Thanks again for your diligent work on this issue. The law you cite contains the language I vaguely recalled:
“When a new certificate of birth is established under this section, it shall be substituted for the original certificate of birth. Thereafter, the original certificate and the evidence supporting the preparation of the new certificate shall be sealed and filed. Such sealed document shall be opened only by an order of a court of record.”
So at least in Hawaii, the original BC is kept under seal, along with the evidence used to alter it. What I don’t entirely understand is if there is no indication on the new BC that such a sealed record exists, how would the BC’s owner find out about it once they reached the age of majority and were in a position to inquire about such matters? Since there are very legitimate reasons someone might need to know their true paternity (e.g., need for organ donation, issues related to inheritance), it seems odd to have a system in which such a material fact is literally buried, as opposed to having a “pointer” on the new BC indicating that other pertinent information is under seal.
Absent such a written amendment to the newly issued BC, it would seem that anyone requesting their birth records would need to somehow specify they wanted a copy of their on-file record, but also any other previous versions etc. Again, that just seems bureaucratically cumbersome. Not to say it’s impossible that’s how things are set up: it just seems odd to me.
I’m not sure how they do it with open adoption; I think the birth and adoptive parents just let the child know all along that the adoption had occurred. But in standard adoptions the idea is to have it be as if an adoption had never occurred, as if that child was truly born to the adoptive couple. I think the way adopted children in such cases find out that they were adopted is by observing differences in appearance or by asking parents or relatives.
My daughter told me about a girl in her high school whose biology teacher dad had announced to her in class that their DNA didn’t match because she had been adopted.
One of the things we talked about regarding Nebraska’s eligibility bill was how a person who was adopted would be able to sign an affidavit saying that the BC they had access to was their “original birth certificate”. If they were adopted in a closed adoption neither they nor anybody but their parents or a judge/agency worker who remembered the case would have any way of knowing that an adoption had occurred. The candidate would definitely be able to say in good conscience that they had their original BC (even though their actual original BC would be sealed and inaccessible without a court order).
If they didn’t even know they were adopted it would be unlikely that they would have allegiance to the country of their birth parents.
If they knew they were adopted the situation would be different. In that case they would need to get a court order, which shouldn’t be difficult. Because the records are sealed nobody could get proof of the adoption to challenge eligibility without a judge’s order to unseal the records.
I asked to see the court order by which Fukino was able to access the “original birth certificate” and was told there was no court order. Whether she could have known about an “original birth certificate” based on index data is unclear. There could perhaps be a flag in the non-public part of the index data which would let them know about sealed records. I don’t know. The whole use of the words “original birth certificate” is puzzling - especially in view of Abercrombie’s statements indicating they don’t have a long-form BC for Obama in Hawaii at all. I think Fukino’s definition of “original birth certificate” must be broad enough to include a signed statement on a kleenex.
The only way we’re ever gonna know what really happened is when there is a criminal investigation complete with subpoena of all the computer and paper records from Hawaii, the Passport Office, Selective Service Administration, Kenya, Indonesia, and Canada, as well as the education and medical records, and depositions and lie detector tests for all the involved people. And that’s not because “birthers will never be convinced” but because there are so many instances of law-breaking and lying by government officials and Obama himself.
Why those people all lied and broke laws and what they were covering up are critical questions that America deserves answers for.