Today the national child-protection organization Having Kids called upon the leaders of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to amend the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act (“CAPTA”) to require states to enact legislation that allows judges to prohibit offenders convicted of certain felonies from having children as a condition of probation. CAPTA allows states to apply for federal grants for child abuse prevention and treatment programs but also enumerates certain “eligibility requirements” that each state must comply with in order to receive funding.
Having Kids’ proposal seeks an amendment to Section 106 of CAPTA to include, as funding eligibility requirements, that a state have Fair Start order legislation enacted. Such legislation would, in the event of a conviction, temporarily prohibit an offender from having additional children during the pendency of any probation in order to prevent the abuse and neglect of any future children. While the Congressional Findings from the CAPTA Reauthorization Act of 2010 hold that “substantial reductions in the prevalence and incidence of child abuse and neglect and the alleviation of its consequences are matters of the highest national priority,” national statistics from the past 5 years show that the epidemic of child abuse and neglect in the United States is not improving. In 2016, there were an estimated 676,000 children across the country who were victims of abuse and neglect, up 3% from 2012. The number of child fatalities that were the result of abuse and neglect steadily rose each year with 1,750 fatalities in 2016 versus 1,640 in 2012. That is approximately 5 children dying every day in the United States as the result of abuse and/or neglect.
“We believe that in order to truly make an impact in the prevention of child abuse, we must ensure that children are not born into potentially life-threatening situations,” said Anne Green, Executive Director of Having Kids. “It is a matter of national importance that we not only take care of abused children after the fact but do all that we can to prevent the abuse from happening in the first place.”
Take action: Email the senate committee members and tell them that you support Having Kids’ proposal for a Fair Start amendment to the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act.
How do we make real change? There are three fundamental problems with the way we have been approaching education.
Given that our early childhoods determine much of the personal development that then determines educational outcomes, true education policy starts with family planning reforms meant to assure parental readiness – including incentivized delay, and in some cases, geographic relocation. Focusing on schools comes way too late in the process – and ignores decades of science. Kids are educated early on at home. That phase really matters.
We are engaged in family planning reform now because existing systems are failing. So why are we using family planning policies that push more and more kids through these horrible systems? That’s a huge mistake. We should align family planning to maximize the impact of the systems that work.
Education policy often fails because there is a fundamental but unacknowledged disagreement about its fundamental role. Many think education is meant to increase economic growth – that babies are destined to be economic inputs. That is wrong. Economies are preceded and justified by functional human rights-based democracies that regulate them. The educational system required for democracies is virtually the opposite as that used for economic growth. Democracies require developing people for town halls, not shopping malls. That means fewer people, highly developed in ways that that make them capable of cooperative self-rule as free and equal people.
We can fix these problems.
Take action: Urge Biden’s new Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona @teachcardona to 1) explicitly recognize these problems, and 2) adopt Fair Start family planning as the fundamental human right and guidestar model through which education reform must be engaged.
Fact check your charities to see if growth is undoing their progress. Nonprofits that claim to help children, animals, the environment, as well as human rights and democracy, are obligated to account for the impact of poor family planning and unsustainable population growth on their missions and strategic progress.
Many organizations are moving in the right direction of family reform. Why? Because the impact of family planning determines all progress. If charitable outcomes depend on people, they depend on family planning policies.
But not all charities are being truthful. Some ignore growth impacts because their funders rely on population-based economic systems, though that growth fundamentally created the climate crisis and is setting back success in moving towards sustainable development goals. Or funders often want to avoid paying to change family systems to give all kids a fair start in life, and instead choose to give their own children a massive head start in life. By evading the key or fundamental issue of growth, and forestalling policy reforms, many nonprofits helped exacerbate the climate crisis.
Many charities that make claims regarding helping children, animals, the environment, as well as furthering human rights and democracy, are seeing their progress undone by growth. More children are being born into horrible conditions than are being saved from them. More animals are dying from increased demand than are being liberated. And both our environment and our democracies are degrading because of that same growth.
