Birth Certificate

Under current state law, a licensed midwife cannot issue a birth certificate; only a doctor can. It's a huge extra hassle, because there's a mile-long list of hoops we have to jump through to get Amanda’s birth certificate, all while we're trying to recover. To me, it's a discriminatory policy designed to discourage out-of-hospital births. There are two main reasons for this: at home, it is the woman who has control of her birth, not the medical establishment. Secondly, doctors and hospitals don't make any money if you birth at home. It's why you hear the medical community claim that only hospital births are truly safe, even though the facts clearly show otherwise. They scare you with stories of all the things that can potentially go wrong, but you never hear them admit that many complications that occur during birth are due to adverse effects from unnecessary interventions, and could have been avoided if they had let nature take it's course instead of interfering. (I'm not referring, of course, to the rare instances when interventions are medically necessary, but to the majority of times when doctors jump in due to impatience or a simple desire to CYA).

So while a woman in America has the right to a homebirth, she has a whole mess of bureaucratic red tape to wade through in order to get her baby the legal documentation he/she needs. Once a baby's born, we (the parents) have to call the Office of Vital Records & Statistics and request a "home birth packet". They send it to us, then we fill it out and call back for an appointment. At the appointment have to bring: valid ID for both parents, a witness to the birth (husbands qualify), the baby (duh!), a signed letter from the midwife verifying my pregnancy, a birth certificate worksheet provided by the midwife, three proofs of the mother's residency (two from before the birth, one from after): such as utility bills, letters addressed to the mother, mortgage payment receipt, etc. And the doozy: three notarized letters, handwritten, from people not related to us and from different households, to confirm that I was pregnant, the date the child was born, and the address where the child was born. They must include the names, address, home and work telephone numbers of the people who wrote them, and be notarized, or they won't be accepted. Isn't that a hoot? Oh, and the process needs to begin no later than 10 days after the baby's birth, and the office is an hour away from me in downtown San Diego. No big deal for a mother recovering from childbirth and a brand new infant, right? I can't help but think it would be alot easier if I was just an illegal alien who jumped the border and delivered my baby in an emergency room: no valid ID required, and the baby is an automatic citizen. What could be easier?