When the birther movement argued that Barack Hussein Obama was not eligible to be the President of the United States due to his foreign birth, his birth certificate came to the rescue to prove his nationality. When Mark Lytte was incorrectly identified as Mexican, he was deported to a nation to which he had no ties and could not return until his brother found his birth certificate to prove his citizenship and faxed it to the US Consulate. Citizenship may be a birthright, but as this book argues, its documentation is what counts, particularly for people whose skin is not white. Nevertheless, as the book argues, this process of documentation has also reified categories like race, ethnicity, illegitimacy, and most recently, gender in ways that render birth certificates far from innocent in the process of boundary making.

In this fascinating book historian, Susan Pearson, meticulously documents the political processes through which birth certificates have emerged as ubiquitous markers of modern life. Most of us are used to the need for birth certificates in getting a passport, driver's license, or other documents that establish our identity and eligibility to work, live or drive in America. Identifying accurate dates of birth is also the foundation on which the discipline of demography is built. However, we rarely think about the social movement that transformed the collection of humans inhabiting a national boundary into enumerated and documented citizens. The Birth Certificate traces the political, social, and scientific forces that came together over the twentieth century to ensure that every child born on the United States soil today has their birth registered.

Pearson argues that the single act of registering a birth serves two functions: it creates a real-time population and technology for personal identification. It establishes both population and persons—aggregates, and individuals. Since this registration remains a bureaucratic process, it allows the state to define who should be tracked and how they should be categorized. This has resulted in the use of birth certificates for supporting a variety of welfare measures and creating boundaries based on categories included in the birth certificate.

In his initial advocacy for institutionalizing birth records in 1850, statistician Lemuel Shattuck argued, “We are social beings—bound together by indissoluble ties. Every birth, every marriage, and every death which takes place has an influence somewhere [and] knowledge of these matters alleged to be private, maybe an incalculable public benefit” (p. 6). Through staunch advocacy of Shattuck and the American Statistical Association founded in 1839, the process of ensuring universal birth registration was born. However, it was not until the Social Security Act of 1935 that the population became convinced of the need for birth certificates as proof of age and their passport to social security benefits.

Birth registration was used for measuring births and establishing age, allowing for many public welfare measures, including controlling child labor and monitoring infant mortality. However, as Professor Pearson notes, the history of birth certificates is slippery where identification has been used as both an instrument of sound as well as oppression.

The political economy of the time, combined with the increasing bureaucratization of identity, led to the imposition of a Eurocentric view of family on Native Americans. The 1887 act, commonly known as Dawes Act, authorized each family to receive a 160-acre plot of land. Allotments were to be held in trust for 25 years by the US government, after which they would be converted to fee-simple property. The land could be conveyed only to an heir during the trust period. This act represented breaking up the tribal common ownership to individual family ownership. With it came the demands for the definition of a family, buttressed by birth registration that required the identification of a mother and father for each child. The process of registration required transforming a communal family into an identifiable unit and was “new and strange” for men and women who were suddenly thrown into legal relations of husband and wife, mother and father.

The earliest birth certificates recorded whether births occurred within or outside the marriage, branding individuals with a piece of their family history they could not erase throughout their life. Birth certificates contained a place for noting race, allowing registrars to pigeonhole individuals into a racial category they may or may not choose to adopt. Pearson carefully documents instances in which registrars decided to ensure that individuals with any African American ancestry could not “pass.” This labeling process allowed birth certificates to become weapons in the arsenal of employers seeking to discriminate against individuals they defined as undesirable. The categorization of individuals through recordkeeping did not disappear until public protests forced the US Census Bureau to redesign birth certificates to move the race and marital status of parents to sections used only for statistical purposes and away from the printed areas.

Pearson notes that the politicization of birth certificates in cultural wars has not ended in the twentieth century. The bathroom wars of modern America continue to rely on gender identity listed in birth certificates to define who may use which bathroom, relegating transgender individuals to the bathrooms designated for the gender assigned to them at birth.

The Birth Certificate is a meticulously researched book written in an accessible fashion, addressing a topic that will be of interest to demographers, sociologists, political scientists, and historians. It also has important lessons for countries that are still building their vital registration systems about utilizing the power of identification for the public good without letting it reify categorization that can easily divide nations. —S.D.

