Fair Start Movement

Author: Fair Start Movement

  • Elon Musk Is Threatening Our Democracy. What Do We Do?

    Elon Musk Is Threatening Our Democracy. What Do We Do?

    Elon Musk puts the wealth of elites over democracy. We see that this week as he flagrantly defies Covid 19 lock down orders for one of his factories, putting an entire community as risk. Does he, and people like him, wield too much power? Is there a solution to the threat their power poses to others?

    Consider these the facts about Musk: 

    • Musk has claimed that his wealth is self-made, but he was born a relatively wealthy white child in South Africa during apartheid. His family owned an emrald mine in Zambia. He left South Africa amid the turmoil, while others stayed to reform the system.
    • As of May 2020, he has a net worth of $36.5 billion and is listed by Forbes as the 31st-richest person in the world. By contrast, the median American household worth is roughly $97,300. Musk has used this wealth to create a level of influence over industry, media, and politics that dwarfs average Americans’ influence over public affairs and their futures and that drowns out their voices.
    • Musk is part of the top of a power dynamic in which the world’s richest people own the same wealth and influence as as roughly the poorest half of humanity.
    • Musk is seen by some as an environmentalist, but he has consistently stoked fears of underpopulation and has promoted population growth policies that would exacerbate the climate crisis and many other environmental crises more than almost anything else we could do. In addition to the impact of his various industries, his commercial space ventures are a massive and growing source of light pollution that obscure one’s view of space and interfere with the practice of astronomy. 
    • As discussed above Musk, in a growing display of antisocial behavior, consistently violated the law, and risked lives, to maintain production and profits at one of his factories in California. The state appears to be acquiescing to the violation. He is being treated as if he is above the law because of his wealth and influence.

    These Facts Raise Questions

    Why is Musk above the law? Is he a fundamental threat to our democracy — and to our right to be self-determining people rather than people whose lives are determined by a small group of people? It’s undemocratic that some individuals, usually born wealthy, wield such disproportionate influence over our lives. If Musk is a threat, and if elected officials do nothing, are free people obligated to act to protect what so many have died for?  

    The problem we face is in knowing what to do, but that problem comes with a solution. We resist taking action against individuals like Musk because rather than using violence, he uses money to wield massive power over others. But as the climate crisis has shown, more subtle human power and influence, like social positioning and climate emissions can pose the greatest threat of all. Money is no exception. As Musk’s defiance of the order shows, money can easily threaten lives. 

    So What’s the Solution?

    The answer lies in Musk’s promotion of population growth, which is consistent with his response to the pandemic. Both evidence his disdain for human rights and democracy, and make him a unique target for those who want to promote human freedom.

    Musk’s statements show that he mistakenly equates democracies with economies in which future children are labor, consumer, and taxpayer inputs and in which the nonhuman world is a resource. That is incorrect. Democracies precede economies and are defined by strict human-rights parameters that make them function, such as the right to speak freely (and have an equal voice). Those rights give us a baseline for what’s an entitlement, cost and benefit, rather than the random “good fortune” Musk had of being born a wealthy white man in South Africa. He has actually invoked the concept of freedom, that countless people died to protect, in order to risk innocent lives as a means of extending his undemocratic control of others. That deserves a response, and his position on family planning gives a pathway for it.

    Musk is pushing for population growth and family planning policies that would try to replace democracies with economies that are devoid of human rights and would ensure that those with wealth control others. He is pushing for kids to be born irrespective of the number born, their levels of welfare and education, and their positioning relative to rich kids, He’s pushing for growth irrespective of its impact on our natural ecologies. In other words, he promotes the family planning model that created the climate crisis. He is pushing for a massive populace designed for economies and not democracies, and world where markets seem like the natural and inevitable state of affairs, and one that ensures the positioning of people like him. 

