I mean, how does it become any more centralized? You need both a birth and death certificate from the state to be a legitimate person in their eyes, along with the unholy alliance between medical authorities and state bureaucracy. The very idea in giving birth today no longer has any of the divinity or spirituality of the sacred act of life-creation, but only the biological materialism of production towards the state.

Giorgio Agamben has a really great analysis of this in, “The Uses of Bodies” the final book of the homo sacer series.