Journal of Human Rights 193 When women’s reproduction is interpreted as marking the boundaries of the nation (Mayer, 2004), mothers whose maternity is protected and desired by the state will not necessarily face obstacles to the registration of their newborn—quite the contrary (Hill Collins, 1999). But racialized migrant women—whose maternity has been discursively, socially, and/or politically cast as a threat—may find that the multiple forms of discrimination they face hinder access to a birth certificate for their babies. This is why it is important to bring the birthing body (intertwined, relational mother–unborn child subject) into view, in relation to the spaces and institutions that would register the newborn child and recognize legal personhood upon birth—or not. Intersectional feminist scholars refer to the multiplicative effects of these intersecting forms of discrimination as “multiple jeopardy” (King, 1988). The patterns of exclusion from birth registration confirm the relevance of paying attention to discrimination based on ability, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, citizenship, migratory status, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity. The findings on the particular intersections at which these combine and multiply elucidate the risk of intergenerational statelessness and rightlessness for the humans they bring into the world. In this project, intersectionality has provided a framework for identifying those who are affected (which groups of people); by whom; and in what ways they experience exclusionary violence in their very flesh. Casting an intersectional lens on how this happens through bureaucratic practices of (non)birth registration reveals the larger geopolitical operations of power, the global as experienced at the level of the intimate (Pratt & Rosner, 2012). For a woman giving birth is powerful, and so too are the power relations that determine whether her newborn will be registered and recognized as a legal person. Notes 1. This article uses binary language around mothers and fathers, women and men, as these are still in common use in the CEDAW convention and UN system more broadly, which are the primary sources of information used to develop the analysis. Nevertheless, I would like to acknowledge the trans and gender nonconforming community and the fact that not all people who give birth identify as women. 2. The full range of findings from the global inventory is discussed in Petrozziello (Forthcoming). 3. See also the guidance note on intersectionality published by the UN Network on Racial Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (2022). 4. On women migrant workers, see inter alia Constable (2014), Fernandez et al. (2023), and Mahdavi (2016); on the experiences of Syrian asylum seekers and refugees with birth registration in Lebanon and Turkey, see Çavlin and Keskin (2020) and Elmolla (2019). 5. Birth registration is a fundamental human right. It is also the procedure for realizing the right of every human being to recognition as a person before the law, also known as legal personhood (“Registration of Birth,” 2015). These rights were first articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and further enumerated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICRMW), and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The human right to a nationality is linked to the rights to birth registration and legal personhood, which is why advocates taking a rights-based approach make use of the above-mentioned instruments together with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). In addition to human rights law, birth registration is also protected by humanitarian and refugee law. 6. The Karana belong to the Muslim community, whose ancestors migrated to present-day Madagascar from India and Pakistan prior to independence. 7. In the United States, border states, such as Texas, have begun questioning the validity of birth certificates issued to those born in border areas whose births were certified by a midwife. This practice has even led to the nationality stripping of US citizen adults of Mexican–American ancestry who were born with the aid of midwives who are on a government black list of midwives (Open Society Justice Initiative, 2019). This shows how racialized presumptions of national origin are used to determine eligibility and validity of birth registration, and how nonhospital births are subjected to greater scrutiny, surveillance, and migration enforcement by the administrative state. 8. In the Dominican Republic, for example, authorities began conducting migration raids on maternity hospitals