    And it’s the first, or lexically prior, human right – the right to a Fair Start in life – Musk may be trying to avoid when he ignores human rights and promotes the chaos of anarchic markets over the freedom of democracy. The right to have children, the right that puts the “human” in human rights, best orients from the perspective of the future child and their right to fair starts in life. That right is the engine that keeps democracies going, and it overrides competing interests, like Musk’s interest in dominating others and the skies, as well as his his passing that dominance onto his progeny. What he thinks is wealth he created is the product of a much larger and more complex social ecology that he is ignoring. And the fundamental right to a fair start in life, which represents the first peremptory norm and the constant reconstituting of our social ecology and democracy, overrides his claims to disproportional wealth, enabling free people to target Musk and other threats like him with a specific demand that would actually level the economic playing field. And it’s not about choosing government over people. That right also overrides the interests of big government and their bureaucracies, especially when the government (who these days is largely comprised of the uber-wealthy themselves) disregard the rule of law and let the wealthy take over.

    People like Musk exist because we have yet to take the overriding right to a fair start in life seriously and have instead pretended it was the hand of God that determined who won the birth lottery. Perhaps, given that right’s efficacy in addressing the crises we face, we should take it seriously now. 

    This Isn’t Socialism or Capitalism; It Isn’t Economics at All

    No economies exist without laws, and no laws exist without a people capable of making them – imagine something like a town hall setting. Both the left and the right value protecting children’s future and their right to equal opportunities in life. But to get there requires limiting the total quantum of human power exerted upon our surroundings and decentralizing it intergenerationally — or finally realizing the duality of freedom from others and the freedom to equal opportunities in life.

    Both Big Business and Big Government, at the top of a Ponzi Scheme pyramid, are pushing women to have more and more kids as a means of creating future labor, and needy consumers, instead. Thy are making economies before democracy. Reasonable people on both the left and the right can work together to target key figures at the top of that pyramid to – instead – to build free democracies through better family planning. Together, we can secure that true form of freedom over its imitation: the anarchical and infantile “I get to do whatever I want to do” sort of freedom that has never made sense, that ends up hurting people and compromising their own freedom, and the form that is promoted by people like Musk who want to change town halls into shopping malls and to replace political freedom into employment and consumption.

    Look for the wizard behind the curtain in the case of Musk. You will see the appropriation and rebranding of other persons’ work by one individual, using wealth enabled by a system of laws he now flouts. The disparity of wealth and influence he enjoys is the product of mistakes in our system, not something naturally occurring.

    Musk appears publicly. Engage him, as you would in a town hall, personally, peacefully, and legally, and demand that he fund Fair Start family planning. Do what our government should be doing to make us free, and use Musk as an example.

    We have a right to a Fair Start share of his resources, and his violating the law presents an opportunity to truly build democracy, taking down the powerful who control us in the spirit of liberation. And while you are at it, urge the United Nations to speed along that liberation, take human rights seriously, and recognize Fair Start as a fundamental human right.

    Those most able must do what’s most effective to maintain a just system.

  • Reflections on Motherhood in a Pandemic

    Reflections on Motherhood in a Pandemic

    *This post is authored anonymously.

    I had a moment of seeing behind the proverbial curtain this weekend, glimpsing the grinding gears and strained puffing of the system we rely on to keep our ways of life afloat. A number of factors led to this: Mother’s Day this year arrived during a global pandemic and stay-at-home order, and I was at the (hopeful) tail end of three weeks of fevers, fatigue, and coughs for me and my family, all while I shouldered the responsibility of keeping myself and my staff employed and paid, along with the additional cognitive and emotional workload produced by the pandemic and its cascading effects. 

    This is a time of erasure of the boundaries and social fictions we employ when things are functioning, or at least more or less functioning, when the very foundations of our societal infrastructure to keep people physically safe, socially connected, and able to acquire resources for survival and fulfillment are not existentially threatened (albeit temporarily for most of us).

    The ‘Have-It-All’ Narratives as Social Fiction

    In normal times, what these boundaries and social fictions allow us to do is to live by some convenient narratives and patina of orderliness that disguises some stark truths. These are the “have-it-all” narratives mainstream society particularly presents to mothers as both incentive and imperative: having children, fulfilling romantic relationships and friendships, community engagement, cultivation of a meaningful and growing internal world, and ambitious career accomplishments.

