worker from Georgia, said that he couldn’t afford to raise all three children, but only one. He tried to force the mother to abort the other two.
She refused, and wanted only to raise the two unwanted children as her own.
Did you notice that I have not called the woman a surrogate, but a mother? That was not careless confusion of the facts. That is the only thing you can call a woman who is carrying a child. Science has long-since learned that people are not merely the sum-total of their chromosomes. After all, even identical twins are not identical.
Our developing knowledge of epigenetics is showing that mothers are not merely incubators. There is a biological conversation between their bodies and the embryos within. The mother’s genetics determine which of the embryonic genes are turned on, which are turned off, when, and for how long.
While this is happening, not only are the mother and babies bonding, but cells from the developing child also pass through the placenta and into the mother’s body where they live for the rest of her life. This cell-colony, called a chimera, establishes a life-long biological link between mother and child.
In addition to the physical symbiosis between mother and child, consider the wisdom of Solomon. When two people came before him, both claiming to be the mother of the same child, Solomon established a simple, effective test of motherhood. He took out a sword and declared that he would give half the child to each. Horrified, the real mother immediately renounced her rights if only the child could live (1 Kings 3:16-28).
That’s exactly what the mother did in this case. She was willing to end the contract and give up her personal advantage, if only her children might live. If only our courts had the wisdom of Solomon!
Instead, the California courts refused to recognize even the most rudimentary rights of a mother.
When the children were born, she was not allowed to feed them. A guard was posted at her hospital door to prevent her from going to the nursery to see them. For the two months that they were in the perinatal intensive care unit, she was not allowed to visit them.
All of this was done because of the California surrogacy law. When the children were born, the mother’s name was left off the birth certificate. Instead, the triplets were given a certificate with only the name of the “buyer.”
Everybody knows that this certificate is a lie. Every child in the history of the world has a mother. The triplets are no exception. But this is a state-sanctioned lie and it has the power of the state to enforce it.
Of course, this was heart-breaking for the mother. But it’s the children who suffer most. They had bonded in the womb for months before birth. Like every newborn, they longed to be cuddled and comforted by their own mother, not by unfamiliar nurses. They were deprived of the nutrition of breast milk and given man-made substitutes because of a legal fiction.
The courts did not take any of this into account. California surrogacy laws prohibit it. Instead, they require the government to treat these children as property. I am not exaggerating. They are the legal property of the “buyer.”
In custody disputes, long-established legal precedent requires the courts to consider what is in the child’s best interest. But in property disputes, the child’s health and welfare, human rights, identity, biological and genetic relationships are all irrelevant. Asked what will happen to the children once they are turned over to the “buyer,” the judge answered, “that’s none of my business.”
The birth certificate, which documents the government’s responsibility has been falsified. The result is that the government has written off its duty.
The Arkansas case (Pavan v. Smith) involves a woman who was legally married to another woman. When she gave birth they sued to list both of their names on the birth certificate. Everybody knows that this is a lie. The child actually has a father. But the state of Arkansas certified a lie.
It would be one thing for the state to assign custody to the two women. But this is entirely different. The state is falsifying the record and deliberately making it impossible for this child even to know that he has a father, much less anything about him.
Is this in the best interest of the child? It ensures that this child will never have access to the paternal side of the family. If he suffers any genetic diseases in the future, he will be deprived of the medical benefit of that knowledge. As the child grows up, and learns about the birds and the bees, he will inevitably ask about his father. How long will they persist in the lie that he has none?
On a broader scale, our whole society is becoming conditioned to the notion that it is perfectly OK for the government to tell obvious lies without even blushing. What is possible in a society like that? What other lies will now become state-sanctioned?
If a mother can be denied listing on a birth certificate, if a non-relative can be listed in the place of the actual biological father, what prevents falsifying of the birth date? What prevents falsifying of the place of birth? What exactly will stop any lie whatsoever?
Certainly not the best interests of the child! All that is in view today are the immediate desires of the adults who buy and sell them.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you say completely! So how can you condone naming gestational carriers as mothers on birth certificates if they are not related to the children they deliver?
ReplyDeleteI reunite for free families separated for all sorts of reasons and many are separated by mothers who were gamete donors. The women who carried and delivered their pregnancies' for them also often raise their offspring. A woman is the mother of her own offspring whether she carries and delivers her offspring or not is irrelevant and whether she raises them or not is irrelevant. The fair and just thing to do is that everyone should be named parent on the birth certificate of his or her own offspring so that everyone has a medically accurate vital record of who their mother and father are. Everyone should be able to rely upon the medical accuracy of their vital record of health documenting them as the offspring of their male and female forbearers because it connects them to the wider network of their maternal and paternal relatives. If the woman that gave birth is not biologically related to them as their mother after they are born she has no business on their birth certificate because she's not their mother for medical purposes.
In the example you give there is a woman who was hired to carry an egg donor's pregnancy. The father in that story really is the father and he should be named father on the birth certificate. The mother is not the carrier the egg donor is if you want to provide an accurate and truthful birth certificate. It may seem all warm and fuzzy sensitive to name the carrier as mother because she was all caring and concerned about the children she delivered but she is not the mother, an anonymous egg donor is the mother and true justice for the person born would be for the name of that woman to be written down on the birth certificate connecting her offspring to the wider network of their maternal relatives.
I help people find their mothers who were egg donors. They usually are given birth to by their step mothers (their father's wives) they don't think of their step mothers as their real mothers just because they gave birth to them and raised them - who remembers being gestated? All they know is that their real mother the one they are related to is absent at the request of the woman that gave birth to them and that actually cheapens the pregnancy experience and builds resentment rather than emotional connection. It's like being adopted at birth but the fact that their step parent paid to be pregnant with them is like being forced to undergo some kind of bonding exercise with their step parent to make them forget she is not really their mother. One person remembers being told as a young girl that "her Mommy and Daddy had the help of an egg donor because her Mommy's eggs did not work". She responded by asking her Dad why didn't he just have the egg donor give birth to me and raise her. He replied that she was not related to his wife and that his wife was really her step mother, the only difference being that she gave birth. From that point on she wanted to find her real mother and placated her step mother who was very insecure by saying yes of course a real mother is the one that raises you but she knew logically that real mothers often don't raise their kids and she wanted to find her mother and move forward and forget the past and she did.
We have had marginal success removing the names of step fathers from birth certificates replacing them with the names of the fathers who were gamete donors, but it is an extensive process where they never mention gamete donation only that the real father had no idea a child was born. We've yet to do it with the real mother but we are going to start seeing people try. Everyone thinks its perfectly fine to lie on birth certificates to suit their own adult desires.
People should be able to get the truth written down as adults if they discover the falsehood and the law should stop allowing for falsification to begin with. If the facts of motherhood and fatherhood are subject to being falsified why not the date why not the location - we have to have some factual standards or the entire point of certifying birth records is moot. To look at the world's birth stats now it appears that women are giving birth in their 50's! Our records are so mired in biological inaccuracies that research on the health of infants using these records is moot! To look at these birth stats it would appear sickly infertile people are reproducing like rabbits and healthy people of reproductive age have no offspring. The practice of not writing down gamete donors as parents undermines public health in general and has the entire population thinking they are related to people they are not and aren't related to people they are! The entire population is at a much higher risk for reproducing with their own cousins, siblings, children, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles because of this rampant falsification in order to sell not only children but pregnancy experiences as well.
ReplyDeleteDo not think of gestational surrogates as mothers if you want to be fair to the people who they give birth to.