I’m on vacation in Türkiya and wonder: what happens when let’s say a pregnant woman goes on vacation and for whatever reason gives birth there.
How can she take the newborn back to her country? Need to prepare all the papers in the embassy or there’s some special procedure for such cases so the paper work can be done in a country she resides normally?
My government has an information page specifically about what you should do when this happens. Basically: register the birth locally (which gets you the local papers), register at home as soon as possible, and you may want to convert the birth certificate for ease of paperwork. There’s another page where you can look up the specifics for each country, but most of them (including Turkey) don’t have any specifics.
This registering abroad can cause issues when giving birth in countries like the USA, where being born within the border makes you a citizen, and therefore liable to pay tax even if you have a dual nationality and live abroad. This is especially weird because the Netherlands does not normally permit dual citizenship. Sounds like a fun bit of paperwork!
Your best bet, for any country, will probably be “contact the embassy and ask what you need to do”. Or maybe “don’t travel across the border when you’re about to give birth”; I can’t imagine a nine month pregnant woman will have a great time on vacation anyway.
This is especially weird because the Netherlands does not normally permit dual citizenship.
It seems like many (most?) countries don’t like/recognize dual citizenship. The way it ends up working is that each country doesn’t have the power to tell the other country that someone isn’t a citizen. Each country just enforces it’s own citizenship within it’s borders. If you had US/Netherlands citizenship, and use a Dutch passport to try to enter the US, you will probably get yelled at by customs if they realize that you are a US citizen. They can’t stop you from entering the US but they can hold you for a while and pester you.
If you have a US citizenship but live in another country, most of your income will be exempt from US taxes (unless you are a millionaire, in which case you probably aren’t paying many taxes anyway).
A similar thing happens with countries that have mandatory military or civil service; you can be required to travel back to serve.
The US actually requires that you pay taxes to the US based on your income in the foreign country unless they approve of you being exempt.
The first $120k is exempt, though, so unless you are bringing almost $1/4 million a year, the majority is not taxed.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/foreign-earned-income-exclusion
There’s also tax treaties that can make things more convoluted.
The Netherlands is especially anal about dual Citizenship. When you gain dutch citizenship, you must give up all others, and the when you gain other citizenship, you must give up the Dutch one.
The only way to be a Dutch dual citizen is to be from a place that won’t let you give up citizenship (Turkey is famous for it here), or to be born to parents with different citizenships. (Or to get grandfathered in from before the laws got this strict)
I think you also get to keep it if you get citizenship through marriage
This is what I know for a regular residents outside their home country. Did exactly this with my son. And also know it took us months to get him a passport so we could travel abroad. Must be a nightmare to have prolonged vacation from a week to few months.
Same with my country. Here kids get the citizenship of their parents - if one is let’s say Brasilian and one is Japanese, the kid is both and has to decide once 18 y/o or get the Austrian citizenship. If this kid is born in America, it has 3 citizenships, since by American law every person born within their borders is American.
Depends on the citizenship rules of the particular countries involved (jus sanguinis vs. jus soli and details thereof).
If a mother from a jus sanguinis country gives birth in a jus soli country the kid might have dual citizenship. In the opposite situation, the kid might theoretically be born stateless, although I’m pretty sure actual nationality laws make exceptions to prevent that in practice.
For reference:
- Jus sanguinis: citizenship based on parentage
- Jus soli: citizenship based on location
I think most jus soli countries also have jus sanguinis
No biggie.
Hopefully the mother is insured with a proper assistance company,for them that’s actually daily business. I had multiple calls when we were tasked with flying home a mom and preterm babies or two. One with neither mom and dad knowing beforehand a pregnancy existed.(that was kind of funny, though,as both had a medical background and were pretty cool about it)
From the document side of things for the industrial nations and the more developed destinations it is usually also no problem - first a local certificate of the birth is required,the closest embassy/consulate is contacted and emergency travel documents are created. As the old children’s passport have been phased out by virtually all countries are regular provisionary passport is granted (that is not printed abroad but filled out by the embassy/consulate) and you are ready to go.
Only intermittent stops/layovers can be a problem sometimes, especially in some countries (US…) so with a professional assistance company one takes care to avoid these. Furthermore some countries do not trust birth certificates from some countries (e.g. due to a high number of surrogate motherhoods) and may demand further proof of the motherhood - e.g. medical records from antenatal care back home or a medical certificate of a recent birth by one of the embassies trusted doctors. But these problems can usually be solved easily.
Babies can get a passport from day 1. Bring the local birth certificate to the consulate and get a passport. It may even be possible to get an emergency one (but I doubt many mother and kids are deemed able to travel internationally within the first 1-2 weeks)
That depends on a country. For Polish consulate it takes few days just to convert the local certificate to Polish one and get PESEL. Then and only then they order a passport that’s being printed in Poland.
Emergency passport would do here tho. Still I’d expect few days at minimum to talk to all those people.
IIRC the mother needs her own proof of citizenship and proof of birth for the infant.
So you can cross the border with a proof of birth only? No special agreement with the inbound country?
She’ll need to work with the home country to get baby issued appropriate citizenship and identity documents, but just to travel home? Birth cert and mother’s docs should be enough.
This is a really good question. Today I learned something.
Looking up the terms “jus soli” and “jus sanguinis” might be of interest to you. Basically it’s different for different countries.
All Schengen countries are blood based citizenship, so no matter what’s the case in Turkey the kid got a mothers citizenship the moment it’s born.
Removed by mod
Why was people replaced with women
Two major assumptions to be countered.
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premature births can happen way before 36 weeks
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not all travel is optional vacation
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may
advise
No requirement there. Just recommendations, and potential at that.
who tf travels on vacation when they’re so close to labor?
People with poor decision-making skills.
Even in six months pregnancy it happens that people are born due to reasons. Also my wife was able to fly basically until the end. Doctor had nothing against, airline didn’t really care. It was all Schengen flights tho.