    Society constructs equally bombastic promises and goals for how we treat our children: seeking equality of opportunity, including broader access to high-quality early childhood care and good schools, rich worldly experiences and skill development, reliance on familial and community support, and modeling of knowledge and behavior to supplement the parent-child relationship with the goal of producing fully actualized human beings. The fact that this is the language of our cultural mythos and that these are real areas of pursuit and achievement for vast swaths of people is a massive achievement, full stop. This is the well-deserved badge of honor worn by the successes (more or less) of feminism and other rights-based movements, and (again, more or less) the excesses afforded to us by economic growth and standards of living in the Western world over the past several decades.

    Nothing I am saying here should detract from the profundity of this shift, seating power in the hands of the individual to seek and, in some cases, to find achievement in some or all of those areas. This is a massive liberation from earlier systems. Still, there are important things these narratives obscure, and until now, there has not been a reason for them to be at the center stage of our cultural discussions. Certainly there has been some hand-wringing over the grandiosity and brittle promise of these narratives in recent decades as people have struggled to realize their promise and live them. These conversations have often been relegated to their own corners of bookstores and coffee shops and then the internet, places that house special-interest think pieces, academic literature on “matrescence,” and “mommy blogs,” often coupled with a lot of reassurance about how wonderful motherhood and children really are.

    The Tension Between Motherhood and Individuality

    So what does not get said? What did I glimpse behind the curtain? The difficult truth in all of this is that the choice to become a mother brings with it an irredeemable cost to one’s individuality. Mothers are beholden to their children’s needs first, and with that their role in the family system, and only secondarily can they answer the call of their own individual pursuits and identity.

    Yes, fathers or other partners, teachers, extended family, child care workers, and others in the community can and should help distribute that load very significantly. And yes, in normal life, mothers and children can “have it all,” or at least have most of it, most of the time. In a well-resourced environment for a person with a high level of skills and emotional acumen, this does not have to be a negative thing, at least not on a surface level. It means doing things for your child that you may otherwise not have done: participating in child-centric activities and making friends with people you otherwise would not, who are not in your “tribe” and who may not be fulfilling to you individually, so as to build your child’s community and experiences. It means relying on your partner and extended family to shoulder much of the burden so you can invest in your own individual growth with intention.

    The Shift to a Care-Based Ethic

    All of this is in itself a kind of important growth. But in becoming a mother, the shift has taken place. The point is that the ethical playing board changes with motherhood. This is true, although mostly hidden, even in the best times. No longer do the most relevant moral and political debates around fairness and equitable distribution of access to resources revolve around the tension between the freedom of the individual and the freedoms of other individuals or groups. For mothers, our central ethical duty is to nurture and provision our children, and to the extent it increases their likelihood of survival and growth, maximize that interconnectedness and resource provision when they are vulnerable and in need of it. This is a care-based ethic: No longer is it my job to primarily worry about humanity in general, or about myself. First and foremost, it is my job to focus on my own children. Anything that comes into conflict with that must take a back seat to it, including my own basic needs and aspirations.

    In times of scarcity and illness, the hierarchical nature of this is even more evident. Neither my partner nor I could fail to function in this pandemic, lest it harm our children in very real ways. Without schools, reliable and safe hospitals, access to extended family and friends, office buildings, and the other usual institutions to offload some of this day-to-day reality and allow a separateness of living spheres, it is clearer that if I were to be paralyzed by anxiety or by physical illness, it would impact my ability to do things as basic as care for my children and keep a roof over their heads. Added to that in the current climate is my responsibility to, with my partner, be solely responsible for their intellectual development, emotional health, and social outlet, and it throws this into greater relief. It is my ethical duty to function through it. 

    Things will return to normal for most of us (more or less). We have invested in a broad net of relationships and solitary pursuits that will go back to delighting and challenging us, and the machines of normal life will come back on in our worlds, both figuratively and literally. But this is a bell that can’t be unrung, and I hope it brings some clarity to what our duties are to our own children and those who we may or may not bring into the world in the future. 

    The Pandemic’s Last Effects: No More Pressure to Parent

    There are a few lessons and shifts in perspective I hope become lasting effects in the wake of this pandemic. First, society needs to stop making motherhood normative. We are all programmed by our evolutionary pasts to maximize our genetic survival and to reproduce as part of that, so we will have to intentionally think our way into what is best for each of us and override the default genetic programming. None of us has a duty to reproduce. Neither the evolutionary nagging, nor the more literal nagging some of us receive from those in our lives, nor the nebulous societal status markers that come with parenthood should carry weight. We can all be freed from that kind of pressure.

