Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Children without birth certificates

Reading through the digest of the recently introduced Births, Deaths , Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill I came across this;

Currently there are around 6,000 births that have not been registered within 1 year of the birth.

You may well ask, If they haven't been registered how can authorities know this?

The Bill enables the Register-General to obtain address information for a child's mother from the Ministry of Social Development.

Aha. One can only assume then that a mother can get a benefit without a birth certificate to even prove the baby is her's. The DPB application pamphlet says, You need to bring along a full birth certificate for each child but exceptions are clearly being made.

I can understand there are circumstances whereby the mother does not want to or can't register the father's name on a birth certificate but these babies aren't even having their mother's name registered.

How does one go through life without any proof of identity? Perhaps their mothers 'get around to it' but the whole business seems incredibly lax.

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