Originally posted by Elisabeth:
After having had 3 home-births I can assure you that it would be hard to fake. Besides, can anyone in there right mind think that Martha could have claimed she'd been pregnant and nobody in small-town USA noticed?
Excellent take on canon.
Elisabeth
Thank you
As for the rules concerning home births - the Byrne Superman rewrite did exactly that - Baby Kal-El's birth matrix was recovered just before (or during) a massive snowstorm that snowed the Kents in for some time and when they finally made it back into town, Martha'd had a baby and nobody questioned that Jonathan could have delivered it safely or that Martha hadn't seen a doctor before hand. (I mean, I remember winters in Illinois. You
might be snowed in for a couple weeks, but not a couple months, certainly not long enough to have an excuse for nobody noticing a pregnancy in a slender woman.)
As I understand the current rules on
unattended births - unless there is outside confirmation that the woman really was pregnant and could have birthed the baby, genetic tests are required to prove that the baby and the mother are related. Until the relationship is confirmed, the state can consider the baby in question to be a foundling or a child in danger. There have been way too many instances of neonates being stolen out of hospitals, even out of their mother's wombs, for there not to be rules doctors and hospitals have to follow before a birth certificate can be issued.)
The way I figure it - the only way Jonathan and Martha could have kept Clark was if the local authorities were absolutely certain they were on the up and up about finding a baby abandoned in a field.
