Fair Start Movement

Category: Campaigns & Accountability

  • Why Is Congress Making the Climate Crisis Worse, and Reinforcing Economic Inequity?

    Why Is Congress Making the Climate Crisis Worse, and Reinforcing Economic Inequity?

    Congress Could Have Recognized Children’s Right to a Fair Start in Life. Instead It’s Treating Them as Cheap Future Labor.

    The Senate’s debate of stimulus legislation that includes significant child-care and tax changes is an opportunity for the United States to recognize every child’s right to a Fair Start in life, ecologically and socially, and radically transform the way we plan families. 

    Instead, per the New York Times and Forbes, the Senate is pushing what one Nobel Laureate called a population growth Ponzi scheme. The legislation does not eliminate the massive wealth gap between black and white families or encourage sustainable family planning that does not severely exacerbate the climate and other ecological crises. Smaller families can have 20 times the impact on the climate crisis as other measures. 
     
    Fair Start, the better approach, would pivot to:
    • Cut all benefits for wealthy families and dramatically expand them for poor families, making the rich pay to offset the unearned privileges their children enjoy in life.
    • Incentivize better family planning, and smaller and more sustainable families for everyone, through things like delaying childbirth until parents are really ready.
    • This is key: These moves can make the legislation antiracist and regenerative and can lay the groundwork to eliminate child abuse and recognize our fundamental human right to nature.
     
    We can do better than pushing women to have kids. Let’s restore nature and level the playing field at birth for all kids. That’s how we create a legitimate society. It’s called Fair Start. It’s the first and overriding human right, and as such, we may achieve it by all means effective. Here is an example of that type of better approach, one that Sen. Cory Booker can easily promote as the Senate debates. We should use funding to fundamentally change the way we plan families to maximize investments in future generations and to compensate them for the harm we have caused. 
     
    Sen. Mitt Romney, a Mormon with five wealthy children, is using the excuse of child poverty to push population growth as means of creating cheap future labor, increased consumption, and a bigger tax base that will benefit his privileged kids.  It’s similar to the Ivanka Trump approach to families and the future. 
     
    The current proposals do nothing to ensure all children some minimum level of well-being, equal opportunities in life, a safe and natural environment, and an effective voice in democracies or systems of self-rule. The proposals further the exclusion of people from their own governance, rather than inclusion, and are setting the stage for further political violence in the future as the gap between rich and poor, in a degraded environment, worsens.  

    What You Can Do Today

    Call Kamala Harris and these four key senators today, and make your case for every child’s right to a Fair Start in life: 

    ·       Cory Booker
    ·       Elizabeth Warren
    ·       Amy Klobuchar
    ·       Bernie Sanders

    And donate here to promote every child’s right to a Fair Start in life, the most effective way to protect our shared future. 

  • Having Kids Presenting at Harvard: From Restoring Nature to Biden’s Child Care/Tax Plan

    Having Kids Presenting at Harvard: From Restoring Nature to Biden’s Child Care/Tax Plan

    Update: It was a great event! Check out the video here.

    __________________

    Cassie King is an outspoken young advocate for Fair Start family planning reforms. She recently called Vox‘s Matthew Yglesias out for pushing women to have more kids in the middle of the climate crisis.

    Tomorrow she will speak at Harvard Law School along with several others, on your and your kids’ human right to nature, and what it means for family planning policy.

    She is joined by Jessica Blome, one of the leading environmental lawyers in the country, who is also a mom. Here is her video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCxuzYElDxE

    Why Fair Start family planning reforms?

    They are the most effective change we can make:

    Infographic showing that one child can produce 20 times more greenhouse gas than a person can save by driving a high-mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

    Want to take action to support this effort, and ensure all children a Fair Start in life? Right now the Senate is debating legislation that seeks to fund child care, and alleviate poverty.

    But it:

    • Does nothing to seriously address the 1/10th wealth gap between black and white families in the U.S.
    • Does nothing to promote smaller and more sustainable families, which is a move with 20x more impact on the climate crisis than many alternatives.
    • Does nothing to end child abuse – instead, it will exacerbate it with a one-size-fits-all approach to family planning incentives.

    Take action: Urge your senator to help Having Kids amend the legislation to promote socially and ecologically fair start family planning, and add your name to our campaign.

  • In a Country Divided, Can Our Children Unite Us? Take Action.

    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.

  • You and Your Kids Have a Right To Nature. Take Action.

    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.

    A map of the U.S. with text stating it would take four Earths to provide enough resources if everyone lived like Americans, shown with four Earth icons below the map.

  • What Makes Pandemics Worse? Population Growth. Take Action.

    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.

    Infographic titled Better Family Planning, Simply Put with icons and three points: Delaying parenthood, smaller families, and community support, each explained with brief text and blue graphics.

    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.

  • Kate Middleton Speaks for Children’s Rights to Equal Starts in Life

    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.

    A comparison chart showing Current Family Planning with no minimum welfare, equality, or environmental protection, versus Fair Start Family Planning with welfare for all kids, equal opportunity, and strong environmental protection.
  • Urge Time Magazine to See Falling Fertility As An Opportunity, Not A Crisis

    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.