Downstream measures do not offset this.
Work upstream
Fair Start family reforms are the most just and effective way to protect children, animals and the environment. Join our Tell the Truth campaign urging corporations and charities to disclose their family policies, past and present, and the impact of those policies on things like inequity and the climate crisis.
This is the scam that created the crises: That the act of having children, the base “we” from which all our language proceeds, should be determined by top-down parental autonomy rather than bottom up, and future child-centric, justice. No other form of justice, or freedom, precedes this. That kind of justice – and the emancipatory freedom that comes with it – is existential, requiring minimum levels of welfare approaching birth equality (eliminating the black/white birth wealth gap), an effective voice in democracies where each voice matters, understanding efficiency as starting with maximizing each person’s capacity to flourish, and the restoration of the nonhuman world or nature.
It’s a lie that we are politically obligated to follow laws and to play fair – without having been created fairly. We can’t be created in that way until we de-appropriate the most vulnerable and numerous groups of entities: future generations and the nonhuman world. And that depends on how we plan families and have kids.
Act effectively
It’s time to apologize to younger generations and act effectively. How do we actually ensure an ecosocial fair start in life for every child? The science is clear: Equitable family entitlements that encourage delayed parenthood work. But instead of going forward into future generations – into women and children – wealth has historically gone into the hands of a few at the top, though there was easily enough wealth available to prevent the crises we are experiencing today.
Recently Prince William and Kate Middleton joked about having a fourth royal child. Many readers will remember that Fair Start Movement wrote to the Royal family some time ago urging them to publicly adopt just and sustainable family planning modeling instead.
Contact the Royal Family here and politely urge them to adopt Fair Start family planning to ensure a future filled with what people need – nature and equity.
FAIR START RESEARCH
A clear link exists between rapid population growth and poverty. Better family planning and smaller families increase economic prospects by allowing greater investment in each child.
According to the World Bank, in 2015, almost 2 billion people (26% of the world’s population) were living on less than $3.20 per day, and nearly half of the world (46%) was living on less than $5.50 a day.
The costs and benefits of overpopulation under globalization are now distributed by class more than by nation. Labor bears the cost of reduced wage income; capital enjoys the benefit of reduced wage costs.
The United State and much of the capitalist world believed that new bodies were needed to produce more labor. This pro-natal, pro-capital belief has created a world in which huge inequities exist. For example, the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, which is more than 60% of the planet’s population.
Family size affects those in developed countries as well as underdeveloped nations: In the U.S., the Kansas City Star reported that of more than 6,000 prisoners in 12 states, 1 in 4 was a product of the foster-care system; there is a foster-care-to-prison pipeline in many states. Foster children are also diagnosed with PTSD at a rate greater than Iraq War veterans, and every year, more than 4,000 former foster care kids end up homeless after leaving the system. Meanwhile, the number of American children in foster care increased 12% between 2012 and 2017.
A recent study from Stanford has found that efforts to mitigate climate change could yield trillions in economic benefits. And the best wayto mitigate climate change is to choose smaller families. Yes, it’s more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation.
By the year 2100, the world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime. If the average woman alive today has between 2 and 3 children, the world population will grow to as many as 16 billion by 2100.
But after rightly criticizing Prince William for his place in the inequitable systems in which we all live (the monarchy is a dead giveaway), Eliza then endorses the isolation model of family planning that prioritizes subjective parental choice and growth over objective values like birth equity for all children as a means to eliminate the gap between rich and poor, the restoration of nature, and ensuring functional democracies where all voices matter. The isolation model evades collective obligations to level the playing field and serves the wealthy (many of whom benefit as advertisers on CNN), not women or children.
As Equals must be committed to equality, for all entities, and we only get there through Fair Start reforms that change the way we plan families, moving us away from the model that created the climate crisis and vast economic inequity, and towards birth equity based reparations for future generations.
