Are Parents’ Marriage Details no longer required on a Child's Birth Certificate? Find out the truth… - Fact Crescendo Sri Lanka English

A post spreading on Sri Lankan Tamil social media claimed it had just been introduced that a child’s birth certificate no longer requires the parents’ marriage registration details. The claim touches a real and sensitive issue for single mothers and for children born outside marriage, and many people shared it as breaking news. To establish the truth, Fact Crescendo investigated.

What Was Claimed

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The post, uploaded on 18 July 2025, carried a video with the line, “From now on, a child’s birth certificate no longer needs the parents’ marriage registration details,” and linked to a report on the madawalaenews.com site. Believing it to be true, many people shared it.

Fact Check

The claim traces back to remarks by the Minister of Women and Child Affairs, Saroja Savithri Paulraj, that steps had been taken to drop the parents’ marriage-registration detail from a child’s birth certificate. Her comments followed an incident last year that distressed Sri Lankans at home and abroad, in which a two-day-old baby was rescued alive from a paddy field at Singhapura, Parakahatheniya, Mawathagama, in the Kurunegala district. It was after this incident, at a media briefing, that the minister made the comments now being shared online.

What the Minister Actually Said

We found the video of the minister’s media briefing on the Ada Derana Tamil YouTube channel. A summary of the key points she made follows:

Do not abandon newborns: Referring to the case of a girl who abandoned a baby in a paddy field in the Mawathagama area, she urged that newborns should never be left abandoned in unsafe conditions for any reason.
State care and support: The government is ready to take on the full cost of caring for and schooling a child whose parents cannot afford it.
Avoiding abortion: Because abortion is not legally permitted in the country, she urged that no woman should resort to an illegal abortion.
Prevention and planning: Where there is no secure environment or family support, she recommended following scientific methods to prevent conception.
Legal protection and adoption: Institutional protection would be given to mothers unable to care for a child, alongside lawful procedures to place children with families that want them.
Importance of sex education: The ministry would work with the education ministry to strengthen age-appropriate sex education in schools to build awareness of safe and healthy practices from an early age.
Changes to the birth certificate: The question of whether the parents’ marriage is registered has been dropped, and a child can be named using the mother’s family name without any need to state the father’s name.

It was these birth-certificate points that were then lifted out of her remarks and shared online.

The Ministry Secretary Confirms the Field Was Removed

To verify this, we contacted the secretary to the Minister of Women and Child Affairs. He told us the newly issued birth certificate no longer includes the item on whether the child’s parents are married. He added that the older, previously printed birth-registration book certificates still carry that item, and that if someone comes to register a birth without a father, the new birth-registration book form is issued to them on request.

The Registrar General’s Department

To learn more, we tried to reach the information officer of the Registrar General’s Department but could not get through. We then contacted a divisional registrar, who told us the question of whether the parents are married has been removed from the newly issued national birth certificate, and that the same change has been brought into the ordinary birth-registration book certificate in regular use.

The National Birth Certificate

Every child born in Sri Lanka must be registered at birth. Under the Births and Deaths Registration Act No. 17 of 1951, the power to issue birth certificates rests with the Registrar General’s Department. Under the Registration of Persons Act No. 32 of 1968, the Department for Registration of Persons issues national identity cards to Sri Lankans who turn 15. Under the Electronic Transactions Act No. 19 of 2006 and the 2019 Sri Lanka unique-identity-number rules, the same department issues each citizen a unique identity number, so that a single number can be used to obtain state and private services from birth to death.

Through the Department for Registration of Persons’ information system, the national identity number is sent to the Registrar General’s Department, which then issues the national birth certificate including that number. Children born from 1 January 2021 onwards have been able to obtain this national birth certificate. It is more modern and secure than the traditional paper certificate: because the record is held in a database, forged certificates are harder to produce, and the document is internationally suited to foreign travel and legal proceedings. It is issued bilingually (Sinhala + English or Tamil + English), so no separate translation is needed, and any corrections are updated in the database and shown on a freshly printed certificate.

Key Features of the National Birth Certificate

Printed on A4 security paper.
Issued with the signature of the Registrar General.
Carries a QR code and several security features.
Includes the National Identity Card (NIC) number.
Issued bilingually (Sinhala + English or Tamil + English).
Some unnecessary fields, such as the parents’ marital status, have been removed.
A new “Nationality” field has been added above the parents’ ethnicity.
Corrections are reprinted with no visible trace of the old version.
Allow the full name to be stated.
Recognized as a valid document locally and internationally.

It carries several other benefits as well.

Parents of children born after 1 January 2021 can obtain the first copy of the national birth certificate free of charge from the district registrar’s section of the district secretariat, as reported by Virakesari and defence.lk.

At the same time, the birth-registration application (CR01) still asks for marriage details: question 32 provides a section for the parents’ signatures where, if the parents are married and the father’s details are to be recorded, both parents must attend the birth-and-death registrar attached to the hospital where the birth took place.

[Image: CR01 form — marriage details section — https://srilanka.factcrescendo.com/tamil/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image-79-1024×358.png

Documents Required to Register a Birth

The ordinary documents required to register a birth are:

A correctly completed CR01 registration form.
The hospital report confirming the birth.
A photocopy of the parents’ marriage certificate.
Photocopies of the parents’ birth certificates.
The original and a copy of the national identity card.

Our search found that the marriage question and the practice of registering without the father’s name were not newly introduced in 2025. The removal of the marital-status field is real, but it dates to the national birth certificate rolled out from 2021, not a 2025 introduction, and that is the missing context.

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Conclusion

Based on our investigation, the claim that it is newly introduced that a child’s birth certificate no longer needs the parents’ marriage details is missing context. The removal of the parents’ marital-status field is real, but it is a feature of the national birth certificate that has been in place since 1 January 2021, not a change newly introduced in 2025. The Ministry of Women and Child Affairs and the Registrar General’s Department both confirmed that the field has been dropped from the new certificate. The minister’s framing that this was newly introduced is therefore misleading. We rate the claim Missing Context.