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As they had with the Certification of Live Birth made public by the Obama campaign in June 2008, birthers immediately claimed that the long form birth certificate was also a forgery. The primary arguments advanced to demonstrate that the certificate was forged were claims that some textual elements of the certificate were anachronistic, and that the existence of layers found when the PDF file was opened with Adobe Illustrator proved that it had been altered. All of these arguments are erroneous.
The claims of anachronism stemmed from three elements in the certificate:


1. Back in 1961 people of color were called ‘Negroes.’ So how can the Obama ‘birth certificate’ state he is ‘African-American’ when the term wasn’t even used at that time?

2. The birth certificate that the White House released lists Obama’s birth as August 4, 1961. It also lists Barack Hussein Obama as his father. No big deal, right? At the time of Obama’s birth, it also shows that his father is aged 25 years old, and that Obama’s father was born in “Kenya, East Africa”. This wouldn’t seem like anything of concern, except the fact that Kenya did not even exist until 1963, two whole
years after Obama’s birth, and 27 years after his father’s birth. How could Obama’s father have been born in a country that did not yet exist? Up and until Kenya was formed in 1963, it was known as the “British East Africa Protectorate”.

3. On the birth certificate released by the White House, the listed place of birth is “Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital”. This cannot be, because the hospital(s) in question in 1961 were called “Kaui Keolani Children’s Hospital” and “Kapi’olani Maternity Home”, respectively. The name did not change to Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital until 1978, when these two hospitals merged. How can this particular name of the hospital be on a birth certificate dated 1961 if this name had not yet been applied to it until 1978?

Claims that these elements are anachronistic to 1961 (the year of Barack Obama’s birth) are incorrect:
•Nowhere on Barack Obama’s birth certificate does the term “African-American” appear. The space for “Race of Father” is filled in with the word “African,”

which at the time was a descriptor that blacks who were actually native-born Africans (like Barack Obama’s father was) were more likely to use for themselves than “negro” (the latter being synonymous with “slave” in Euro-colonial countries such as Kenya).

•In 1895 the British Empire established the East Africa Protectorate, the forerunner of the country now known as the republic of Kenya. Although Kenya did not achieve complete independence from the United Kingdom until 1963, it was known as the Kenya Colony from 1920 onwards and was typically referred to as Kenya long before 1963. A search of news reports from 1961 (the year of Barack Obama’s birth) turns up hundreds and hundreds of news articles referencing that entity simply as “Kenya.”

•The former Kapi’olani Maternity Home became the Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (where Barack Obama was born) in 1931, and it retained that appellation until 1971, when its name was shortened to Kapi’olani Hospital. The Kauikeolani Children’s Hospital (where Barack Obama was not born) was a separate entity which merged with the Kapi’olani Hospital in 1978 to become the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children.A listing of social services available in the Hawaiian islands documents that the facility bore that name prior to 1961:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/

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