In the middle of the twentieth century world leaders misinterpreted the right to have children under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ensure a particular level of continued population growth to grow their base, to reinforce power structures, and to evade collective obligations to invest more in kids. Their family planning systems ignored the physical borders of human power and were designed as preconstitutional or illegitimate, to create lots of economic inputs for shopping malls, not politically empowered citizens with influential voices for town halls. The systems isolated parents, and required no minimum level of welfare at birth or the development of prosocial behavior in children, in violation of the Children’s Rights Convention, no level playing field between rich and poor kids, and no environmental sustainability. Public interest mostly groups went along with this plan.
That move fundamentally created the ecosocial crises we face today, including the climate crisis, massive inequality, horrific child abuse and neglect, and failing democracies where the average voice does not matter. It also reinforced a fallacy, the constitutive fallacy, that we can abstractly derive just systems without going upstream, to the norms that account for the first creation of social relations. In doing so it gutted the possibility of consensual governance, or freedom from the power of others (or most accurately, relative self-determination).
The Fair Start movement was designed to correct that mistake, and promote child-focused and ecosocial Fair Start family planning centered around parental readiness, collective planning to ensure birth equity and a level playing field for all kids, and a universal ethic of more sustainable families. That is the correct interpretation of Article 16.
Fair Start is the first and overriding human right – the one on which all other rights depend – and it is the genesis of freedom. We can achieve a just transition towards by incentivizing better family planning though taking the resources from the concentrations of power that created and benefited from the crises we face today. Why? Because we first physically constitute just communities by limiting and decentralizing power, and future children have a right to those resources. That – a just claim to family planning incentives as future child entitlements – is the key to qualitative optimal world populations / democratic communities.
Fulfilling that claim means liberating the most numerous and vulnerable entities in the moral universe – those that will live in the future. Nothing has a greater impact in comprehensively maximizing social justice, and ensuring the transition involves a struggle between free people who promote Fair Start and fundamental justice, and preconstitutional people, or precons, who do not. We can tell the difference between the two by simply asking a few questions.
While a lot of people celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks and beer, some are asking what it truly means to be free, and how to create a world that ensures that freedom for all with equal opportunity, a meaningful role in more effective and participatory democracies, and the freedom from others – and the climate crisis – that we find in nature or the nonhuman world. That sort of freedom is what human rights and consensual governance looks like, and we get there by ensuring an equitable start in life for everyone. Fair Start family planning creates an actual social contract that works, and nothing has a greater impact on the crises we face today.
Enter Cassie King and Matt Webber. Cassie and Matt are exemplifying what it would mean to constitute communities that are actually free, in part by compensating future generations for the harm we have caused them through the climate, inequity and other ecosocial crises.
Cassie, an activist and nonprofit professional said this about family planning:
Current corrupt concentrations of power push a growth model that promotes unsustainable family planning policies. They see us ordinary people as economic inputs in their machine, to use for our reproductive and other labor. It’s our job to fight that narrative and elevate the worth of every individual to have their basic needs met, on day one. My partner and I hope to adopt children one day and I feel the urgency to ensure that my future child, and all children, have the resources and opportunities that are their right.
Matt, a donor to the Fair Start Movement, said this:
I support the Fair Start Movement because I know that any claims I have to property and wealth are subject to ensuring every child a fair and equitable start in life, the first and overriding human right. I’m willing to step forward, as a donor, and say that. I challenge others to do the same.
Together, they are exemplifying a real new deal, one that fixes the fundamental source of the biggest problems in the world today, and leads to a comprehensively liberated state of affairs. It’s not about population. It’s about people, the vast majority of people, who will exist in the future. It’s about putting their interests first. And if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for a child.
Government derives from the people which derive from their creation. A just creation norm thus precedes and overrides everything else, including the government assigned property rights that have created massive power differentials between rich and poor. Free people will further this truth; precons, or those opposed to just and free communities, will oppose it. Cassie and Matt are engaging in the discourse of decolonization, of physically constituting justifiable and consensual communities of free and equal people. Cassie and Matt are exemplifying what it means to change power structures, and demand justice, at the most fundamental level. They are echoing the spirit of people fighting for freedom in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a suit that treats the government’s failure to respond to the climate crisis as a grave violation of our right to be free in nature from the power of others.