    We Should Ask: Is This What I Want?

    That leaves us each with a choice and a question to ask ourselves: Is this what I want? We need to recognize the tradeoff in choosing to have children, and especially to have multiple children, and the shift that comes with that. Identity becomes focused on one’s role in a broader system of relationships and responsibilities, including the parent-child, nuclear, and extended families and their communities. For some of us, thinking about shifting from an individually grounded life to one in which one’s own needs become subservient to the group is terrifying. For some, it sounds like the fulfillment of a dream. It’s those personality differences and preferences among us that should guide us in making these choices and in taking on our future pursuits with competency and clarity.

    We need to let go of the idea that one of these choices is somehow better or more noble than the other, or that anyone has the moral right to make that choice for anyone else. Making decisions from this point of view will likely mean fewer people will choose to have children (or to have multiple children), and those who do have them will be the people who are the most suited to do the task well and to be well-prepared. 

    For those of us who do decide to have children, and for the children themselves, we need to stop outsourcing our responsibilities to institutions that primarily function to separate children from the daily lives of adults. Certainly education, recreation, friendships, and broader communities are vitally important, and the quality of parenting and thinking about how we can do right by children and parents is not about the quantity of time spent together. It’s a reckoning with the fundamental vulnerability of children and, by extension, their parents who are engaged in the pursuit of raising them. As parents, we are reliant on things going right that are almost entirely out of our control, and yet, those are the most important things in our lives. This lasts for decades, until our children can fledge and our vigilance can lessen, although it will not go away completely.

    Legitimizing the Choices of Nonparents

    For nonparents, we need to recognize the legitimacy of their choice and the opportunities that nonparents have, both to be individuals in pursuit of their happiness, goals, and meaning, and to be interconnected on their own terms. This includes playing those community roles that benefit all of us. With this fuller understanding, all members of society including nonparents could be creating an environment that is supportive of kids and parents, particularly in understanding the vulnerability and lack of control both kids and parents have. This reasoning leads to supporting policy frameworks that give children and families the greatest access to resources for holistic well-being and growth, including physical safety, relational connectedness, intellectual independence, and self-efficacy. At the same time, we need to remove policy defaults that incentivize having children and we need to provide routes for meaning and prosperity to nonparents.

    In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull,” with the idea that one can find some solace in the privacy and the freedom of the internal life, no matter how authoritarian the external world becomes. This is not on offer once we become mothers. Leaving aside the literal changes and growth in the brain, which is a fascinating discussion on its own, a mother’s internal life always has multiple voices. Who we are has become inextricable from what we do, from the family system itself. This shift can manifest as a quiet din sometimes, or it can be very loud and very literal; it can be rich with novelty, awe, and emotional complexity, and it can enhance personal growth and self-awareness. We can pursue and achieve while our life is made better by having our children. But we must accept some truths, and sometimes in our lives those truths are visible and sitting in our living rooms, if we just take the time to look behind the artifice.

  • Michael Moore and the Return of the Population Question

    Michael Moore and the Return of the Population Question

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    Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore are being heavily criticized for their new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” putting a focus on restraining population growth as the solution for many environmental crises. The criticism centers on a few themes: The focus on population distracts from more immediate solutions, such as radically reforming our energy policies and markets. That given steadily falling fertility rates, population growth has been sufficiently addressed. And most pointedly, that raising population growth as a problem in need of a policy solution invites draconian population control measures that will violate human rights.

    Gibbs and Moore could respond to the criticism directly: Reducing family size by one child is the most effective way individuals can reduce greenhouse gas emissions — twenty 20 times more effective than other changes, to one’s diet or transportation, for example. How could this key factor be a distraction?

    Also, arguing that the world has solved the population problem implies some general agreement on an optimal world population, baselines for environmental protection, levels of biodiversity, etc. In reality, despite a projected world population growth of billions in the next few decades, many are pushing to increase fertility rates and raise the population curve through cash payments, limits on abortions, and pronatal media rather than flatten. Why?

