What is Fair Start?
The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of
social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life. Let’s stop counting people, and start making people count. How? Move wealth from the top of the economic pyramid and into incentivizing better family planning and smaller and more equitable families for all. That wealth was made through unsustainable family planning policies that put the real ecosocial costs on women and children, rather than ensuring birth equity.
Redirecting that wealth – as the first and overriding human right – is how to do the most good for children, animals and the environment, and the only way to make people truly free.
Moving power forward, not up, is how we constitute just communities.
Without giving every child an ecosocial Fair Start in life we never come from a just place. Changing that is the first obligation, for all of us, has the greatest impact on the crises we face today, and as such it is achievable by all means effective.
Social Justice
Because inequality is inherited and unequal opportunities affect kids for life.
Eco Justice
Because children have a right to nature, and healthy, safe environments.
Reproductive Justice
Because it is the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
Why Fair Start?
Governments are failing children’s right to an eco social fair start in life.
We know that early childhood experience is pivotal to lifetime outcomes. Why are we waiting for adverse childhood experiences to occur before acting?
Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning. A fair start in life is the first human right – it overrides all others. It is what children are entitled to under the Children’s Rights Convention, and what allows them to eventually be free from the power of others, and truly self-determining.
Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always coming from an unjust place.
How do we change course? Many are joining this simple discourse, in which we recognize that all wealth is subject to future generations’ right to fairness, and that wealth transfers should act as an incentive and entitlement for better – and equitable – family planning. Ensuring an eco-social #fairstart in life for all kids can have ten to twenty times the long run impact on the key social and ecological crises we are facing today relative to other interventions.
It is the most effective and just thing we can do. We may achieve it by extraordinary means, because there is no justice without it.
How Can We GIVE ALL KIDS A FAIR START?
By enacting child-centered policies made to level the playing field and non-coercively incentivize
smaller and well-planned families, we can ensure every child a fair start in life.
We can move the discussion away from population and towards people, away from counting people and towards making people count.
WHen Communities and governments priotize a fair start in life as the first human right
We invest more in families and Help Parents be Ready, empowered, and positioned for success
Kids get a fair start and our future is protected
Pathways for specific and achievable metrics for each of these can be found here. These include standards for delay and readiness to avoid horrific cases of child abuse and neglect, provisions to transfer wealth from rich kids to poor kids to level their playing fields, and incentives to promote smaller families for everyone. These standards move us towards an qualitative optimal world population – the first order of any policy, which could be measured using things like how we are reversing the paradox of voting and instead empowering people as influential democratic citizens. These are the basic building blocks of freedom for all.
1. Do you feel your kid or future kid deserves a level playing field and equal opportunities in life, relative to wealthy kids – the many millionaire and billionaire kids who will impact your child’s life?
2. What if your kid or future kid had a human right to that fair start ? Would you advocate for policies, and direct action, to ensure that right?
3. If you are someone with wealth, would you be willing to speak out in support of that right and those policies?
Contact us at Ashley@FairStartMovement.org if so.
What We Do
The Fair Start Movement is a collective of parents and young people, child advocates, activists, health practitioners, social scientists, ethicists, and institutions from a range of causes who come together to advance Fair Start efforts at the state, federal, and global level.
We advocate for informed, inclusive policies rather than ones focused on short-term and unsustainable economic growth with damaging ecological consequences. We call on those with a platform to speak out, from celebrities to those in governance. We also build our movement through a growing coalition of organizations. But most importantly, we empower young people and parents to share their stories and force accountability from those who oppose giving kids a fair start and threaten our and our children’s future.
Campaigns
Recent Blogs
What’s the Most Important Law of All? The One that Makes Us Social
Education is compulsory for children, beyond the massive return on investment it ensures, because it is seen as a prerequisite to democracy. Why? Democracy requires people are sufficiently developed, and have enough of a common core, to come to agreement on the...
Act: Ask CNN and Eliza Anyangwe to Embrace True Equality Now
Kudos to Eliza Anyangwe for reporting on the most important issue of our time: The changing way we are all having children, the massive impact it will have on our futures, and the policies that control these matters. But after rightly criticizing Prince William for...
Eliva Press book on Fair Start recommended by leading constitutional scholar Prof. Lawrence B. Solum
Review by Prof. Larry Solum "The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Justice as a Fair Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children by Carter Dillard. Here is a description: “Heidegger wants us to recapture the sense of people as unique and valuable, and...
One Family Shares Their Story
A Mother’s Plea: Collective Planning
A Message from Fair Start Movement
Co-Director, Catharina Hughey
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