Forget the idea that the borders of human power are lines on a globe. Cassie and Matt are living the truth: The borders of human power that really matter are the conditions in which we are born, and the nexus of our communities with the nonhuman world. Those are the borders where our most basic values align. We were not constituted by god-like founders and ancient constitutions from the past. To constitute just societies means to limit and decentralize human power, first and foremost through the actual constituents – the “We the people.” In other words, we constitute just communities through Fair Start family planning – changing our polities/economies into legalities, and Cassie and Matt are leading the way.
We maximize autonomy by doing equity upfront – birth equity, in the fullest sense of the concept, including one’s share of democratic rulemaking authority. We don’t maximize it by continuing to pretend the inherently interpersonal act of creating children is an act of autonomy, and then chasing equity through invasive and ineffective measures downstream and later in life.
We can spread this modeling, and this simple discourse: “Part of your wealth is my and my future child’s family planning entitlement and incentive.”
The rich and powerful hold their privileged positions because of a racist, colonizing and ecocidal family planning model that exploited future generations and the nonhuman world to create wealth for a small group of people. These people hold their power over others because men with guns are there to defend it – not because it is just. Fair Start is our justified demand to limit and decentralize that power using a zero baseline baseline for distribution, in favor of democratically empowering future generations.
TAKE ACTION:
Speak truth to power. Help us approach and engage these five people who together well represent concentrations of public and private power, and the intergenerational injustice that created it.
Elon Musk, who is a perfect example of our unjust family planning system and someone who also continues to promote it as a means of enriching himself. Contact him via his partner Grimes.
These people hold privileged positions, in derogation of true democracy. They are uniquely situated to promote Fair Start as the best means to compensate future generations for the harms we have caused them. They can lead by example, like Cassie and Matt, and in being willing to support birth equity can show how to put people over property. We have a right to the resources at the top (including the platforms of influence privileged people have to communicate) to further Fair Start – the first and overriding human right.
If Matt and Cassie can work to change the paradigm away from the isolationist family planning model that helped create the ecosocial crises we face today, so can these five high influencers.
Do you support the simple ideas that 1) parents should be ready before they have kids, 2) that we have a right to distribute resources to give all kids an eco-social Fair Start in life, and that 3) a universal ethic of sustainable families for all is the best way to restore nature? Peer-reviewed research shows that prioritizing these elements in policy has ten to twenty times the positive impact on climate and other crises, relative to most other changes we can make.
World Environment Day 2021 provided a crucial opportunity for the United Nations to make good on its promise to reset humanity’s relationship with nature. But by continuing to adhere to a family planning model that allows unfettered growth, despite every opportunity to simply issue statements that would initiate reform, it has failed to honor its pledge at the most fundamental and impactful level.
Our relationship with nature is fundamentally defined by the laws that shape family planning and drive population size, and whether – in those laws – nature or the nonhuman world is seen as a resource for population growth, or instead a check on it.
By adhering to the isolation modeling the UN is enabling a false idea of autonomy and is perpetuating inequity that benefits white colonizing nations. (That colonialism is reflected in the current 1/10 wealth gap between black and white children in the U.S.) Instead the UN should promote birth equity to achieve true autonomy and as a reparations to future generations.
The UN has not taken action. It has failed to link its outdated modeling to the overcrowding and poor public health that helped drive the COVID-19 pandemic. It has failed to condemn China’s new pronatal family planning regime, which is intended to create a baby boom among a population that – because of its size – already poses the greatest threat to the world’s ecologies. Instead the UN has focused on downstream efforts while at the same time profiting, politically, from population-based GDP growth.
Inaction threatens the UN’s credibility. Pronatal policies being rolled out in response to a perceived economic “baby bust” show that our current systems of governance are fundamentally illegitimate. If we are willing to create lots of people in whom we invest relatively little in order to satisfy markets and economies, instead of fewer people in whom we invest more in order to build the democracies that must precede, justify and regulate those markets and economies, we are admitting fundamental illegitimacy, or as the peer-reviewed work shows, the preconstitutionality, of our political systems. This is especially true when doing so exacerbates the climate crisis. In that case, all effective measures to correct this inversion are just.
The costs of ignoring reproductive justice legal reforms are mounting. These include the costs of the relevant climate emissions that could have been avoided since at least 2007, and the role the failure to require equitable family planning has played in driving the massive and growing gap between rich and poor across the globe. The Fair Start Movement is calculating those costs as harms, and believes world leadership must – and one day will – be held fully accountable for them.
