Obama Birth Certificate & Adoption

Birth records get murky when adoption involved
Dual citizenship can result, parents names changed
Posted: July 20, 2009
10:37 pm Eastern

2009 WorldNetDaily

One of the little-explored issues relating to the controversy over Barack Obama's eligibility to be president under the U.S. Constitution's demand for a "natural born" citizen in that post is the impact of his move to Indonesia as a child.

WND has reported on multiple legal challenges to Obama's eligibility to be president based on doubts that he was born in the United States or was granted "natural born" citizenship at birth.

Some of the legal challenges contend he was born in Kenya, wasn't a "natural born" citizen because of his father's Kenyan citizenship, that he was a dual citizen, that his mother wasn't old enough to transmit citizenship at birth and other claims.
But all of those are clouded by his move as a child to Indonesia and apparent adoption by an Indonesian citizen who married his mother.

Reports confirm Barack Obama Sr. was Kenyan citizen who attended school in the United States and then returned to his country. His marriage to Ann Dunham reportedly happened in Hawaii but was brief, and within a few years after he left Obama's mother met and then married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro.
The family later moved to Indonesia.

Jerry Fuller and Mike Persons of the passport services division of the U.S. State Department say such a move for a child, coupled with the apparent adoption, could impact a child's birth certificate.

That includes the possibility of a change in the listed location of the birth, a change in the names of the parents on the birth certificate, and others. Without a doubt, officials said, the result could be a dual citizenship.

That would be possible with Kenya through his father, or even Indonesia – if that nation recognized dual citizenship at the time in the 1960s – through a stepfather. The AP has reported that Obama was listed as Barry Soetoro while a child attending school as a citizen of Indonesia and his religion listed as Islam.

The State Department officers confirmed that when an adoption of a child is involved, the law becomes murky quickly.

A child born of two U.S. residents overseas would be a U.S. citizen, but there are a lot of other rules and provisions that apply when only one parent – as in Obama's case his mother – is a U.S. citizen.

The law in the 1960s said an American mother couldn't transmit citizenship to a child unless she had lived 10 years in the U.S. including five after the age of 14. According to the State Department that's similar to today's rule, which requires a mother to live two years after the age of 14 in the U.S, according to officials.

One WND reader whose name is being withheld because he is a private individual reported when he adopted his wife's daughter from a previous relationship in Asia and brought the family to the United States, he was given a "certificate of birth" from the state of Kansas for his daughter.

However, the document cites specifically, "This Certificate is not evidence of United States Citizenship."

He said the family still has the girl's original birth certificate from outside the United States.

In adoptions within the United States, new birth certificates routinely are granted citing the adopting parents as biological mother and father, even though there is no blood relationship.

WND has reported on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's status as a "natural born citizen." The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

Some of the challenges to Obama's presidency contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.

Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight cases seeking the release of a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions.