Then why were only part of all the births in HI listed in those papers?
I can’t remember the figures but very recently someone posted how many births there were that August in HI, and only some are in the newspapers. Others are not.
“Then why were only part of all the births in HI listed in those papers?”
I haven’t seen that claim. I’ve only seen the listings for 2 papers, which, IIRC, listed births for only about a week. I wasn’t aware that anyone had tracked down the other 3 or 4 notices that would have appeared in August and compared this against the actual number of births. Someone has pointed out that Nordyke twins don’t appear on list with Obama even though we know from BC’s that they actually were born in this time-frame. But we also know their BCs were recorded later, so in my mind, this may simply be a timing issue: there surely can’t be a sinister explanation for both newspapers electing to “suppress” news of these twin births, so a more hum-drum explanation likely applies.
Notice the “cookie-cutter” nature of the births listed. If these were paid announcements, don’t you think at least some parents would proudly include their newborn’s name in the listing? It might have cost more, but who can imagine the paper not taking advantage of the chance to make money on news most parents would be gladly willing to pay a little extra to share? Conversely, who can imagine not a single family electing to take advantage of this option? Also, while one might well expect some parents to pay the expense of listings in 2 local papers, one might also expect at least some families to only bother with one paper. Thus, the fact that the lists are identical in both papers again suggests a common source of the listings, as opposed to a compilation based on individual notifications by parents.
What was released appears to be the “bare essentials” of what was considered public information at the time, i.e., names and address of parents. But the inclusion of marital information, i.e., Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama, likely was a subtle way of enforcing social norms to discourage/shame births to single mothers.