Will you join that call? Nothing would have a greater long-run impact on restoring our environment than simultaneously compensating future generations, while helping them become parts of legitimate democracies, via Fair Start investments in their empowerment and resilience.
For demographers and other population experts population decline is the expected and desired outcome of decades of family planning interventions meant to end and reverse unsustainable population growth. Why the media alarmism then?
Zero Baseline (or “Fair Start”) Modeling (ZBM) corrects critical errors in all theories of social organization (from states, to corporations, to families etc.) that center around how we derive legitimacy, and political obligation, in the process of organizing. These errors retard personal sovereignty, or relative states of self-determination, and hence freedom. While there are several errors that drove the development of the ZBM, they can be summed up as the “constitutive fallacy,” or the belief that legitimacy and obligation can be fundamentally derived from anything other than the norms that determine our creation, and hence determine our initial relations and forms of organization.
The ZBM is a proposed creation norm to correct the fallacy and to legitimate forms of social organization. It operates primarily by 1) treating social contract theories of political obligation as inherently intergenerational (such that we are constituting states rather than having been constituted in the past), 2) prioritizing relative self-determination (relative to zero, or the absence of human influence, including 300ppm and lower climate crises baselines required to meet restorative/ecocentric/rewilding standards of environmental protection) as a value, but one that should diminish as members are added to the contract and the sovereigns displace one another, and 3) expanding our conception of power to include any form human influence or affect, like climate emission and bad parenting. The ZBM thus serves 1) as an interpretation of the moral and legal right to have children – one focused on collectively giving all children an ecosocial fair start in life as a means of limiting and decentralizing human power so that it can be subjected to norms, and 2) a formula by which to assess optimal world population.
The following discussion will situate the ZBM in the relevant literature, detail some of the costs of the constitutive fallacy, and finally present the ZBM in more detail as a basis to move social organization from top-down relations based on coercion, or incentive, towards bottom-up relations based on inclusive systems of relative self-determination derived from child development.
Situating the ZBM in the Literature
The ZBM combines work from several theorists and overlapping subjects, most obviously:
Hans Kelsen’s work on the basic norm,
deontological population ethics,
social contract, natural law, and Rousseau’s democratic theory,
the intergenerational justice work of Lukas Meyer, Axel Gosseries and David Archard,
theories of political obligation, constitutional identity, baselining, as well as personal and political autonomy,
the work of Joel Feinberg on children’s right to an open future,
related work from Sarah Conly, Christine Overall, Onora O’Neill on the right to have children,
And the practical realm of family law and reproductive rights.
That said, the ZBM is unique because it corrects the constitutive fallacy where it appears in the work above, like the common presumption that the claimant is who they should be, were created justly, and as such operate from the position of a justifiable social organization. Instead of political obligation theories like “fair play,” or relying on the harm principle for measuring liberty, the ZBM reserves legitimacy for states of affairs in which people were created fairly. Unlike many theories on the right to have children, the ZBM rejects procreative autonomy, and even places autonomy in the form of choosing not to have children subsequent to collective obligations not to have them if they would fall below minimum thresholds of civic quality necessary for a democracy.
The failure to develop and implement a just creation norm, like the ZBM, has created significant social and ecological costs. The following will discuss some of these costs, before moving onto a more detailed discussion of the model as a solution, and as a baseline to seek restorative justice.
The Underlying Errors
The errors – almost all conceptual – underlying the fallacy include, among others: 1) Treating things like national constitutions, or even rules of recognition, as the fundamental norms or grundnorms, when in fact the norms that determine our creation would have preceded these forms. 2) Using abstracted conceptions of the person focused on adulthood, and rationality, that are insufficiently dynamic to account for the key early stages and drivers of personal development, and the cumulative and collective impact of that development. And specifically for liberalism, 3) the failure from Locke to Rawls to account for how (the harm principle aside) the creation of persons controls their relative states of self-determination (e.g., vote dilution), and how this failure to account disenfranchises the majority of constituents, or future persons, who along with nonhumans are the most numerous and vulnerable category of moral entities.
The underlying errors also include using 4) limited conceptions of human power (and the borders of that power), e.g. that are focused on coercion, as opposed to using a conception that includes all human influence or affect, 5) myopic conceptions of autonomy that are self-contradicting, e.g. procreative autonomy and which presume we are whom we should be rather than the products of unjust creation norms, and in 6) in population ethics, using a concept of persons focused on quantity, when the concept of population inevitably at least five incommensurable and primarily qualitative values discussed below.
The Costs of the Errors
There are many costs that flow from the fallacy and underlying errors. Because the fallacy enabled in 20th Century a misinterpretation of the right to have children that focused on procreative autonomy and parental subjective desire rather than the objective needs of future children, population growth exploded past optimal levels, and continues to do so, backed by pronatal policies. That continued explosion drives the climate crisis and other ecocides, child poverty, massive inequity, and the degradation of systems of human rights and democracy. Because of the fallacy – which ironically seeded subjectivism, unlimited power (parental) and “might makes right,” at the fundament of human rights – neoliberal, colonial and patriarchal systems were able to use future generations and the nonhuman world as resources to fuel economic growth.
They used the misinterpretation to enable that growth (and subjectivism more generally) over systems of early childhood and civic development. This had the result of physically constituting economies, or shopping malls, rather than the antecedent systems of democracy, or town halls, that regulate economies. Often this process used religion as the driver, in violation of separation principles. The trend continues today, as falling fertility rates – a phenomena with twenty times the long-run impact reducing climate emissions – are treated by the dominant discourse an economic “baby bust.”
The Solution to the Constitutive Fallacy: ZBM
If the constitutive fallacy involves skipping the step of creation in determining the justifiability and legitimacy of relations, the solution involves a norm that literally creates normativity, or the inclusion of relatively self-determining and reasonable agents into social organizations that reflect their constituents. In other words, if we want just systems we must begin with a just creator or creation norm, one who gives all children a Fair Start in life. That will in turn allow us to maintain the constant and antecedent “we,” or group of free and equal people, necessary to constantly reconstitute participatory democracies that empower their members to actually control the rules under which they live.
The Fair Start grundnorm or ZBM (the constituting norm) is comprised of four interdependent evaluative requirements, or objective values that act as necessary conditions that enable true human subjectivity and choice: To minimize the loss of political autonomy in a human-rights-based democracy, and hence maximize consent, integration, and justified political obligation, would require, as a matter of lexical primacy, that (1) each new entrant be of a minimum constitutive quality or capable of constituting with others, (2) that there be a maximum number of members constituting the human-rights-based democracy, (3) that they enter relative to each other so that they exclude equally, and (4) that they are capable, given their quality, quantity, and relativity, of reconstituting their legalities relative to (or approaching) some level of nonpolity, or nature, that represents their capacity to convert power into law.
The existence of these four variables are inevitable in the act of procreating. The grundnorm thus necessitates backdating the standards, e.g., requiring conditions of entry that ensure constitutive quality and emancipation, rather than ignoring entry and subsequently excluding persons as insufficient in some way.
The values that comprise the grundnorm, which try to maximize obligation and autonomy through entry, role, and exit are the following: Treating procreation as the improved continuation of the parent’s life (“improved continuity,” or IC), a minimum level of welfare at entry, the nexus or zero-baseline point at which the values are first determined, fairly defined by the welfareof other entrants (> MW(F)). A qualitative threshold of a minimum quality of equitable individual sovereignty defined by the standard for emancipation, or reason (> E). A quantitative threshold of a maximum number of individual sovereigns defined by a minimum of individual sovereign roles, or capacities, in their democracy (< R). And finally, a quantitative threshold of a maximum number of individual sovereigns defined by nature (< N), the nexus or zero-baseline point or balance point at which the values are last determined.
To constitute is to maximize relative self-determination by approaching – given that constituting is dynamic – the zero baseline, or beginning to make people count or count, on a simple scale of 0, 1, 2 . . . 0
The thresholds above can be set using existing legal standards we claim to already adhere to, like basic parental fitness, the Children’s Rights Convention, biodiversity and wilderness restoration targets, education benchmarks, federalism and representative ratios, redistribution polices that attempt to create equality of opportunity, etc. The model will show that, by our own standards existing in law today, we are not who we should be or who we claim to be, but the products of a truly original sin.
The model above represents the implied and justified antecedent “we” in any normative claim, assuming the fundamental value of relative self-determination, or the grouping of persons from which the claimant is operating and in which they matter. At its base, democracy involves the capacity to influence, which in turn begins with the existence of the person. If we take democracy (or individual sovereignty, from the appropriate and more compelling individualized perspective) seriously, we must focus on the creation of individuals and thereby unravel the age-old legal conundrums of balancing community and autonomy, unified independence, and ordered liberty.
Taking Action
Beyond theory, the ZBM is the subject of a growing social movement demanding a shift from preconstitutional, parent-focused, and subjective family planning systems to a future child focused Fair Start system that – as grundnorm – should be treated as the fundamental and overriding human right. The vision and mission of the work involve bending the world population arc downwards, using a universal policy of families working together to plan for and equitably invest more in each child. The goal is to create a future of truly democratic communities surrounded by nature, constituted of free and equal people who each have a meaningful role in making the rules under which they live, and where each was empowered by the conditions in which they were born and raised.
The movement uses a simplified application of the ZBM, and includes dozens of legal, policy, institutional, cultural and direct action interventions supporters can use to further the change. The interventions include, among other things, international law reforms, celebrity appeals and Fair Start family modeling, tax measures, litigation, contraceptive funding, demands for climate compensation relative to the zero baseline, corporate divestment campaigns, and fact checking and reporting on claims relevant to the modeling.
Chaos Enabled by Irresponsible Behavior Is the Antithesis of Freedom
What do pandemics like Covid-19, and ecocidal things like the climate crisis, have to do with the idea of human freedom? For some, these events will be perceived as opportunities for governments to limit human freedom. For others, they will seem like limitations on freedom, along with governments’ failure to prevent them. Whatever the view, these events are largely driven by human behavior, which in turn is driven by values and norms, like freedom. How we further these events, and react to them, fundamentally derives in many ways from our perception of freedom and how it limits or justifies behavior. Dealing with these crises could then fundamentally start with examining the concept. Below are three particular perspectives, centered on isolation, inclusion, and creation, respectively.
A common view of freedom is the right to do whatever one wishes, absent some obvious and unjustifiable harm to others. The vision here is that one is and should be autonomous from other people, a vision captured in statements we see all the time: A gym owner in Arizona who refuses to require masks or close his business despite Covid-19, landowners who refuse to comply with the endangered species act, companies in trade associations that push back against consumer regulations, or coalitions fighting regulations that would limit climate emissions. The entire concept proceeds from intentional myopia, or the decision to view oneself in isolation from others, in time and space. It is the maintaining of willful ignorance of how people came to occupy different positions in society, the subtlety of harm, and the importance of things beyond harm – like obtaining the considered consent of others we influence. That myopia makes these claims of freedom easy to contest, but they endure to the extent our political systems position people so that they are – in an antisocial way – unwilling or unable to examine them. Collective problems, like the climate crisis and Covid 19, are primarily seen as presenting a risk that the collective will have a new opportunity to interfere with the will of individuals.
A second and less common view of freedom evades these problems we find in the first view. It takes many forms, but the general idea is to more comprehensively account for one’s position in the collective, and ensure a shared arrangement that allows one to do what one wishes as part of a system that simultaneously allows others to do the same. The goal is to not prevent each other from self-determination in the process. The philosophers: Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, or Philip Pettit, in a recent Ted Talk, exemplify this more comprehensive view. It cannot easily be picked apart by examining how the autonomy of the individual relates to the collective – they have accounted for these complex and relevant connections. Under this view, both the climate crisis and Covid-19 present direct risks to the autonomy or freedom of all, as well as those in the future. It is consistent with the objective value of people getting to do what they want that we require all to change their behavior in response to these events. This vision is more complex and accurate – but beyond the capacity or willingness of many to grasp.
But the truly myopic, and even the more comprehensive visions of freedom, aside, there is a third view of freedom that involves something unique. Is there something odd about the two visions of freedom just discussed? There is no account of how the people in them came to be. It’s as if they dropped from the sky. But if freedom entails freedom from other people and their unwanted influence, as well as the freedom to do things – like choose among the valuable options in life enabled by particular types of social organization – don’t we have to first account for the creation of people? Don’t we have to assure all some minimum levels of welfare or even equity of opportunity at birth, some meaningful role in controlling their governance, and political entities physically defined by nature so that we can be free from others? In other words – we first need a norm that accounts for the creation of free people.
This third view of freedom – which we might call a fair start, is centered on the act of creating other people to ensure they live as free and equal persons. It is not exclusive of the first two but rather precedes and enables them, and would be furthered through a very specific process of reforming family planning and population policies – specifically treating the act of procreation as more other-determining for the child than self-determining for the parents. It asks: How can we be inclusive without first accounting for the creation of the people to be included? The impact of these family planning reforms would exponentially surpass many of the downstream reforms underway to alleviate child poverty, ensure equity, restore democracy, and protect our environment. So would the long-term impact on the climate crisis, and the impact and risks of pandemics.
Lastly, this third view has a unique feature: Because it always proceeds other behaviors, in that we are before we do, it overrides conflicting interests. We may do whatever it takes to ensure all children a fair start in life or to continuously recreate the people who actually – or physically – comprise free societies.
The crises we face today arise from and depend on values, like freedom. Starting at the source of the problem entails examining what we mean when we use this word, and what it means for others.
President Biden is unveiling his American Families Plan this week. It aims to support families with the cost of childcare, expanding child tax credits, providing paid family leave, among other things. But is this enough to meaningfully reduce U.S. inequality (the highest in the developed world) and set up the next generation for a healthy, equitable and sustainable future?
Leaders on both sides of the aisle already agree that early childhood is critical in positioning kids for success throughout life. Just look at programs like Head Start, SNAP, Medicaid, etc.) The American Families Plan even includes spending for pre-k education.
But we need to invest in kids even earlier. We really should be starting from conditions at birth. That is how to truly give kids a fair start in life.
Given that, shouldn’t we also pursue family planning investments that have more than 50 years of proven results in reducing poverty and improving lives? These are efforts like encouraging delayed parenthood, birth spacing and investing more in each child.
Yes, family planning decisions are ultimately between parents. But our policies have significant implications for the conditions in which children are born.
Therefore, lawmakers must ask key questions as they devise policies if they really want to give kids a fair start in life:
How can we help parents be financially ready?
How can we help parents provide stable and healthy home environments?
How can we act to reduce inequities and the climate crisis, rather than exacerbate these harms?
Here are a few ways the Biden administration could advance parental readiness and improve equity to give all kids a fair start:
Encourage delayed parenthood by releasing funds being held up in the development of the male pill.
Making higher education more accessible, allowing parents to better provide for their families throughout their lifetimes. The good news? Tuition-free community college is already included in the American Families Plan!
Improve family planning education to arm young people with information about the benefits of delayed parenthood, birth spacing, and focusing resources on kids. Future parents can set themselves up for greater lifetime success and give their future kids a fair start. Why aren’t we giving them this information?
Cut all benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding.
Use those savings as cash incentives to power up family planning and early childhood investment systems in the United States to
And yet people like Matthew Yglesias and the media outlet Vox continue to push women to have kids. Many have said that we should punish climate change deniers for blocking policy reforms that could have mitigated the crisis. But all climate emission flow downstream from the increase in demand population growth creates. It is the fundamental driver. Aren’t the people actually making the crisis worse, usually to grow their investments, just as bad as the deniers? Did Ygelsias pushing women to have kids actually have an impact? The proposals to change federal child tax and care subsidy policy to encourage population growth that followed his advice suggest it did.
Let’s hold him and others, like Lee Raymond, accountable. We have a right to take the resources of wealthy people like Lee and Matthew who profited from poor and unsustainable family planning but never paid that costs that growth imposed on the environment, animals, women, and children. Why? Because every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start is the first human right, and it precedes and overrides any other obligation, including property rights.
It’s time to pay up. Those that really profited owe future generations – more than most.
What is Fair Start? It’s about people, not population. It’s about shared values and thinking qualitatively about the future, not using poor and unsustainable family planning to grow economies. Read the Allegory of the River, and why Having Kids talks about constituting democratic communities instead of framing our work around the concept of population, to understand more. Let’s make family planning truly inclusive, and geared around creating democratic communities where everyone has a voice.
It’s simple: Fair Start family planning means smaller families sharing resources to invest more in every child. For some, the closest analog for this new model would be responsible family planning incentives. But Fair Start resources are actually entitlements held by future children, and funded through non-traditional means. Those opposed to remodeling favor our current system of unsustainable families, unearned privileges, and undemocratic influence, over giving kids a fair start in life.
All kids have a fundamental human right, ecologically and socially, to a #fairstart in life. It’s the first human right. Help us secure it against those who threaten our future.
Groups and individuals from around the world are signing on to an effort to change the old model that focuses on what parents want toward a new model that focuses on what all kids need. The new model, called Fair Start family planning, is the beginning of real social justice. The reform can begin with the United Nations secretary general simply acknowledging the need for change.
Sign on, and urge any organization you support or can influence — nonprofit or for-profit — to also sign on. Sign here, or contact us at info@fairstartmovement.org for more information.
