Fair Start Movement

Category: Campaigns & Accountability

  • Fair Start Planning Is Essential to the Anti-Oppression Toolkit

    Fair Start Planning Is Essential to the Anti-Oppression Toolkit

    With nearly 40% of all kids in the U.S. living in or near poverty, human rights and democracy under attack, and systemic racism keeping intergenerational inequities alive and well, better policy is long overdue.

    Sadly, it has taken the murders of black citizens in recent years to bring to the forefront the conversation surrounding inequities and oppression. But a deeper look at the intersectional issues is finally making it to the mainstream. Now is the time to develop anti-oppression and anti-racist informed policies to change course effectively. 

    Fortunately, one path forward is clear. Decades of research have shown that family planning is the most effective way to break the cycle of generational poverty and inequality. Early interventions are up to 13 times more effective than reactive approaches. Furthermore, parents who choose to have only one or two kids can invest more time and resources in each child, setting up these children for great success throughout their lifetimes.

    Yet oppression continues because of a lack of equitable resources from birth. The facts are simple:

    • Inequality is inherited. 1
    • Inequality is a welfare issue. Studies have documented examples of rising inequality decreasing child welfare. 2
    • Inequality affects kids for life. Unequal opportunities translate into unequal lifelong outcomes by the time children reach age 5. 3
    • Inequality’s impacts are more damaging the longer it is experienced. The longer a child is poor, the greater his risk of poverty in adulthood and of experiencing lifelong health problems and involvement in the criminal justice system. 4
    • Inequality disproportionately affects children of color in the U.S. 5
    • Affluence plays a role, too. The growing divide between low-income children and their peers reduces opportunities for low-income children throughout their lives. 6

    And that is why anti-oppression policy without Fair Start investments is a nonstarter. If we are truly determined to dismantle systemic racism, we must come together as communities to ensure a fair start for all children. 

    We are already pursuing Fair Start campaigns to improve equity for kids:

    As we plan for 2021, we are working to invite more partners to join our coalition on these intersectional issues. If you would like to join us or share your perspective, please email ashley@fairstartmovement.org.

  • The Most Fundamental and Effective Social Justice Reform Possible

    The Most Fundamental and Effective Social Justice Reform Possible

    The right to have children comes with responsibilities on parents and their communities that protect us all. The United Nations is using a decades-old pro-growth family planning model that ignores those responsibilities and hurts kids. That model is fundamentally driving ecological crises and the climate crisis, child poverty, and growing inequity across the globe. That model exacerbates the risk and impact of pandemics, and prevents our reaching the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. That non-inclusive model exploits children more than it invests in them, thereby driving political illegitimacy.

    But groups and individuals from around the world are signing on to an effort to change the old model, which is focused on what parents want, toward a new model that focuses on what all kids need.

    The new model is called Fair Start family planning, and it is the beginning of real social justice. The reform can begin with the United Nations secretary general simply acknowledging the need for change.

    Sign on, and urge any organization you support or can influence — nonprofit or for profit — to also sign on. Sign here or contact us at info@fairstartmovement.org for more information.

    Help support this effort and you support new family planning policies that can reduce poverty and inequity, and mitigate the climate and other ecological crises, on a scale of 10 to 20 times non-family planning measures.  

  • Biden vs. Trump? Here’s a Better Way Forward

    Biden vs. Trump? Here’s a Better Way Forward

    Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

    So why are we focused on two men fighting for a presidency, as if the idea of controlling our future were like some kind of football game?

    We tend to see politics this way because of mistakes that were made in the design of our constitutions and political systems, and because of cognitive dissonances we humans are prone to, like confusing symbols with the real things those symbols refer to. Instead of seeing “We the people” as an inherently complex, dynamic and intergenerational concept, we tend to focus on the static symbols that purport to represent a nation of hundreds of millions of people – like the presidency. And instead of empowering future generations through real family planning policies, our leadership has exploited population growth and those cognitive dissonances, vesting more and more power in themselves. As the United States population has ballooned from 3 million to well over 300 million, people have remained focused on distracting icons like the presidency, or the one person meant to to “represent” all of us, rather than focusing on empowering one another as effective citizens through good parenting. Driven by poor family planning, representative democracy replaced the possibility of real democracy, where each person has meaningful control over political outcomes.

    For example, we focus on Biden or Trump as a symbol for what we want in terms of climate policy, when in reality, the population of the country – the thing driving the climate crisis and also the ultimate source of political authority – continues to grow, diluting the impact each person could have in mitigating the crisis. We are decoyed by these two men, who in the end will simply enforce, through violence, their own views on a populace they do not and cannot represent. This is iconarchy, not democracy.

