Fair Start Movement

Category: Calls to Action & Petitions

A True Independence Day? Watch Fair Start in Action

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.

Ivanka Trump – daughter of Donald Trump. Contact her and her followers here.

Hunter Biden – son of Joe Biden. Contact him here. Contact him via his spouse, here.

Mr. Pedro G. de Oliveira Guterres – son of United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Contact him here.

John T. Raymond – son of oil magnate Lee Raymond. Contact him here.

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.

Join us in urging them to do so.

July 6, 2021
Growth Economics Created the Climate Crisis. Why Are Politicians and Media Pushing Women to Have Kids? Ask NYT’s Editor

Fact: Falling fertility rates and eventual population decline will have the most beneficial long-run impact on the climate and other ecological crises. And yet influential media like the New York Times, and politicians pushed by businesses that rely on unsustainable growth, continue to urge women to have more kids. That is what even progressive Joe Biden is trying to do with his Ivanka Trump-inspired increased child tax credits.

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?

Between the time those interventions were begun and today, neoliberalism and unsustainable growth-based economics that externalizes costs – like the climate crisis and birth inequity, has become the zeitgeist. The Times itself wrote about the same. But fanciful ideologies aside, growth remains unsustainable. The more interesting question is how the arc of population growth became so high to initiate the climate crisis, and who among those who have benefitted from that mistake will pay to compensate the future generations who certainly will be harmed – through no fault of their own.

Justice begins with an ecosocial #FairStart in life.

TAKE ACTION: Engage and urge the Times editor and his family to address the #FairStart question, and how we will redistribute power – including influential media platforms – to compensate future generations.

June 1, 2021
The New York Times Pushes Women to Have Kids. Take Action.

Every crisis we face, from the climate to Covid-19, is a function of family planning laws and policies that actually do nothing to ensure planning. They do nothing to give children minimum levels of welfare, or birth equity, and nothing to promote sustainable environments, or functional democracies where each voice matters. All of these problems, social and ecological, root in the people that comprise them.

The reasonable reaction to this situation would be to reform these systems to address the problems, especially given the massive impact changes in family planning systems make on things like climate emissions. Any discussion of family planning is an opportunity to do so. So why is the New York Times publishing empty pieces that celebrate thoughtlessly having children and simply hoping for the best? The most recent piece does nothing to address whether a more collective model of planning could mitigate the crises, sets up a false dichotomy of anti/pro-natalism, and spends the rest of the piece dressing the former up as nihilistic and the latter as a glorious leap of faith that even Kant would endorse. The author manages to ignore that if we followed Kant, we would in fact find a universal norm for family planning that did not simply exacerbate the problems and injustice we see today but address them as a collective action problem, a norm like Fair Start.

The New York Times can do better than push people to have kids with babies = hope messaging. It can address the problem one Nobel Laureate laid bare: Those in power like Times editor Dean Baquet sit atop a population pyramid, the growth of which they are incentivized to promote as a means of expanding their wealth and influence. Baquet and the Times benefit from the growth, but don’t pay its costs. The costs of that expansion, including the inequity that floats Baquet and his son Ari above the masses, are leveled on others, especially on future generations who will suffer in the climate crisis. Family planning is the first border of justice – address that issue, Dean and Ari, and let People Magazine publish thoughtless pieces on hopeful baby making as a solution to the crises causes by the same.

Take Action: Urge @deanbaquet, or his son Ari, to explain how they intend to promote the reform family planning laws and policies to address the crises we see today, and account for the social and ecological benefits they enjoy, but others will not.

April 13, 2021
Power Grid Failures Show Threats of Population Growth: Take Action

The recent climate-driven grid failures in Texas highlight a key threat to our children’s future: Systems upon which more and more people are dependent, and which themselves are threatened by that very growth. Nothing exacerbates these “loop” problems, like the ecologies upon which we are dependent and which the climate crisis threatens, more than poor and unsustainable family planning.

Not everyone is at the same level of risk in these situations. The wealthy people and their families who have benefitted from population growth, like Ted Cruz and his kids (who vacationed in Mexico while poor children in Texas died), find ways to avoid the risk.

How do we solve this problem? While big government and big business want unsustainable population growth to continue, and who together created the unsustainable family planning systems that create growth by exploiting future generations, human rights point in a different direction.

If we are willing to plan responsibly, we have the right to take the resources necessary from the top – and people like Cruz – in order to ensure all children a Fair Start in life. Why? Because having kids is the first and overriding human right. It comes before the exploitative systems that government and corporations conspired to create.

Contact Ted Cruz and urge him to support Fair Star reforms that will protect Texans in the long run, and to ensure justice for all.

