[LEAPSECS] Birth date question

[Gerard Ashton]

A while back a list member asked about how legal rules about time would
affect the year shown on a person's birth certificate for a person born near
midnight December 31 / January 1. As a volunteer emergency medical
technician, I have been trained in field childbirth. The EMS state protocol
gives no specific instructions about recording time of birth. An approved
textbook by Mistovich & Karen, "Prehospital Emergency Care" 9th ed.
instructs EMTs to care for mother and baby through the delivery of the
placenta (10-20 minutes after birth of the child) and then "Record the time
of delivery and transport mother, infant, and placenta to the hospital." So
if the instructions are carried out literally, it requires the EMT to
mentally estimate a time of about 10 to 20 minutes.

My interest in time and names have lead me to come across some other
time-of-birth scenarios:

A child is born in a conveyance (ambulance, aircraft, ship, etc.) while it
is outside the US, but the child is first removed from the conveyance in the
US. The child's birth certificate is filed in the locality where the child
is removed from the conveyance, but the child's place of birth is the best
estimate of where the conveyance was at the time of birth. The time of birth
would be the actual time of birth, but  the time zone (and hence date) would
be that of the location of the conveyance at the time of birth, or the time
zone where the child is removed from the conveyance.

A child is born in a conveyance, and the conveyance is inside the US at all
times. The place of birth is where the child is removed from the conveyance.
Typically, this wood be a child born in an ambulance and the child would be
removed at the hospital. The same issue of which time described in the first
scenario applies.

A child is born in the field outside of any conveyance. The time and place
of birth are the actual time and place of birth.

A child is born in a basic life support (BLS) ambulance, which meets an
advance life support (ALS) ambulance on some dark foggy highway. The place
of birth is the place where the child is transferred from the BLS to the ALS
ambulance, because that is where the child is first removed from a
conveyance.

All of this may very well be recorded in computerized patient care reports;
ambulances are beginning to carry laptops for this purpose. What are the
chances the software designers considered all these scenarios?

Gerard Ashton

PS: (I'm fudging the minutes due to imperfect memory) Dispatched on an
ambulance call at 2:30 AM. Returned to quarters 2:15 AM.