Fisher: Citizenship, Federalism, and Delayed Birth Registration 2024] C ITIZENSHIP, F EDERALISM, AND DELAYED BIRTH R EGISTRATION 55 nationality where children would otherwise be stateless 27 or where a child’s parentage is unknown. 28 Birth registration also provides documentary proof of a person’s date of birth, and thus of a child’s legal status as a minor that entitles them to child-specific protections. 29 The ICCPR requires governments to provide children “such measures of protection as are required by his status as a minor.” 30 Birth registration is also a tool “to track trends in birth rates, provide denominators to calculate early age mortality rates, serve as the fundamental input into population projections, and inform government planning for health (e.g. childhood vaccinations), education and social services.” 31 B. Birth Registration in the United States 1. The Federal System of Birth Registration The U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment does not require birth certificates for those born in the United States to prove a claim of U.S. citizenship. Indeed, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized formerly enslaved people as U.S. citizens due to their birth in the United States, but the majority of those who benefitted would not have had records of their births, due to factors including the institution of slavery and infrequency of birth registration at that time. 32 Birth registration was not commonplace in the United States until the early twentieth century. 33 In the United States, state law governs birth registration processes. 34 More than 6,000 local registrars “in 57 vital event registration areas—the 27. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, art. 1(4), opened for signature Aug. 30, 1961, 989 U.N.T.S. 175. 28. Id. at art. 2. 29. Appell, supra note 24, at 32; Jonathan Todres, Birth Registration: An Essential First Step toward Ensuring the Rights of All Children, 10 HUM. R TS. B RIEF 32, 33 (2003). 30. ICCPR, supra note 20, at art. 24(1). 31. Adair T. Lopez, How Reliable are Self-reported Estimates of Birth Registration Completeness? Comparison with Vital Statistics Systems, 16 PLOS ONE: e0252140 (2021), available at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252140 [https://perma.cc/5TT5-2HP6]. 32. See generally Brian A. Robinson & Claire Heckel, People Not Property: Slave Deeds of North Carolina, 58 THE S. Q. No. 2, 84 (2022) (noting the difficulties tracking genealogy of enslaved individuals prior to the 1870 census and exploring legal documents including deeds of sale as sources of information about formerly enslaved individuals in North Carolina). 33. Remus, supra note 9, at 230. 34. Stephen Schwartz, The U.S. Vital Statistics System: The Role of State and Local Health Departments, in VITAL S TATISTICS: S UMMARY OF A WORKSHOP 77, 78 (National Research Council (US) Committee on National Statistics 2009) (observing that “[i]n the United States, all vital events are local. What we see as national vital statistics start out as births, deaths, terminations of pregnancy, marriages, and divorces that are registered locally.”) [hereinafter NRC, “Vital Statistics”]. Published by IdeaExchange@UAkron, 2025 7