  • Our Right to a Better Future Does Not Depend on Amy Coney Barrett or the Court

    Our Right to a Better Future Does Not Depend on Amy Coney Barrett or the Court

    The conflict over Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, behind which looms abortion rights and the legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is capturing the focus of the nation. But it will obscure more fundamental matters inextricably tied to debates about the value of human life, abortion, and the nature of future generations: Has the United States reached a place where its centuries-old institutions, like presidency and the Supreme Court, lost enough legitimacy to require revision? Can a handful of people really represent hundreds of millions of deeply diverse people — hundreds of millions more people than existed at the time institutions like the presidency and the Court were designed?

    It seems odd to think that our future must rely upon the decision-making of a handful of individuals, while existential threats like the population-driven climate crisis and the new pandemics it will enable go largely unaddressed. If we care about our kids’ futures, we can’t leave those matters to a few people to decide.

    It may seem fanciful to even raise these questions. It’s unlikely the nation will be convening a constitutional convention for the input of all on a new constitutional structure. Reenter the issues of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation and the legality of abortions. The reason a convention seems fanciful is that the nation contains so many people but almost no common core. Much like the population-driven climate crisis, our freedom is limited by one another.

    But what if instead of thinking of the nation as having been constituted top-down by leaders in the past, we thought of the nation as “constituting,” dynamically, with the creation of children? That would be more consistent with the idea that government derives from the people. What if we took “We the People” in a literal and intergenerational sense, so that our being or becoming an inclusive, representative, legitimate, and self-determining people (arguably the cluster of core values behind the idea of the United States) depended on how we have and raise the next generations? How would our thinking change? Would we make lots of people irrespective of their personal development to grow the economy, or would we create fewer people in whom we’ve invested more?

    If we thought in these terms, we could change who we are, as a nation engaged in a true form of federalism that limits and decentralizes power intergenerationally, without convening a constitutional convention at all.

    Thinking in these terms suggests concrete outcomes.

    The abortion debate would change, because we would have to account for abortion as more that just a means of facilitating women’s autonomy. We would have to also ask whether could ever possibly ensure kids a fair start in life without a women’s right to terminate her pregnancy. We would have to ask whether, without abortion, we could feasibly move toward the “smaller family “ ethic that has 20 times the mitigation impact on the climate crisis than other downstream options. We would have to ask whether we could possibly create a future of smaller democracies where each voice matters and whether without abortion we could possibly give kids a fair start in life, eliminating the unearned privileges of one’s birth position and the inequity that is tearing our democracy apart.

    If we realized we were constituting, and not constituted in the past, our thinking would change.

    Should measures like “baby bonds” be enhanced enough and pegged to family planning incentives as a means of leveling the playing field for all kids, perhaps using the privileged children of white families, or more specifically of pronatalists like Mitt Romney, as a benchmark?

    Rather than being divided into left and right, such thinking might lead to a new and singular political border, and a spectrum between those seeking to constitute ourselves as free and equal people, free of the imposition of forms of human power like the climate crisis and possessed of truly equal opportunities in life, and preconstitutionals, and those like Trump and Matthew Yglesias, who sees future generations as fodder to grow the economy, other values aside.

    If we still think we exercise our freedom by doing whatever we want, in terms of having large and unsustainable families and consuming all we can, we are learning nothing from the climate crisis and the way it will limit our and future generations’ freedoms. We will have learned nothing from the pandemic. Like refusal to wear a mask, things that seem freeing and individualized can at times be the opposite and can end by limiting the freedom of all.

    Ruth Bader Ginsburg knew this, as was evident in her appreciation of the role of population growth in the things that threaten our future.

    These are the issues that matter. If the Court’s power derives from the people, our focus must first be on the creation of children as free and equal people, or that which constantly reconstitutes us as a democracy. We have to see that as a process that overrides the Court’s authority — and end any deference to a handful of people who purport to decide the future of hundreds of millions of people to whom they have little, if any, connection. Our right to better family planning is the first human right. It overrides other matters and puts the function of democracy — to free us — above the archaic form of the Court.

  • Factory Farming is Fundamentally the Product of Poor Family Planning Policy. Take Action.

    Factory Farming is Fundamentally the Product of Poor Family Planning Policy. Take Action.

    Cory Booker is spot on in targeting the industrial agriculture complex that is destroying our environment and health.

    But he could go further, and be much more comprehensive and effective.

    That complex was created in response to, and is driven by, ballooning population growth. It also exploits and exacerbates the growing gap between rich and poor, in terms of who consumes and who produces the animal products. Booker should connect the dots, and tie his attack on factory farming to a new version of the guaranteed minimum income for children, or “baby bonds,” proposals he is known for. Specifically, those bonds could be funded by taxes on the biggest factory farming conglomerates, and be modified to incentivize smaller families that cooperatively exchange resources to give all kids a fair start in life. This would cut demand for the products of factory farms, restore our environment, and also restore the middle class – including middle class farmers – that is the antithesis of the toxic corporate structure at the heart of the United States food system. 

    Urge Booker to take a more comprehensive and effective approach. Contact him here.