    Population growth often means (albeit unsustainable) economic growth. One’s view of an optimal world population depends on one’s values, and amid the debate, there are wildly different ideals. Even simply focusing on survivability draws huge variances. Whether we have dealt with the population problem by flattening the growth curve in the past century or so is not the question. The question is whether we have flattened it enough or whether we will actually choose to reverse course. 

    Finally, Gibbs and Moore have a ready response to the allegation that they invite violations of human rights: The most searching examinations of the right to have children have found the right is really the right to reproduce one’s self, rather than the right to a large family. The right to have kids, like the right to speak freely but not yell “Fire!” in a theater, is limited by others’ rights, including the right of our children to a safe, healthy, and biodiverse environment.

    A Better Way to Solve the Population Debate

    But is there a better way to resolve the debate? Population growth is preceded by the act of having kids, and perhaps we can find more common ground regarding the optimality of that.

    Four value propositions lay a pathway forward:

    • First, there seems to be common agreement that all children deserve some minimal level of welfare at birth, or the things we aspire to provide all children in the Children’s Rights Convention.

    • Second, while economic equality is controversial, ensuring everyone equal opportunities in life is not, though the process for doing so remains elusive. What if we focused the process on family planning and leveling the playing field by training the redistribution of resources around the start and first stages of every life?

    • Third, if we assume economies are preceded and limited by the rule of law and democracies that enable them, we can assume that family planning policies should be geared around producing citizens rather than consumers and workers. Developing future generations for democratic town halls looks very different from developing them to fill massive shopping malls, with the former calling for smaller families to create a future in which every voice could be heard and more investment in the education of each child to make their voices transcendent. 

    • Finally, given the damaging impact of the anthropocene on everything from pregnancy to the threat of pandemics to wildlife extinction, the safest baseline for environmental protection — consistent with the precautionary principle — is a restorative baseline that values nature as biodiverse nonhuman habitat rather than a human resource. Valuing nature as nonhuman space is more about ensuring our species the nonhuman nature we physically crave and need than an abstract debate about optimal populations and the mathematics of utility far removed from the lived human experience.

    And the pathway toward the highest standard of environmental protection starts with better family planning. 

    All Policy Roads Lead to Family Planning

    Combined, these value propositions promote a universal policy of smaller families achieved through incentives, delayed parenthood, and the equitable redistribution of resources to ensure every child a fair start in life. Regardless, given the volatility of future world population growth and all that risk entails, it’s simply not acceptable for anyone talking about the environment to not have a plan for family planning reform. Contrary to what some think, all polices involve people and hence family planning (or a lack thereof).

    If we want to target consumption, we have to stop producing consumers and start producing free citizens, or what John Rawls called free and equal people, to comprise actual democracies. That may first entail changing the fundamental framework we use to assess these issues, including the concept of population. “Population” refers to people, and if we unpack the concept, we find something more qualitative than quantitative, dynamic than static, endogenous than exogenous, normative than descriptive, and multifaceted rather than one-sided and numeric.

    The Guardian’s George Monbiot could reframe his thinking on this issue and further environmental values we all share much more effectively. Here are five questions that might help Monbiot and the rest of us start this process and move from a traditional family planning system focused on parents to one focused on future children. 

    Regardless of whether Gibbs and Moore confront their accusers directly or choose to open a new dialogue, they have helped to bring back the population question at a time when environmental catastrophes, constant social distancing, a growing pyramid of inequality, and threats to our children’s future seem draped before us.

    Let’s hope we can answer the question correctly.

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  • Connect the Dots Colorado workshop: The Most Effective Way to Help People, Animals, and the Environment

    Better family planning ranks as the most effective way to mitigate the climate and other environmental crises, protect children, and reduce inequity. It is also one of the most effective ways to protect animals, getting to the fundamental source of problems like factory farming and the disappearance of wildlife.

    From 12-1:30 Mountain Time on Thursday May 14th, 2020 there will be a virtual meeting and discussion of draft legislation that would implement Fair Start family planning in Colorado, as part of the Having Kids Connect the Dots Colorado campaign. This work builds on the theoretical discussion/planning from our 2019 George Washington University forum, https://fairstartmovement.org/forum/, and seeks to crystallize a truly human rights-based approach to family planning in Colorado.