Take action: Urge @ElizaTalks to consider alternative policy models, like Fair Start, as the most just and effective solution to the crises we face today.
Facts:
A clear link exists between rapid unsustainable growth and poverty. Better family planning and sustainable families increase economic prospects by allowing greater investment in each child.
According to the World Bank, in 2015, almost 2 billion people (26% of the world’s population) were living on less than $3.20 per day, and nearly half of the world (46%) was living on less than $5.50 a day.
The costs and benefits of overpopulation under globalization are now distributed by class more than by nation. Labor bears the cost of reduced wage income; capital enjoys the benefit of reduced wage costs.
The United State and much of the capitalist world believed that new bodies were needed to produce more labor. This pro-natal, pro-capital belief has created a world in which huge inequities exist. For example, the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, which is more than 60% of the planet’s population.
Family size affects those in developed countries as well as underdeveloped nations: In the U.S., the Kansas City Star reported that of more than 6,000 prisoners in 12 states, 1 in 4 was a product of the foster-care system; there is a foster-care-to-prison pipeline in many states. Foster children are also diagnosed with PTSD at a rate greater than Iraq War veterans, and every year, more than 4,000 former foster care kids end up homeless after leaving the system. Meanwhile, the number of American children in foster care increased 12% between 2012 and 2017.
Our current family planning systems provide no minimum standard of well-being for future children, allowing children to be born into failing state systems because their parents cannot care for them. That exacerbates inequity and ensures rich kids stay rich and poor kids stay poor.
Recent coalition of organizations promoting equality in family planning reforms.
“The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Justice as a Fair Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children by Carter Dillard. Here is a description:
“Heidegger wants us to recapture the sense of people as unique and valuable, and this seems like the central argument of Dillard’s book.”
How did we ever come to believe in the myth of intentional, just and legitimate systems of social organization – like states and families – without actually accounting for the fair creation, development and consensual inclusion of future generations – the majority of persons – into those systems? How is consent, or self-determination, possible without that account? What norm could possibly precede that account? These articles – several peer-reviewed and originally published by Yale, Duke, Northwestern and other universities – will argue that, abstraction aside, there is no real justice without ensuring all children a fair start in life, both socially and ecologically. We first move towards justice by reforming the moral and legal right to have children, and the family planning systems the right creates, around zero baseline – or Fair Start – modeling that through collective child-centric planning enables consent to power and thus relative self-determination against the true baseline of nonpolity. Without it, we never orient our actions from a just, or inclusive and reflective, position.
Fair Start moves the discussion away from population and toward people, away from counting people and toward making people count. If we care about freedom, we first care about people because in democratic systems they – ultimately – have political authority over us. A just creation norm makes God fair, our systems consensual, and frees us from one another.
This book thus seeks to correct what we might call the constitutive or grundnorm fallacy: The mistake of trying to derive inclusive systems of justice, and freedom, downstream of our creation rather than going to the source – just family planning. Correcting that mistake, and understanding the right to have children, resolves a corruption at the heart of human rights which makes a system designed to protect the most vulnerable, like future persons, fundamentally exploitative of them. The creation norm is what most accounts, and should most account, for the lives we experience. Making that norm fair brings us to optimal world populations. It is also the most effective solution to the ecosocial crises we face today, with the weight of evidence showing ten to twenty times the impact, via redistributive Fair Start family planning entitlements/incentives, on things like the climate crisis and economic inequality relative to downstream measures.
“Justice is not abstract, but created in the constant and fundamental formation – or procreation – of power relations.”
Thomas Friedman’s recent piece on Musk and tech capital as a solution to the climate crisis is a jarring poke in the eye for those who decry more geoengineering as a solution to a crisis created by geoengineering. But Friedman missed the crucial history, and issue, at play. Fundamentally, climate change flows from the failure of world leaders to adopt sustainable family planning policies in the Twentieth Century that would have used nature as a limiting factor.
