Governor Maura Healey is seeking to restrict access to Massachusetts birth records, death certificates, and marriage notices under a proposal that would shield less costly versions of some records from public view for nearly a century.
Under current law, copies of birth and death records can be viewed or purchased by the public with few exemptions at local town or city halls and the state’s records registry. Despite the state’s reputation for government opacity, the law makes Massachusetts one of the country’s most transparent states in terms of access to birth or death certificates.
Healey’s proposal would reshape state law in several ways. It would allow the state to create regulations to ensure information on the records that is of a “highly personal nature” could only be examined by the person requesting their own records, or a few others, such as an attorney, parent, or guardian.
Certified copies of the records, which can be requested for varying fees, would still be publicly available, her administration said, but uncertified copies — which reporters, researchers, and members of the public can typically get free of cost — would not be considered public record.
Those uncertified copies of the records would only become publicly available 90 years after a person is born or married, and 50 years after a person’s death, according to the proposal. In Massachusetts, where the average life expectancy is roughly 80 years, those timelines would ensure those documents would not be available to the wider public for a virtual lifetime.
Healey tucked the language into a 29-page spending bill she filed last week that also includes a host of policy proposals, including to limit teens’ use of social media and lift a ban on Sunday hunting.
Healey’s office said in a statement, and in a letter to lawmakers, that her proposal targeting birth and other vital records would remove the term “out of wedlock” from state law to “modernize language and remove stigma.”
Current law bars the public from examining so-called vital records for those “born out of wedlock or abnormal sex births, or fetal deaths,” except under a judicial order or for those seeking their own birth certificate, for example. Deleting that language, her administration argues, could make more records open to the public.
But in her messaging, Healey — who once vowed to bring more transparency to her own office “than ever before” — left out the fact that her proposal would also make it harder for people to get copies of some of those vital records by exempting them from public disclosure for decades.
That, open-record advocates say, could make it harder to get records that can help identify health trends, are crucial building blocks for genealogical research, and allow reporters to fact-check basic details.
Last year, Healey signed into law a measure that ended the inclusion of Social Security numbers on publicly available death certificates in the state.
Ann Scales, a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Health, said the new proposal would create “a path to consistent privacy protections for all records.”
“It will also make accessible records that have not previously [been] made publicly available due to outdated limitations,” she said, “and start a process to determine whether there are additional steps that can be taken to protect sensitive information and prevent fraud.”
Ben Kaufman, the town clerk in Brookline and chair of the Massachusetts Town Clerks Association’s legislative committee, said his office sees requests for vital records “pretty frequently” and that clerks are cognizant of the potential for fraud and scams.
A “certified copy” of a record means it has been signed, stamped, and is printed on bond paper, making it difficult to photocopy or reproduce. A certified copy must also be requested in writing, and takes three to seven days to produce, Kaufman said.
Kaufman said he and his peers have hoped for legislation to “say we only offer certified copies for security reasons,” he said.
Allowing members of the public access to only certified copies could create steep financial barriers to getting records that are, for now, more easily accessible. To get a single certified copy of a birth certificate through the state, for example, it costs $54 to order one online, and another $42 for each additional copy.
Getting many public records in Massachusetts is already harder than in other states. Massachusetts is one of just two states, with Michigan, where the governor and Legislature are not bound to the public records laws. And Massachusetts is the only state in the country where the governor, Legislature, and judiciary all claim to be completely exempt.
Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told the Globe he was most concerned about the lack of access to uncertified records “because it prevents all of us from getting access to the information in those records for a whole range of valid reasons.”
“Any changes to a law restricting access to public records should be backed by research and data and clear threats,” he said.
Not everyone agrees.
Mary Connaughton, director of government transparency at the conservative-leaning Pioneer Institute, said she supports the proposal, citing identity theft and other scams where perpetrators use people’s personal information for nefarious reasons.
“With all the scam artists out there and criminals, it makes sense for Massachusetts to join the many other states that restrict access to these records,” she said. “I think this is Massachusetts getting with the times.”
Governor Charlie Baker pushed a similar, but more far-reaching, proposal in 2020 that would have allowed only those requesting their own records to view or get copies of the records, albeit with a few exceptions, such as a person’s parent or attorney, for example, or by a judicial order, for similar lengths of time. The Legislature never put the language to a vote.
At the time, attorneys and open-records advocates were surprised by the proposed change, saying it would radically scale back access to records that could help identify health trends, boost genealogical research, and allow reporters to fact-check basic details or seek valuable insight.
The Globe, for example, used death records to find and interview families of patients who died seeking care at Steward hospitals. The paper also analyzed death records to provide important insight about the racial disparities in who is dying of COVID-19.
State-level approaches to who can view vital records also fall across a wide spectrum. Rhode Island, Alaska, Idaho, and Virginia restrict access to birth records or make them confidential until 100 years after a person is born, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which tracks law changes across the country. In Alabama, it’s 125 years, and in Texas and Iowa, it’s 75. Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, and a handful of other states make the records, for the most part, totally confidential.
In Ohio, by contrast, birth records are considered public. So, too, are records in Minnesota and California except “those parts which contain medical and family information,” according to the Reporters Committee.
Matt Stout of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Samantha J. Gross can be reached at samantha.gross@globe.com. Follow her @samanthajgross.