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.
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.
far 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 are the basic building blocks of freedom for all.
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
Nandita Bajaj Joins FSM as Co-Director
I am ecstatic to be joining the Fair Start Movement as the part-time voluntary co-director. I resonate deeply with FSM's philosophy that is centered on the rights and well-being of current and future children and how those rights are inextricably linked to...
Fair Start: Let’s Stop Counting People, and Start Making People Count
It’s this simple: If we – each one of us – wants to be coming from a place of justice, we have to prioritize giving every child a fair start in life. That means reforming our family planning systems - through high incentives and entitlements - to ensure all future...
Texas Abortion Fight: A New Way Forward?
The move by Texas to ban abortions in the earliest stages of a woman's pregnancy is part of the long running war between those focused on the potential life of the fetus, and those focused on women's autonomy. The Fair Start Movement intends to file amicus - or friend...
One Family Shares Their Story
A Mother’s Plea: Collective Planning
A Message from Fair Start Movement
Co-Director, Catharina Hughey
English
Arabic
Bosnian
Chinese (Simplified)
Czech
Dutch
French
German
Greek
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Pashto
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu