The most effective way to protect children, animals, our environment, and equality is by changing from family planning policies that focus on what parents want to policies that ensure future children what they need, both ecologically and socially.
The sooner you speak out, the better our and our kids’ future will be.
There are massive advantages to planning smaller and more equitable families.
It enables greater empowerment for women, more individual attention and more resources invested in each child, greater achievement in school, and more engaged, less crowded communities. But most importantly, research indicated that smaller families are better for kids. Smaller families also leave time, energy and resources for parents to invest in their community, and to ensure that the world their children will inherit is better and more equitable than the one we experience today. This list is by no means exhaustive. The bigger picture is that families and communities benefit. Read more reasons to have a small and more equitable family.
Have you chosen to have just one or two kids? Send us a video and tell us why. Email info@fairstartmovement.org
It’s true that many policies that have been promoted under the banner of an attack on systemic racism have – by the accounts from empirical scholars of all political leanings – utterly failed. But is Steele missing the foundational issue that makes any allegation of systemic racism true, regardless of what policies we put forth to eliminate it? Black children, and children of color more generally, are poor – in the extreme – relative to white children.
We cannot coherently talk about racism and policy at all without addressing the core issue – our failure to give all kids a fair start in life – and the specific family planning and redistribution reforms that could actually reverse that failure.
Take action: Every child has a fundamental human right to a #fairstart in life. It is the first human right, the one that makes us free and equal people, and as such it overrides all competing interests. Urge Congress to begin to recognize and legislate around the right.
Elon’s Musk’s Starlink satellites are creating massive sky pollution and ruining stargazing; his commercial interests are creating “space graffiti” in the night sky and obstructing astronomers’ observations. Can we solve this problem in a way that could apply to other scenarios — such as the climate crisis — in which the uber-wealthy and dysfunctional governments work together to destroy nature and threaten our kids’ futures? These incursions into nature interfere with our being free from others’ power, and their subtlety does not make them any less wrong than more obvious forms of oppression. It’s more proof that Musk, who recently doubled down on his assertion that women must have kids in order to support the economy, is not an environmentalist as much as he is a car and space tourism manufacturer.
At the most fundamental level, this process of propping up the world economy involves a population pyramid in which a few people exploit population growth, fueled by poor family planning, as an engine to convert nature and the nonhuman world into their own wealth. One fundamental solution involves simply reversing that stream: We should agree that two correlative human rights — everyone’s right to nature and children’s right to a fair start in life — supersede the property rights of wealthy people like Musk. The solution involves seeing the right to be born into the world as a free and equal person as the first human right. And it requires using that foundational right to rebase our constitutions on people, not property.
As we constantly reconstitute societies through the act of having kids, we have a right and an obligation to recycle the resources at the top, and the raw power over others they represent, to constantly generate nature, equity, and democracy where each voice matters.And there now exist clear policy ideas — like Fair Start baby bonds — to ensure that mankind most effectively uses those resources to empower future generations. The few at the top, who are literally hiding the stars from our view, can’t have power over us if we don’t give it to them.
Take action: Urge Musk to support Fair Start family planning reforms.
A vision for comprehensive family planning reforms
The voices of animal-rights advocates have become more prominent in social justice circles, and The New Republic magazine recently pondered whether animal rights is the next frontier of the left. It’s inescapable, the argument goes, because animal rights overlap with other key elements of the progressive agenda, including environmental protection, social justice, the ravages of capitalism, and more. But loud voices are often misleading.
Over the past several decades, the extent to which humans are driving animals into extinction, consuming them through massive factory farms, and experimenting on them in research labs has only skyrocketed.
Why? Because poor family planning has driven an explosion in human population over the past several decades. In that time, billions more of our species has overrun, tortured, and destroyed other species. And while many animal protection organizations raise money through claims of success, we have all failed animals if we haven’t accounted for the overwhelming negative impact of humankind’s poor family planning policies.
What can we do to change course and create real success?