The solution? Embrace a new family model based on equity and ecological restoration, and use the wealth bubble at the top of the pyramid – the one that buoys up the uber-rich of the world – to fund the transition as a matter of ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life.
Urge @tomfriedman to get it right.
What is Fair Start?
The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life. Let’s stop counting people, and start making people count. How? Move wealth from the top of the economic pyramid and into incentivizing better family planning and more equitable, sustainable families. That wealth was made through poor family planning policies that put costs on women and children. Redirecting that wealth is how to do the most good for children, animals and the environment, and the only way to make people truly free.
Without giving every child an ecosocial Fair Start in life we never come from a just place. Changing that is the first obligation, for all of us, and as such it is achievable by all means effective.
How did we end up in a world with massive wealth in the hands of a few and ecosystems crashing as our climates degrade? The answer is surprising. Rather than invest in early childhood development, at the crucial phase in the middle of the Twentieth Century, world leaders chose population growth and the creation of mass consumers, cheap labor and large bases of taxpayers.
Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always coming from an unjust place.
Today many are fighting to change this, get the wealth back, and use it to most effectively reverse the crises we face. We can separate those people from the politicians, fake charities and others protecting the wealth bubble at the top – and hurting our kids – with a simple language test.
It’s not about counting people, it’s about making people count. The borders of just and inclusive nations are not lines on a map; they are comprised of people who trust one another, and engage in consensual and inclusive governance.
For example, if environmentalists claim to be protecting a river, force them to account for the way population growth will drive the climate crisis in ways that will degrade the river and increase demands for its use. Many environmental and animal protection groups raised millions to protect natural spaces that they knew would be destroyed by population growth, growth they were helping promote – furthering the Anthropocene. If child protection advocates claim to be investing more in kids with tax policy for example, as them why they permit children to be born into poverty in the first place, rather than incentivizing better – and even equitable – family planning. If groups claim to promoting democracy, ask them to account for how poor family planning and population growth is diluting our individual roles to the point of meaningless, and degrading the civil qualities of the people around us. But the first norm has to be to simply to create normative people, which can best be visualized as a functional constitutional convention of principles – free people – not representatives, and not with the expectation that the norms will require coercion or incentives because they are not truly reflective of the people involved.
Our world is the way it is because we never held those claiming to promote values to actually account for the truth: People are the most important factor in all policy, and people don’t fall from the sky. If officials or groups do not prioritize giving all kids a #fairstart in life, they are part of the problem, not constituting us as free and equal people (and hence preconstitutional or “precons”) and protecting the bubble of wealth at the top of the pyramid in ways that will hurt our kids.
We are at a fork. The choice is clear. Let’s take what our kids deserve and build truly consensual governance. Now, how?
To constitute ourselves as free people means to limit and decentralize the power people have over one another, and we do that by promoting a simple discourse in which intending parents agree to planning caring, and sustainable families in exchange for their future children’s entitlement to #fairstart funding and incentives taken from the top of the wealth pyramid. That’s a true, or physical, social contract, which is inclusive of the majority of persons – those who will live in the future. It reflects the alleviation of power differentials, the sort rich have over poor, parents have over children, and we all have over our natural ecologies. That is what it means to be sufficiently other-regarding, or empathetic, to constitute ourselves as free people.
We can take the wealth at the top of the wealth pyramid – as matter of the first human right, one that overrides government processes and property rights – and use it to bend the arc of the future to create greater welfare, equity, meaningful democracy, and nature. Or we can leave it at the top and have a future with greater inequity, less nature, and bloated democracies that don’ work. We can become free people, and defeat the precons. The wealth bubble at the top is big enough to bend the arc, and incentivize, the future we deserve. Let’s move that wealth forward.
Take Action
Moving wealth from the top of the economic pyramid to incentivize better family planning and equitable families is the best way to do the most good
Support a federal executive order – the Tell the Truth order – that would require the disclosure of corporations and nonprofits role in the scam described above, so that we can hold people accountable.
