Yes, There Was A Kapiolani Maternity And Gynecological Hospital In 1961

I’m seeing a lot of chatter about the name of the hospital on Obama’s newly released birth certificate. Supposedly it’s wrong because the Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital didn’t exist in 1961. Well, I’ve already found evidence that it did, and I don’t even understand the reasoning behind the argument that it didn’t.

I first saw the allegation at The Smoking Gun, in the comments, yesterday, and have been seeing it all over the blogosphere ever since. The argument goes something like this:

Name of the Hospital Obama was supposedly born at should have been Kauikeolani Children’s Hospital until 1978. Then they merged with the Kapi‘olani Maternity Home in 1978 and became Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children.

See for yourself. Here is the link to the hospital website detailing their history… Lets see if they change their history now…

http://www.kapiolani.org/women-and-child…fault.aspx

Okay, so the link leads to the Kapi’olani Medical Center For Women And Children info page, which says:

A Century of Care for Hawaii’s Women and Children

This is the story of two hospitals: Kauikeolani Children’s Hospital and Kapi‘olani Maternity Home.

Concerned about the welfare of Hawaii’s mothers, Queen Kapi‘olani held luau and bazaars to raise the $8,000 needed to open Kapi‘olani Maternity Home in 1890. She endowed her legacy with “Kulia i ka nu‘u” or “Strive for the highest.”

In 1908, Albert and Emma Kauikeolani Wilcox donated $50,000 to start a children’s hospital. The community, concerned that two of every seven infants in Hawai‘i did not live to see their first birthday, rallied to match the Wilcox’s gift. A year later, Kauikeolani Children’s Hospital opened.

The two hospitals joined in 1978 to become Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children. Staying true to its mission, the non-profit hospital has played a vital role in the health of Hawaii’s women, children and adolescents. It is staffed with highly skilled, compassionate physicians and nurses, dedicated to providing the finest care for Hawaii’s families:

A lot of people lack basic reading skills if they are taking from that that it was a children’s hospital until 1978. What started out as a maternity home, became The Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in 1958. This is from a PDF from HA Catholic Social Services, which referred unwed mothers to the Kapiolani Maternity Home/Hospital throughout the years:

What more, another Hawaiian birth certificate from a day after Obama was born has been posted online from the same hospital, (Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital):

As you can see, there should be no question whatsoever that there was a Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in 1961. It merged with the Children’s hospital to become The Kapi’olani Medical Center For Women And Children in 1978.

Now, you may see some  differences in the birth certificates. Obama’s is much…uh – newer looking. And the ID # in the top right hand corner is higher even though he was born a day earlier. But I’m sure there will be explanations for these things.

 NRO’s  Nathan Goulding of National Review shot down the “layers” argument I’ve been seeing all over the place:

What’s plausible is that somewhere along the way — from the scanning device to the PDF-creation software, both of which can perform OCR (optical character recognition) — these partial/pseudo-text images were created and saved. What’s not plausible is that the government spent all this time manufacturing Obama’s birth certificate only to commit the laughably rookie mistake of exporting the layers from Photoshop, or whatever photo editing software they are meant to have used. It’s likely that whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner. Let’s leave it at that.

I’ve confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator, does in fact create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home.

I think the story here is that Obama was being a big, fat,  petulant jerk for refusing to release the thing until it started hurting him in the polls. That’s it. Time to move on.