The first step entails reenvisioning animal rights and liberation in terms of the most aspirational versions of those concepts. Animals have a right to live and develop autonomously in the nonhuman world, truly liberated from human oppression. To ensure that requires universal family planning reforms that promote smaller and more equitable families for all of us. These reforms will leave room on our planet for nonhumans and will ensure the high levels of empathy in future generations that nonhumans need us to have in order to live and develop. That constitutes true animal rights and veganism. Veganism is not just another way to be a consumer. It’s the natural evolution of a truly inclusive form of social justice that marries animal, environmental, and human rights by moving from archaic and divisive approaches that involve welfare and aesthetics to a unifying approach that focuses on the simple limitation and decentralization of human power.
One of the best parts? These policies are a win-win for humans as well. They ensure greater investment in each child, finally achieving the human-rights ideal of fair starts in life for all, smaller and truly democratic communities where each voice matters more, and the highest standard of environmental protection possible. Now that’s effective altruism. Had early animal-rights advocates insisted we protect nonhuman autonomy and treat the environment more as a nonhuman habitat than as a human resource, we could have avoided the climate crisis.
Want to help animals? Go beyond being a consumer in a humanized world. Focus on the people with whom nonhumans will interact. Lock arms with other social justice movements that protect future children, equity, and the restoration of nature. And bend the qualitative arc of our species’ growth trajectory to liberate humans and nonhumans at the same time. Envision a better future — and focus on family planning reform to build it.
Take action: If you support an animal protection organization, ensure that it signs this simple letter to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urging him to adopt Fair Start family planning reforms as essential to the international bill of human rights. If the organizations you support do not publicly take a position on family planning reform, ask them why not and urge them to. There is no legitimate form of animal protection that would allow our species to overrun all others.
Pope Francis recently renewed his plea for economic equity in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, lamenting the failures of free-market capitalism as the massive gap between rich and poor grows. But is he missing a simple truth?
If we want to effectively address economic inequity, as well as extreme child poverty and the climate crisis, we have to start at the source. Universal family planning reforms that ensure every child a fair start in life are the most effective way to create equity, eliminate poverty, and restore the nature created by the god Pope Francis worships.
Promoting that change does not require any changes in the Vatican’s position on contraception or abortion; it simply takes calling for an equity-based standard for policymaking and prioritization in the redistribution of resources. Having Kids has a history of engaging the Vatican on issues around creating a more sustainable and equitable world.
Urge Pope Francis and addressing to make good on his words and support #fairstart reform. Write him by mail and address it to His Holiness Pope Francis, Apostolic Palace, 00120 Vatican City.
Today is World Children’s Day, the special day designed to promote international togetherness, awareness among children worldwide, and improving children’s welfare. Our organization, Having Kids, is writing to you as leaders who have pushed boundaries in unique ways and have distinctive capacities to change universal norms, including the norms that surround how we choose to have children.
More specifically, we write because you both recently made key statements — you, Barack, about the need for “an informed citizenry and social cohesion,” and you, Kamala, about “rooting out structural racism” in the United States. In response, we write with this radical proposition and argue that neither of the things you want would be physically possible without ensuring a state of affairs that reflects this new human right:
Every child deserves a fair start in life, ecologically and socially. That is the first human right, the one that constitutes the communities of free and equal people envisioned by the International Bill of Human Rights. And as such, it overrides all competing norms and interests.
Establishing and promoting such a right would require reorienting family planning systems from their current focus on what parents want to a focus on what future kids need, and reinterpreting Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to prioritize the redistribution of resources to incentivize a new system of cooperative family planning. It would require using the Children’s Rights Convention as minimum standard for family planning. If we do that, the mitigating impact on the 1) climate crisis, 2) the gap between rich and poor, and 3) child poverty could be 10 to 20 times that of the downstream approaches we traditionally use. It’s time to take seriously an approach to family planning that is both ecologically and socially sustainable.
We are writing to ask you to consider supporting this change, which we call the Fair Start transition.
Because Fair Start is the first and foundational human right, we believe that political systems that are not implementing it — and that risk social and ecological collapse as a result — are fundamentally illegitimate. This is a claim we flesh out in peer-reviewed work and recent legal scholarship. What’s a concrete next step you all might support?
