Toward a New Birth Registration System in England and Wales

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with reforming the birth registration system in England and Wales. It aims to make the system more inclusive particularly for parents departing from the traditional ideal; in other words, those in some way not conforming to the married, cisgender, heterosexual, two-parent model of ‘family’ which the law has historically and continues to prioritise.
It achieves this by tracing the evolution of registration since its official inception in 1538 to show how, historically, birth registration was primarily concerned with the protection of private property and inheritance rights – not the recording of (bio)genetic information as is usually assumed. While there does appear to be a recent policy of birth registration acting to facilitate parent-child relationships, construed along (bio)genetic lines, this never seemed to be an explicit aim of registration in and of itself and seems a recent imposition or assumption of the underlying historical policy. The thesis goes on to explain how this assumption is due to the prioritisation of the nuclear family model throughout history, intertwined as it is with (bio)genetics, and how this understanding is infused within the law in various ways. To help make informed reform recommendations, primary empirical data in the form of semi-structured interviews was conducted with 13 ‘non-traditional’ parents (trans and non-binary parents, n=4; gay fathers through surrogacy, n=8; and LGBTQ+ polyamorous parents, n=1). Drawing on the analysis of this data, in conjunction with wider literature and theoretical perspectives, the thesis then develops a novel and innovative approach to birth registration in England and Wales by proposing a completely new system, which also features ‘preferred’ and ‘alternative’ reform recommendations. Under this system, birth registration would enable all parents to be reflected on the birth certificate, irrespective of how far they stray from ‘tradition’.

Date of Award	17 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Peter R Dunne (Supervisor) & Sheelagh McGuinness (Supervisor)