Information About Birth Certificates When Born at Home?
Being born at a hospital or special, clinical facility is a relatively new phenomenon, considering how long people have been giving birth. Home births, which may be viewed by some people as backward or new age, used to be the norm for everyone. However, if you give birth at home for one reason or another there are certain things you need to do in order to register your new child.
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Department of Vital Statistics
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The government body that keeps track of all children born is the Department of Vital Statistics. If you give birth to a child at home or in another, non-institutional setting then you need to contact the state's department in order to register your child and to get his birth certificate.
Information
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There is certain information that you'll need to put on your child's birth certificate paperwork. You will need the child's full name, the legal names of both parents (including the mother's maiden name), the place of birth, the date and time of birth, the child's gender and the child's registration number (which will be given by the Department of Vital Statistics).
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Time Frame
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Getting the paperwork filled out for a baby born at home has to be done fairly quickly. The exact law varies from state to state, but the necessary information and application for a baby's birth certificate needs to be filled out within a few days to a week or so of the baby's actual birth.
Witnesses
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Some states, like Ohio, require witnesses for home births. The goal is to stop fraudulent registration of births, and because of this only certain people will be accepted as witnesses in many of these states. A licensed mid-wife, medical doctor, or even a person's neighbor is a valid witness in most of these cases.
Necessity
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A birth certificate is a very important document. Birth certificates are used to track how many people are born in the United States, and they're a necessary document for a social security card, as well as for a driver's license and in many cases a job. If a child doesn't get registered to receive a birth certificate it could result in a lot of obstacles later on in life.
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References
- Photo Credit birth marriage and death image by Warren Millar from Fotolia.com