当出生者运动争论巴拉克侯赛因奥巴马由于他的外国出生而没有资格成为美国总统时，他的出生证明来证明他的国籍。当马克·莱特被错误地认定为墨西哥人时，他被驱逐到一个与他没有联系的国家，并且在他的兄弟找到他的出生证明以证明他的公民身份并将其传真给美国领事馆之前无法返回。公民身份可能是与生俱来的权利，但正如本书所说，它的文件才是最重要的，特别是对于皮肤不是白色的人。然而，正如本书所论证的那样，这种记录过程也具体化了种族、民族、非法性以及最近的性别等类别，使得出生证明在边界制定过程中远非无辜。

在这本引人入胜的书中，历史学家苏珊·皮尔森 (Susan Pearson) 细致地记录了出生证明成为现代生活无处不在的标志的政治过程。我们大多数人已经习惯了在获得护照、驾照或其他证明我们的身份以及在美国工作、生活或驾驶资格的文件时需要出生证明。确定准确的出生日期也是人口学学科建立的基础。然而，我们很少考虑将居住在国界的人类集合转变为枚举和记录的公民的社会运动。出生证明追溯了 20 世纪聚集在一起的政治、社会和科学力量，以确保今天在美国土地上出生的每个孩子都有出生登记。

Pearson 认为，登记出生这一单一行为有两个功能：它创建了一个实时人口和用于个人识别的技术。它建立了人口和个人——集合体和个人。由于这种注册仍然是一个官僚程序，它允许国家定义应该跟踪谁以及应该如何对他们进行分类。这导致使用出生证明来支持各种福利措施并根据出生证明中包含的类别创建界限。

统计学家 Lemuel Shattuck 在 1850 年最初倡导将出生记录制度化时说：“我们是社会人——被牢不可破的纽带联系在一起。每一次出生、每一次婚姻和每一次死亡都会在某处产生影响 [和] 对这些据称是私人的事情的了解，也许是不可估量的公共利益”（第 6 页）。通过 Shattuck 和成立于 1839 年的美国统计协会的坚定倡导，确保普遍出生登记的过程诞生了。然而，直到 1935 年的《社会保障法》，人们才确信需要出生证明作为年龄证明和获得社会保障福利的护照。

出生登记用于测量出生和确定年龄，允许采取许多公共福利措施，包括控制童工和监测婴儿死亡率。然而，正如皮尔森教授所指出的那样，出生证明的历史很不稳定，身份证明既被用作声音的工具，又被用作压迫的工具。

当时的政治经济学，加上身份日益官僚化，导致美洲原住民强加以欧洲为中心的家庭观。1887 年的法案，通常称为道斯法案，授权每个家庭获得 160 英亩的土地。美国政府以信托方式持有分配的土地 25 年，之后将转换为收费简单的财产。在信托期间，土地只能转让给继承人。这一行为代表了将部落共同所有制分解为个人家庭所有制。随之而来的是对家庭定义的要求，并得到出生登记的支持，要求为每个孩子识别父母。

最早的出生证明记录了出生是在婚内还是婚外，给个人打上一生都无法抹去的家族历史。出生证明包含一个记录种族的地方，允许登记员将个人归入他们可能选择或可能不选择采用的种族类别。Pearson 仔细记录了注册服务商决定确保具有任何非裔美国人血统的个人不能“通过”的实例。这种标签过程使出生证明成为雇主武器库中的武器，这些雇主试图歧视他们定义为不受欢迎的个人。

皮尔逊指出，文化战争中出生证明的政治化并没有在 20 世纪结束。现代美国的洗手间战争继续依赖出生证明中列出的性别认同来定义谁可以使用哪个洗手间，将跨性别者降级到按出生时分配给他们的性别指定的洗手间。

《出生证明》是一本经过精心研究的书，以通俗易懂的方式编写，解决了人口学家、社会学家、政治学家和历史学家感兴趣的主题。对于仍在建立其人口动态登记系统的国家来说，它也有重要的经验教训，即利用身份识别的力量为公共利益服务，而不是让它具体化很容易分裂国家的分类。—SD