    We believe that as tragic as COVID-19 has been, the pandemic also provides a unique opportunity to bring about changes in Colorado that could help mitigate future crises. We know that overcrowding, economic inequality, and consumption of wildlife are each drivers of epidemics, but we also know that none of these drivers can be addressed in isolation. Therefore, we need your help in connecting the dots between access to contraception, economic equity, and environmental protection as we seek to draft a comprehensive Fair Start bill for Colorado.

    A Little More about Our Model:

    Having Kids advocates for a Fair Start model that encourages parents to have smaller families and to delay having kids until they are ready. It also works to ensure that communities and governments provide the resources necessary to guarantee that all kids have a fair start in life.

    The model begins upstream to solve many of the problems that threaten our planet and future generations. Choosing smaller families is 20 times more effective at reducing climate change than adjusting dietary or transportation habits alone. The Fair Start model also helps to reduce the negative impacts on animals that come from factory farming and the degradation of animal habitats related to overcrowding.

    Advancing the Model by Promoting Economic Equity:

    Having Kids commends and supports Senator Booker’s proposal to guarantee a sustainable child income through baby bonds.  We believe that Colorado could continue this momentum by adopting a similar proposal. Given that the current pandemic has exacerbated inequality, as well as the numerous economic, health, and social benefits of waiting to have kids, we propose structuring the bonds in a way that incentivizes delaying pregnancy until at least age 25. Please see our model policy for the District of Columbia and the attached draft law review article as a guide.

    Advancing the Model by Recognizing a Right to Nature:

    One of our goals is to guarantee that every child has the right to enjoy nature. To this end, we propose amending the Colorado constitution to recognize a right to nature. This concept may sound radical, but twenty one states already recognize a constitutional right to hunt and fish.  We believe that if these states can protect an individual’s right to exploit nature, Colorado can perfect the right to enjoy nature. Several countries, including Sweden and Norway, recognize a right to “outdoor access” and can help guide a pathway forward for Colorado.

    Other Questions?

    If you have any questions or recommendations, please do not hesitate to reach out to Nicole King, a DU Law student who is helping to coordinate this event and to draft any proposed legislation. Nicole has a MA in Global Health affairs and previously worked for Colorado’s Title X family planning program, so she is excited to dive in. Please feel free to contact her at nking@crownlinellc.com or 908-420-7467. 

  • If There Is a Magic Pill for Today’s Crises, It’s New Male Contraception. Take Action.

    If There Is a Magic Pill for Today’s Crises, It’s New Male Contraception. Take Action.

    Having Kids is a nonprofit organization dedicated to replacing current subjective and parent-focused family planning models with the objective, human rights-based and child-focused Fair Start model​. Sensible family planning is among the best ways to promote quality of life for present and future generations, protect the environment, and reduce overcrowding as a hedge against coming pandemics. We are encouraging Congress and the key federal agency to act.

    We are writing the two key members of the House and Senate, as well as the head of the National Institutes of Health, to make this happen.

    Take Action: Add Your Name Here.

    Given the current pressures the COVID-19 virus pandemic is placing upon our environment, our institutions, and on families everywhere, particularly the most marginalized among us, and given the previously unsustainable pressures these systems and groups were already facing, we are urging Congress and the urge the Subcommittee on Health to prioritize, reallocate, and increase funding towards more sensible family planning tools like long-acting reversible contraceptives (“LARCs”) for men, as well as use its power to facilitate expedited clinical trials of these products. As no such widespread male contraception is currently available for couples, this product represents an opportunity for a remarkable return on investment in the form of more equitably sized family units and all the benefits that flow from them.  