    Another example: We are told we live in a country that recognizes us as free and equal people. But our family planning policies carry forward historic injustices, such that our birth position places us in a hierarchy of power where some – like white families with ten times the wealth of black families – are entitled to have more freedom of opportunity and influence than others. Our traditional view of family planning dismisses our birth position as the work of god, rather than structural inequity we choose to tolerate.

    Our mostly male political leaders, working with business interests, intentionally accelerated the centralizing of their power by encouraging growth and inequity, and failing to require systems that would equitably develop each person to help co-lead true democracies. In other words, they used crowding to disempower individuals. That constant growth and alienation from one another has ensured reliance upon strong, top-down, leaders. Today, many want to continue to exacerbate this process in order to use families as a means of driving economic growth. They exploit an archaic legal system that does not protect a right to nature, but defends completely irresponsible procreation as matter of right because of the population growth it creates. Yes, our archaic legal systems generally protect the right to procreate an unlimited number of children into abusive conditions and state institutions, but no right to be free in nature. This is the antithesis of freedom, and represents those at the top of our systems using everyday people to oppress one another.

    To people who care about democracy, or a system that allows all people to control the rules under which they live, this is offensive. We have a right to an effective role – not diluted by hundreds of millions of people – in the political systems that impact our lives. Is it time to tear down the icons and to stop the constant political swing from left to right? Can we disempower the symbolic, meaning the leadership at the top of both the public and private sectors, and empower the real — the people themselves — from the bottom up?

    The best way to do that, and the most effective way to directly address the crises we now face, irrespective of our “representatives,” is to correct the fundamental mistakes and build our family planning systems around the idea of cooperative self-determination. Instead of thinking of democracies as constituted in the past, we can instead think about having and investing more in kids as a way to constitute the democracies we want, and deserve, in the future.

    Understand this: The constitution is not what you might think it is, We were not constituted by god-like men in the past, and subjected to a system over which we have almost no influence, We are constantly constituting legitimate communities or deconstituting into illegitimate forms with each child born, depending on how we plan our families. If power and legitimacy ultimately comes from the people, it necessarily first derives from their creation, and we constitute legitimate societies by limiting our power over future generations and decentralizing the power we do hold into the children we will have.

    We can start by ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life, which is the first and overriding human right, and using that right to decentralize and limit human power. If we truly believe in government for and by the people, this is the only way to achieve it – through actual people. We may engage in this process – of physically constituting democratic communities where each person matters – by taking resources from concentrations of power, and using those resources to incentive smaller families that fully develop their children.

    Ready to make real change? Joe Biden is doing the same thing Trump and others have done to promote population growth over investing more in children, and building smaller and more sustainable democracies where each person’s voice matters. What’s a better idea? Let’s use the child tax credit program to create a progressively scaled family planning incentive system that promotes parental readiness, smaller families, and a fair start in life for every child. Nothing would go further in fundamentally solving our social and ecological crises.

    Urge Biden’s kids to support this alternative, and to help offset the unearned privileges they have received in life. Learn about them here, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/a33661848/joe-biden-children-grandchildren/. You can find ways to contact them online.

    Here are several other actions you can take.

     

     

  • Ecological Destruction Starts With Poor Family Planning. Take Action.

    Ecological Destruction Starts With Poor Family Planning. Take Action.

    This video was recently shared by a supporter:

    THE FACTS ARE CLEAR:

    • The most effective way to address many of the impacts on our environment and other species, such as climate change, is to choose smaller families. In fact, it’s 20 times more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation.  
    • By 2100, 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.
    • Child-first family planning provides a clear human rights-based solution and path forward. It’s sustainable and equitable, and it’s reflected in the worldwide trend toward smaller families that can invest more in each child and ensure a safer future.

    TAKE ACTION:

    Urge the United Nations to do what it was created to do: protect all of our futures by adopting Fair Start family planning policies: https://secure.everyaction.com/gZiWOydZ_0m7kxrlfD5OjQ2

    Urge any charities you support to commit to better family planning policies. which are the most effective way to protect kids, animals, the environment, and democracy: https://fairstartmovement.org/organizations-joining-for-world-population-day-at-the-u-n/

  • Our Environmental Impact Starts with Having Kids. Take Action.

    Our Environmental Impact Starts with Having Kids. Take Action.

    In a recent piece, The Guardian and George Monbiot do right by at least discussing family planning, the fundamental driver of our ecological and social crises. But they miss the mark by using their pulpit to demonize and exclude those focused on family planning reform, as opposed to unifying environmentalists, and offering ways for anyone who cares about our future to work together on the most effective changes.

    This is not in dispute: People cause anthropogenic impacts, and people don’t fall from the sky. In the case of the climate crisis, choosing one child fewer has 20 times the impact of altering one’s diet. In the mid- to late 20th century, world leaders and environmentalists made a gamble that family size would fall quickly enough to evade catastrophe. All of us, including George, were wrong. Our children will suffer for that mistake.

