EDITORIAL — No proof of birth

Even if she registered late, it seemed to have been easy for Alice Guo to secure a Philippine birth certificate, which she used in running for mayor of Bamban town in Tarlac. Many Filipinos are not as lucky. An estimated 3.7 million Filipinos have not been registered at birth, according to the Philippine Legislators Committee on Population and Development.

The PLCPD, citing data from the Philippine Statistics Authority, said the 3.7 million are mostly children aged from infancy up to 14 years. A birth certificate is needed for Filipino citizens to avail themselves of a wide range of government services including health care and education. The birth certificate is required for establishing a legal identity, obtaining employment and, as the nation has seen in the case of Guo, in seeking elective office.

Guo has said it was her father who applied for her late birth registration on Nov. 22, 2005, when she was already 19 years old. Senators want the certificate of live birth to be invalidated because Guo allegedly lied about her birthplace and citizenship. The Office of the Solicitor General has asked a Tarlac regional trial court to cancel the birth certificate, citing “glaring inconsistencies” in the entries in the document and information contained in other public records.

The PLCPD said many of the Filipinos with no birth certificates live in remote or underprivileged communities, with the birth registration process made difficult by distance from the civil registry office and by financial constraints. Low literacy also means little or no awareness of the importance of birth registration. Hospitals, which keep their own records of child deliveries, facilitate birth registration, but many women from low-income families still give birth at home, assisted only by midwives, folk physical therapists or manghihilot or sometimes simply by relatives. Such births are rarely recorded in the civil registry. It’s not unusual for such unregistered children to grow up not even knowing their accurate birthdate.

Similar problems are seen in the registration of deaths, according to the PLCPD. It said cultural practices and logistical hurdles compound the problems in places such as the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. In 2021, only 42 percent of deaths in the BARMM were registered.

These problems are unconscionable in the digital age, with the government represented all the way down to the grassroots through the barangay. The country’s civil registration system is in dire need of modernization, and the barangays must be mobilized to guarantee universal and accurate birth registration.