    There are multiple reasons to pursue this strategy:

    • US Environmental Policy Requires Sensible Family Planning: The grandfather of US environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) declared that the US government has a “continuing responsibility” to act as trustee over the environment for future generations and it outlines a federal environmental policy to “use all practicable means and measures… to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony…” To that end, it requires government bodies to take a hard look at “population growth” and its effects on environmental health. Facilitating the production of LARCs is consistent with this policy.
    • Current Population Trends Require Male Contraception: The world’s current population is increasing at the rate of 80 million persons a year and global population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Choosing smaller families is the most effective way to reduce human impact on the planet and animals. For example, having one less child is nearly 20 times more significant than the adoption of other environmental practices, like driving a hybrid or changing one’s diet.  Accordingly, the long term environmental benefits achieved by even only a few couples employing LARCs can be enormous. 
    • Institutions Implicitly Recognize The Need To Manage Family Sizes and Population: The ​CDC acknowledges​ that “unintended pregnancy carries significant health and economic consequences and disproportionately affects poor women and women of color.” Moreover, the WHO has recognized that ​overcrowding exacerbates epidemics​ and is perhaps the most ​fundamental threat to public health​. Human overpopulation is a ​key factor in the spread of a variety of diseases​, and this now ​includes novel coronavirus​. The WHO has further stated that supporting family planning services is a “life-saving” strategy that policymakers should undertake during the current crisis.  LARCs help manage these risks.  
    • Gender Equality Requires More Focus On Male Contraception: To date, unfounded ideology has been the primary inhibition to male contraception. In the few instances when pharmaceutical companies have tried to create products for men similar to “the pill,” progress has often been halted by side effects that women have experienced for decades, such as depression, acne, increased libido, and shrinking testicles or ovaries. Society apparently will not tolerate these effects in men, but for women they are expected. Moreover, rather than create reliable hormone-driven male contraceptives akin to what’s available to women, the market seemingly focuses on the opposite – pouring its resources into products such as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra. It is Congress’s duty to help correct these market imbalances by facilitating the production of LARCs, not only because it makes pragmatic sense given the environmental and quality of life costs, but also for gender equality. 

    Having Kids previously raised these concerns to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Spring 2019, when it requested additional funding for LARCs.  Since that letter there has been no meaningful movement despite the fact that the need for such family planning tools has only been exacerbated over that time. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is but a symptom of the fact that we have too many unmanaged families living in too close proximity to one another.  

    For these reasons, we are encouraging Congress and the NIH to prioritize funding for research and development of male LARCs to offset the market’s failure to produce these drugs, as well as to expedite their clinical trials.  For example, NIH currently only spends $20 to $24 million on contraceptive research, which is a pittance compared to its current $41.7 billion annual budget for medical research. ​Taking action to create widely available and easily accessible male LARCs would ensure a higher quality of life for future families, it would protect the environment, and it would safeguard future generations from overcrowding, thus substantially reducing the threat, transmission and impact of pandemics like COVID-19. 

  • Earth Day: Covid-19 Is Showing Us the Fundamental Taboo We Need to Break

    Earth Day: Covid-19 Is Showing Us the Fundamental Taboo We Need to Break

    I love and want to protect my child, so I don’t want her to have to live in a crowded and polluted future filled with billions more people, many of whom never got what they needed to really grow up and work well with others. When can I say that out loud? 

    As a mother of one child, I think about the future a lot. What will her environment be like? What will the people with whom she shares the world be like? Will she be safe?  Our society isn’t equipped to provide each child a fair start from the very first days of life, and we know that whether a child gets the education love, care, and attention he or she needs in the first three years of life can determine how they interact with others for the rest of their lives. 

    And the truth is, her future most depends on one factor, more than any other: family planning.     A family choosing today to have one additional child can exacerbate the climate crisis by 20 times that of other choices, such as those around diet or transportation. Beyond that, overpopulation is one of the key drivers of pandemics. 
    Several studies show that small changes in average fertility rates will have massive impacts on population growth and that smaller families are the best way to confront climate change and other related environmental crises. By 2100, world population could vary by billions of people depending on whether the average woman in the world has one child more or fewer in the near future.  Nothing will matter as much for my kid’s future as the people with whom he will share this world. Who we are matters most of all. 

    Yes, immediate threats are distracting, but success comes in focusing on what’s important and what’s urgent and from being more proactive than reactive. I can try everything possible  within the bubble of our family to ready my child – and all those efforts will go to waste, depending upon what other parents do.  Yet I have to write this post under the pen-name Kelly, because calling for family planning laws that ensure parents are ready before they have kids geared toward alleviating the societal ills bred by income inequality or that support smaller and more sustainable families, is taboo. I actually fear I would be condemned by friends and family, and that my business would be threatened. This is the taboo we need to break.