Many versions of “baby bond” legislation are being proposed at the state and federal levels. Having Kids would alter this concept to instead move toward leveling the entry field for all kids, through a steep progressive tax and benefit system designed to improve child welfare and equity, and 2) by using these incentives to universally promote smaller and more sustainable families. We believe the latter can help pay for the former, especially in the long run. More specifically, we see the legislation responding to the pandemic as a possible vehicle to begin to implement the transition to Fair Start. Our detailed proposal to Cory Booker is here.
We appreciate your breaking taboos around discussing families and wealth with your public statements recently regarding raising your three biological children to embrace being born affluent and to not feel guilty about that, but instead to “own it.”
We want to suggest an alternative way of thinking about the issue. Today we see 1) massive disparities in wealth and well-being in the United States, with black families having roughly one-tenth of the wealth of white families, and 2) clear and increasing evidence that these disparities are largely inherited on the basis of one’s economic positioning at birth. Inequity at birth and early in one’s life has disproporinate impact on one’s life prospects.
Adding to the injustice, those on the disadvantaged side of the spectrum will feel the impacts of ecological crises like climate change and pandemics like COVID-19, which are both fundamentally driven by the way we plan our families, much more keenly than those on the advantaged side.
The solution is obvious: Rather than continue laws and policies that promote our current way of planning families, we should cooperate to level the playing field for all kids, with more ecologically and socially regenerative family planning models. Regardless of whether you plan to have additional children, your publicly endorsing such a change in law and policy would go far to eliminating the injustice, while at the same time offsetting your children’s advantage by raising the floor for other kids.
Changing the way we plan families can free us. Why? Freedom requires a social contract, and that contract does not work if parents can simply pass disproportionate power to their children, rather than at least starting to move toward giving all new members of society a fair start in the social agreement — as free and equal people deserve. One model for such a change is called child-centric Fair Start family planning. As you think through these issues, would you consider this model and perhaps speaking out publicly in support of it or another justice-focused model that promotes ecological and social regeneration?
Time recently highlighted the issue of changing fertility rates as a harbinger of a new era for the United States. But the author, Eliana dockterman, errs in thinking changing our old ways, where unsustainable population growth meant free money in the form of new bodies inflating gross domestic product, is a bad thing.
It’s key in this process that we stabilize at a sustainable level – and given the climate crisis (which Docketerman never mentions) – we need smaller families to hit a safe level and we need them now. Delayed fertility and smaller families are one of the greatest ways to mitigate climate emissions. As we change average family sizes and get over our addiction to growth, we are presented with another opportunity. Can we use new family planning policies to eliminate other crises, like the economic disparity, where the average black family has one tenth the wealth of the average white family in the United States?
Yes we can, through policies designed to distribute wealth in ways designed to give every child a fair start in life. Growth had to end sometime – hopefully it’s not too late.
Take action: Urge Time’s editor, Edward Felsenthan (@efelsenthal) to talk about better ways of planning our families that can make a brighter future for all.
Younger generations are responding to the climate and other ecological crises by doing the most effective thing possible: Choosing smaller families. And while that’s great, there is still a lot of work to be done today, like enshrining the change in our laws and policies, and twisting the quantitative trend to make it more qualitatively equitable, by taking the resources necessary to fund cooperative family planning systems that give every kid a Fair Start.
But another category includes older generations – the ones that failed to prevent the population explosion driving the climate crisis – who can’t see beyond their way of doing things. The Independent featured a great example recently, with an author bemoaning how smaller families threaten the bonds of siblinghood. Should we risk the ecological collapse of our planet because we are unable to raise kids capable of bonding beyond their own blood relations? Perhaps we need to think out of the boxes the created the mess we find ourselves in today, and think of bonding and community in more advanced and sustainable ways.
TAKE ACTION: The media is failing its journalistic obligations to report on what really matters to people: Effective solutions to the world’s greatest problems. Email us at media@fairstartmovement.org for guidance on how to submit op-eds and contact reporters to help news outlets do their job.