March 18, 2021
In a Country Divided, Can Our Children Unite Us? Take Action.

Whatever rhetoric comes from President-elect Joe Biden, the country remains more divided because of the election, with studies showing a growing divide and distrust between red and blue communities and increasing openness to violence on both sides. The impact of the second wave of Covid-19 on businesses, the continued killing of black men and women by police, and a former president soon unhindered by office, will not help.

Biden is pursuing a business-as-usual approach to funding childcare that makes the situation worse long-term. This policy does not address the root of the problem: family planning. It does not ensure a minimum threshold under which children should not be born, does not address the way unsustainable family size drives the climate and other crises, and does not create inclusive communities.

Why are your tax dollars being paid out without these safeguards?

It’s a cliché to say that children, who are the future, can unite us. But novel policies that could change the way we plan for, have, and raise kids make the possibility of coming together real and meaningful beyond empty clichés. Those policies begin by our realizing that being truly inclusive starts by deliberately including children in communities through more cooperative family planning systems that eliminate marginalization, and focus as a priority on giving every child a fair start in life.

Those policies would also have to promote smaller families that create more democratic communities where everyone’s voice matters. This would be a stark reversal of our current family tax policies that promote quantity over quality, ignore fair starts in life, and promote the antithesis of inclusivity.

The best part? Such #fairstart policies should appeal to both liberals and conservatives, because they promote the traditionally liberal value of equity while also promoting the traditionally conservative value of autonomy by investing more in kids in ways that make them self-sufficient and capable citizens. Together, these values create a vision of free and equal people engaged in the self-rule the founders of the nation envisioned, or the ideal of town halls, rather than a vision of economic growth that through overcrowding and lack of a common core excludes people from public institutions.

Moreover, new family planning policies like these would have a massive impact on the climate crisis that threatens all of us, with an exponentially greater impact than many downstream alternatives. Family planning reform is the only truly fundamental type of reform, and given the climate crisis, fundamental reform is what we need.

Children can unite us, but to make that statement mean something, we have to start at the beginning, with the way we plan families. We have to start with a vision of a future of smaller, sustainable, and truly democratic communities where we invest more in kids and where all have a meaningful voice.

Take Action: Urge Kamala Harris to use her position to educate Biden and to promote child-centric Fair Start family planning reforms. Copy and paste this message in your communications with her.

January 15, 2021
You and Your Kids Have a Right To Nature. Take Action.

While many nations’ constitutions are clear in protecting the property rights of the wealthy, they are less clear in protecting the nature we and future generations need to thrive. That’s a mistake.

Given that humans need nature to survive, we have a right to nature’s restoration and protection. A lawsuit in the United States is making that case, and will be heard in 2021.

A recent Ecowatch piece covered the appeal, and why no political system that fails to protect a right to nature is legitimate.

Here is an excerpt:

“The world made [a] baseline mistake in developing environmental policy decades ago, choosing to treat nature as a resource for humans. The baseline was too low and allowed policies that fell short; indeed, it is one of the reasons our planet continues to superheat. We are making that same mistake now with regard to COVID-19, by financially stimulating factory farming and other forms of ecocide that degrade the buffer (or social distancing) between people that our pre-Anthropocene environment offered. Degrading that “natural buffer” exacerbates the risk of pandemics and determines how we can react to them. As the New Republic reported, the next pandemic could be hiding in the Arctic permafrost.

Solving the baseline problem will allow us to trace these calamities — like the unfolding death of the Great Barrier Reef — and help us back to an ultimate source, and, perhaps, to a solution. We can no longer use a baseline for environmental policy that treats nature or the nonhuman world as a human resource. This is the baseline most environmentalists use, and the one that created the Anthropocene era in which we find the world today. A much higher baseline would view nature as something that ought to be a nonhuman habitat or the homes of sentient species who have a right to survive and thrive. This would be a restorative baseline, and the one more consistent with animal liberation. Such a baseline would be most protective against things like climate change and the pandemics it drives. A policy based on this baseline would revolve around ensuring our children have the only environment proven — over millennia‚ that allows humans and all species to thrive. It would seek to eliminate the way the absence of nature in our lives is degrading our psyches.”

Take action: Urge Congress to get ahead of courts and recognize our fundamental right to nature.

January 10, 2021
What Makes Pandemics Worse? Population Growth. Take Action.
Humans are shortsighted by nature. We experience something like the climate crisis or Covid-19, and our usual reaction is to look for an immediate solution like emissions technology or a vaccine. But sometimes solving problems – especially global and interconnected ones – takes stepping back and seeing the larger picture.