    My child deserves a better future than the one she is on track to get, and the way to break off that track starts with a family planning system whereby we take the resources from the rich to level the playing field for the children of the poor, incentivizing smaller and sustainable families for everyone along the way. That is truly fundamental change. 
  • Earth Day: 7 Effective Moves to Restore Nature

    Earth Day: 7 Effective Moves to Restore Nature

    Forget all the feel good advertising for “green” products. Want to actually be effective in protecting the environment? Promote: Promote: 1) smaller, more sustainable families, 2) communities and parents working together to ensure that all kids have a fair start in life – including a habitable planet. Now that’s being effective.

    Here are 7 next steps:

    1. Tell Congress to include Fair Start family planning in the Green New Deal.
    2. Overcrowding set the stage for Covid-19, and the next pandemic. Urge the WHO to promote a family planning policy that actually mitigates the threat.
    3. Celebrities influence how we plan families. Urge them to lead by example and to choose smaller families.
    4. Our governments are so eager to grow populations of consumers, workers, and taxpayers, they are actually flooding failing child welfare systems with more and more kids. Urge them to change course.
    5. Shouldn’t the United Nations be promoting child welfare, equity, democracy, and the restoration of nature, rather than using babies to create economic growth. Tell UN Secretary General Guterres to change course, and to flatten this curve.
    6. The wealthiest corporations and families in the world have no claim to their astronomical wealth against the right of every child to a Fair Start in life. Find and peacefully / legally engage the people at the top of the population pyramid to fund Fair Start family planning. We have a right to those resources.
    7. Protecting the environment starts with recognizing the human right to nature. Support another nonprofit? Urge them to recognize the right, and contact us at info@fairstartmovement.org submit amicus briefs in the recent federal litigation in the United States seeking to enshrine the right.
  • Coronavirus: Overcrowding is making it worse. We can fix that.

    Coronavirus: Overcrowding is making it worse. We can fix that.

    Today, Having Kids petitioned the World Health Organization to address the fundamental driver of the coronavirus and many other public health threats: overcrowding driven by poor family planning.

    Read the letter here.

    As the WHO has recognized, overcrowding exacerbates epidemics and is perhaps the most fundamental threat to public health. Overpopulation is a key factor in the spread of a variety of diseases including coronavirus, yet this driver is often ignored in policymaking. 

    The facts are clear: 

    Hence, we are obligated to all advocate for better family planning modeling. 

    Take action: Urge the WHO to address the fundamental driver by contacting them here: https://www.who.int/foodsafety/contact/en/

  • Beyond the Environment as Resource

    Beyond the Environment as Resource

    The Washington Post is right to shine a light on the connection between hunting and our environment, a connection that is breaking down as Americans lose interest in hunting. With the decline in hunting comes a decrease in conservation funding from hunting licenses, firearms permits, and more, with wildlife and environmental agencies suffering the consequences.

    This trend screams for a paradigm change in the way humans think about — and make efforts to care for — the environment. We must establish a new paradigm for future generations of valuing nonhumans for more than their ability to kill them.

    Prevailing Attitudes Toward the Environment


    The old paradigm is centered on the idea that the “environment is just a human resource.” This thinking treats the environment as part of a world economy and considers it valuable only if people assign value to it, like any other commodity we buy and sell. This myopic, anthropocentric thinking helped create the climate crisis and the other ecological crises that now threaten our children and future generations.

    Codifying the Human Right to Nature

    What does the shift from this old way look like? It looks like recognizing our fundamental human right to nature. This right rises above and cabins the subjectivity of markets and human shortsightedness. It looks like institutionalizing that right in law.

    That paradigm shift is now before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a suit challenging the government’s total abdication of its most basic duties by failing to mitigate, and in many cases by exacerbating, the climate crisis. We have a right to nature — and seeing it is the paradigm shift toward having a truly symbiotic, nonviolent relationship with the ecology that keeps us alive.