Susan J. Pearson, "The Birth Certificate: An American History" (UNC Press, 2021)
New Books in Law
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Are We Shouldn't Record Race on Birth Certificates?
Black doctors start to perform acts of conscientious objection, essentially in a and these get covered in the black press. They refuse to fill out the racial categories on the birth certificates because they are threatened with lawsuits by their states. At the same time, you do have african american politicians and intellectuals who say, well, but wewe want to collect information about that people's health issues. So again, it's this sort of tension between, like, we want this population level information, which birth registration can give us, but we don't want that information to show up as an individual birth certificate.
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