Decades ago world leaders were faced with a choice: Respond to explosive population growth by promoting smaller families and greater investments in child development universally, or take a relatively hands off approach, and hope that falling fertility trends would continue. Most countries chose the latter, which allowed them to grow and to exploit rather than invest in future generations.

This choice has resulted in a world population that is still skyrocketing towards potentially eleven billion people by 2100. The hands off approach has done little to alleviate poverty and inequity, and has become the fundamental driver behind the climate crisis and every other anthropogenic impact. What’s worse? The hands off approach – pushed by men who controlled their households – did not comply with human rights requirements, which require balancing parents’ right to have kids with an obligation to provide the things all future children need. The human-rights approach to planning families requires that we collectively plan in ways that give all kids a socially and ecologically fair start in life.

The exploit-rather-than invest approach set the stage for the risk and impact of Covid-19, and is setting the stage for the next pandemic, which could be larger in scale. How?
1. Overcrowding, or the quantity of people around us, helps pandemics like Covid 19 spread. Worldwide, public health officials are admitting that the failure to contain the pandemic is largely a function of the quantity and civic qualities of the people crowding the planet, which are factors that depend on our family planning policies. India is exemplifying this. Key UN agencies were urged to change modeling well before the pandemic, but did nothing.
2. Civic qualities that are largely contingent on the conditions of our birth and early development, like our overall health and risk of comorbidities, as well as empathy deficits which are reflected in the refusal of many to engage in easy and life-saving public health measures like practicing social distancing and wearing masks, substantially contribute to the impact of pandemics like Covid-19.
3. The economic disparities we inherit at birth lead to massive disparities in how pandemics impact different communities, and hence determine the average impact of things like Covid-19.
4. Our growing population is degrading our natural ecologies, which sets the stage for future and worse pandemics.
5. The distribution and efficacy of vaccines is being stymied by population size, the refusal of many to participate, and underlying health conditions that can be traced to family planning systems.
What does all of this mean?

Part of the response to Covid-19 has to be reforming family planning policies to fulfill human rights obligations, and give every child a Fair Start in life. Given that Fair Start family planning is the first and overriding human right and obligation, we may fulfill it by taking resources from both public and private concentrations of wealth and power, and using them to incentivize better and more cooperative family planning, or smaller families working together to invest more time, love, and resources in every child.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the Biden administration to reform family planning policies, and do what has the greatest impact on the climate, Covid-19, vast inequity, and other crises we face.
December 30, 2020
Kate Middleton Speaks for Children’s Rights to Equal Starts in Life

Kate Middleton is speaking out, urging the world to recognize that all children deserve an equal start in life. Unveiling the results of a U.K. survey on attitudes about children’s early years, she said work on the importance of early childhood should be regarded equally alongside the other most crucial social issues of our era. She argues that the early childhood years are key to shaping the rest of each child’s lives and our broader societal outcomes.

The work she advocates is a far cry from the outdated standard still used by the United Nations, the United States, and many other countries that ignore child welfare in favor of focusing on parental autonomy (and in so many cases, exclusively male autonomy). Given that children have the most at stake, shouldn’t our family planning systems be based on their needs? Other mothers are speaking out, too. See a recent video of one mom’s plea here.

This move makes Kate a leader on the issue of family planning reform. The bold statement brings her into closer alignment with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who also recently spoke out.

The move, prompted in part by Kate’s “early years” work, could not come soon enough. Children in Britain and around the world are sinking deeper into an abyss of pandemic, poverty, and ecological crisis. Kate’s move is also step toward Having Kids‘ mission of promoting every child’s right to a Fair Start in life as the dominant human right, overriding anything with which it would conflict.

Kate’s Truth

We cannot help kids without changing the conditions into which they are born. That means we must change the policies that control way we all plan for and raise kids. Kate knows this hard truth and is not afraid to speak out. Kudos to her. It’s time for the United Nations to make the same move and to start urging member nations to come into compliance with human rights requirements. This summer for World Population Day, Having Kids will bring to the United Nations secretary general the demands of a growing coalition of organizations.

TAKE ACTION:

If you support any organization that claims to help children, animals, the environment, and/or human rights and democracy, reason with them as to why their mission is impossible without embracing family planning reform, and strongly urge them to join our coalition by contacting us at Carter@HavingKids.org.

Learn more about the transition from parent-focused to child-focused Fair Start family planning policies at HavingKids.org.

December 28, 2020
Urge Time Magazine to See Falling Fertility As An Opportunity, Not A Crisis

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.

Falling fertility rates are part of the overall trend towards population stabilization and gender equity, some of the greatest successes of our time.

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.

November 3, 2020