Author: Fair Start Movement

The concept of child sponsorship is nothing new. We’ve all seen ads about helping a child for some small amount of money per month. But still, childhood poverty persists, and inequality in America is actually getting worse. 

Recently we saw one such ad from the christian charity organization World Vision whose “Chosen” initiative flips the script by having children choose their sponsor.

What if a system like this could be the first choice for parents looking to grow their families? What if instead of having a third, fourth, or fifth biological child, parents chose to keep their families small and direct the resources a new child would need to a child in the world today who chooses sponsorship?

A plan like this would this lead to declines in the devastating impacts of childhood inequality. Plus, smaller families are the most effective way to mitigate the global threat of climate change, so the whole world would benefit. 

TAKE ACTION: Ask the United Nations to lead by example and recommend smaller families. 

Today Having Kids announced a campaign to prioritize the male pill. It’s time to expedite the approval and mass marketing of the male pill and other long-acting reversible male contraceptives. Why is there no male pill on the market today? 

It seems regulators forgot to consider the environmental impacts of blocking approval. According to extensive research by Having Kids, there is no evidence that federal regulators ever considered impacts of their inaction on world ecosystems, or the way that failure exacerbates climate change, and a host of other man-made environmental crises, like ocean acidification and mass extinction. Instead, regulators stopped prior approval protocols for reasons that have a lot to do with gender bias, and at the same time federal policy was openly encouraging  population growth and limiting access contraception and abortions, as a cheap way to grow the economy. That policy has only gotten worse. 

“Our federal government ignored the environmental impact of its decision to approve things like Viagra, but not the male pill,” according to Erika Mathews, Executive Director of Having Kids. “It did so while employing sexist rationales about unacceptable side effects women experience all the time, and in the face of other policies that push women to produce cheap labor and voracious consumers to inflate the economy.”

Having Kids’ campaign will lobby Congress and regulators for a massive increase in funding and prioritization of approval as a matter of national security, given the impact approval would have on the social and ecological environment. 

• Experts are calling for a “contraception revolution,” in light of projected growth and a population-fueled climate crisis: 
• Current efforts in regions with the highest projected growth are failing, which portends disaster.
• Access to contraception is not enough without a change in norms, or the models that underlie the way we plan families. 

According to Erika, “If our government had done the assessment correctly we would have had the male pill and other forms of male contraceptives years ago. Instead they made the situation worse.” Let’s start prioritizing the male pill.

Humans are still evolving. But our family planning models are stuck in the past, and do not factor in things like the impact on our ecology, sustainability, inequality, or human rights and democracy. The models were designed decades ago by men who thought domination of the natural world, and of vulnerable entities, was the destiny of our species. They were wrong, and we are all paying the ecological and social costs of their mistakes today. We can do better.

What is Fair Start family planning? 

Communities ensure that parents have the resources to plan families and guarantee that all kids have the resources they need for a fair start in life.

Each of us delays having kids until we are ready to be good parents, and have small and sustainable families that put less demand on our shared resources and our world.

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 unearned privileges, and undemocratic influence, over giving kids a fair start in life.

What the Fair Start Model Does

The Fair Start model addresses the biggest problems affecting kids such as poverty, inequality, and neglect. The model breaks down the barrier between family planning and child welfare, aligning need with resource. The model links 1) where and when children enter the world, with 2) the provision of what those kids need for a fair start in life. In making that link the model has the greatest impact on child welfare, equality, animals and the environment – exponentially more impact than downstream approaches. In so doing the model corrects for cognitive dissonances that prevent us from seeing that how we plan families, more than any other one thing, determines the quality of life on Earth. By focusing our attention on future children the model temporalizes our thinking, allows us to plan ahead, requires us to cooperate, and thereby helps ensure the best outcomes. What’s a good analogy? In many ways our remodeling of family planning looks like the revision of the norms, in the late 20th Century, around using seat belts. Small improvements can lead to massive benefits.

Fair Start family planning is the most effective way to simultaneously:

protect children, promote equality and democracy, and preserve

a healthy planet.

The proven impacts are 10 to 20 times higher than traditional downstream attempts to protect kids, animals, and the environment.

Building Freedom Through Human Rights-Based Family Planning 

The model shifts the focus of family planning from a narrow focus on just the parents to a broader one that includes the interests of the future child, the parents, and the community. This embodies the inclusivity of human rights and democracy. The model moves us away from a sense of parenting as an isolated activity to a proactive and cooperative system that expands our capacity for care-giving beyond our own bloodline. The model is all about making family planning a community effort that is deliberately inclusive – deliberately including future children into the community, oriented around the shared ideal of equality. Families having kids in isolation from the community ensures that inequality, as well as social and ecological degradation, continues. That way of planning our families has undone much of the progress the child welfare, environmental/animal, and human rights and democracy movements tried to make in the past few decades – just look at the numbers.

But by working together as parents and communities, we can build resilient, cooperative, and conscientious populations, that are approaching the United Nations low variant projections, and that can thrive in challenging future environments. That’s the Fair Start model. Fundamental change means changing who we are, and will be, through better family planning. Nothing else comes close. 

Because of its fundamental nature the Fair Start model creates true freedom: The freedom that comes with being given real opportunities in life, the freedom of living in functional communities where you can have confidence in the people around you, the freedom of smaller and autonomous democracies where you have a role in creating the rules under which you live, the freedom of nature, and the safe and healthy environment that comes with it. This all begins with children’s right to a fair start in life. It is the lexically primary human right, the right that most makes us who we are, and it overrides all conflicting interests. Fair Start family planning moves the world from demographic and economic transition to a human rights-based, qualitative, equitable and democratic transition.

The relatively few people in the world who have power, both in business and government, push against this freedom because their power lies in exploiting the large and vulnerable populations poor family planning creates. If you value child welfare, equality, nature, or democracy – and the freedom they represent – you will push back.

Its time to truly empower people – right from the start. Read here for more detail.