View Message

This is a reply within a larger thread: view the whole thread

[Opinions] Re: Baby and Infant
They are not names. They are just what is put on the certificate if no name is chosen. You see this all the time in old records too.

Replies

Why did that happen more often in the 1990s?
Maybe a lot more people didn't have names picked out before leaving the hospital, or the requirement to fill the certificate out before leaving changed. Maybe the "name" was removed from census data more thoroughly in other decades. I'm not sure. But I'm confident that very few people actually named their babies Baby and Infant.
In the old days, there were more listings of "boy" "girl" "female" "male" and "unknown."
Ah, so it's kind of a symbol of our society starting to reject the gender binary, haha.