"Original birth certificate"

There are (at least) two very different things being called an “original birth certificate.” It’s important to keep the meaning straight in context.

The seminal article on Barack Obamas’ birth certificate is probably the 2008 piece titled “Born in the USA” at FactCheck.org. They write:

FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate.

They photographed the state-issued paper certificate from Hawaii, with Registrar Alvin Onaka’s signature stamp, the physical impressed seal of the State of Hawaii, and printed on official state security paper; FactCheck didn’t look at a photocopy, or an image on the Internet -- they looked at an “original birth certificate.” However, the document they photocopied didn’t exist before 2007 when the State of Hawaii issued it and in that sense it’s hardly “original.”

In the vital records community, what FactCheck photographed would be called a “certified copy.” The US Department of State uses similar less-ambiguous language in its passport requirements: “certified birth certificate issued by the city, county or state” which they further describe as:

A certified birth certificate has a registrar's raised, embossed, impressed or multicolored seal, registrar's signature, and the date the certificate was filed with the registrar's office, which must be within 1 year of your birth.

A certified copy has to be a certified copy of something, and that something is more accurately described as an “original birth certificate,” something that in times past was a paper document filled out by someone who witnessed the birth, usually a physician, and usually submitted to a jurisdiction by a hospital. The jurisdiction numbered the certificate and if it met certain quality standards,added it to their official file of births within the jurisdiction.  (This is further confused by some hospitals issuing souvenir birth certificates directly to parents, documents with little legal significance except as secondary evidence in the absence of a real certified copy.)

When Birthers demanded (between June of 2008 and April of 2011) to see Barack Obama’s “original birth certificate” they meant a “certified photocopy of Barack Obama’s original hospital-signed birth certificate.”

The difference between a true original and a certified copy becomes important in dealing with birther fly-speck analysis of birth certificate images. Original birth certificates are registered, not certified. They are not generally on security paper, and they do not have seals on them. Stamps and seals are certifying attributes used to certify the copy and security paper is used for such copies to prevent alteration and forgery of the certified copy. There is no concern over unauthorized alteration within a jurisdiction’s files. A moment’s reflection should make it obvious that original certificates in the file are not on security paper, the whole purpose of security paper being to make it hard to copy.

After the April 2011 press conference where Barack Obama presented his certified birth certificate (and put an image of it on the White House web site), birthers use the term “original birth certificate” to mean the paper document residing at the Department of Health in Hawaii. Birthers have moved the goal posts two or three times without changing the words, only the meaning.