    What’s the solution now? The right to have children is universal, but properly interpreted, it has to orient from what future children need more than what intending parents want because future children have the most at stake. In other words, social justice and the constituting of just societies has to start at the beginning by prioritizing a resource distribution that incentivizes smaller and more equitable families. We can start by targeting the industries most responsible for the crises to pay what they owe. Making that one change in our family planning systems, and quickly employing policies that give all kids a fair start in life, is the way to be most effective and to unify family planning and equity. And we can do that by starting at home, as Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have done by choosing a smaller family and speaking out.

    TAKE ACTION: Urge the key U.N. agencies to ditch their isolationist family planning models and adopt the human rights-based Fair Start model instead. And urge the Guardian’s head offices to discuss the real solutions — like better family planning policies — to our biggest problems.

  • Biden vs. Trump? Here’s a Better Way Forward

    Biden vs. Trump? Here’s a Better Way Forward

    Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

    So why are we focused on two men fighting for a presidency as if the idea of controlling our future were like some kind of football game?

    We tend to see it this way because mistakes were made in the way we designed our constitutions and political system, and because of cognitive dissonances we humans are prone to, like confusing symbols with the real things those symbols refer to. Instead of seeing “We the people” as an inherently dynamic and intergenerational concept and instead of empowering future generations, past leadership vested the power in themselves. And as the United States population ballooned from 3 million to well over 300 million, people remained focused on distracting icons like the presidency, or one person who is supposed to “represent” all of us, rather than focusing on empowering one another. Representative democracy replaced real democracy where each person has real control over outcomes.

    • For example, we focus on Biden or Trump as a symbol for what we want in terms of climate policy, when in reality, the underlying population of the country – the thing driving the climate crisis and the ultimate source of political authority – continues to grow and become less equal, so that the average person has less and less of an impact on national policy. We are decoyed by these two men, who in the end will simply enforce through violence their own views on a populace they do not and cannot represent, while the fundamental state of democracy and freedom degrades. This is iconarchy, not democracy.

    In fact, our leaders, working with business interests, intentionally accelerated the process of centralizing their power by encouraging population growth and failing to require systems that would equitably develop each person to help co-lead true democracies, ensuring chaos, and with it our reliance upon strong leaders instead of one another. Today, many want to exacerbate this problem in the name of creating economic growth. They exploit an archaic legal system that does not clearly protect a right to nature, but defends completely irresponsible procreation because of the population growth it creates. This is emblematic of our history of trading self-determination and freedom for chaos, greed and consumption, and the exploitation of future generations.

    To people who care about democracy, or a system that allows all people to control the rules under which they live, this is offensive. We have a right to an effective role – not diluted by hundreds of millions of people – in the political systems that impact our lives. Is it time to tear down the icons and to stop the constant political swing from left to right? Can we disempower the symbolic, meaning the leadership at the top of both the public and private sectors, and then empower the real — the people themselves — from the bottom up?

    The best way to do that, and the most effective way to directly address the crises we now face, irrespective of our “representatives,” is to correct these mistakes and build our systems around the idea of cooperative self-determination. Instead of thinking of democracies as constituted in the past, we must instead think about having kids as a way to constitute the democracies we want and deserve in the future. We can do so by ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life, which is the first and overriding human right, and using that right to decentralize and limit human power. If we truly believe in government for and by the people, that is the only way to achieve it.

    At Having Kids, we are trying to move systems in that direction by decentralizing the power at the top of what Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called a population pyramid and investing that power in future generations.

    Ready to make real change? Here are several actions you can take to join the fight to give the people control of their own futures.

  • Yale Climate Connections: It’s Time to Tell the Truth

    Yale Climate Connections: It’s Time to Tell the Truth

    Yale Climate Connections is a crucial media service for understanding the greatest environmental threat facing our species. But a recent article may have missed a key opportunity to further that understanding. The article involved an interview with fertility coach Elizabeth Bechard, and focused on the connection between family planning and our ecological future. Bechard, whose profession involves people having kids, gave this advice:

    I personally have, I guess, a spiritual framework that helps me to trust that there’s more going on than meets the eye, and I believe at a spiritual level that the children who come through are souls that chose to be here. And so, you know, if someone deeply desires a child, I would say listen to that.

    Is there better advice we can give prospective parents who want to protect their kids’ future? The key lies in Bechard’s own decision not to have a third child, for ecological and other reasons. Choosing a small family is the most effective thing one can do to mitigate the climate crisis – twenty times more effective than other lifetsyle changes like changing one’s diet. And if we go one step further, and collectively shape our family planning polcies around equity, and the distribution of resources that would give every child a fair start in life, we can effectively reverse many of the other crises facing our kids.

    If we really care about our kids’ future, shouldn’t we do what is most effective?

    TAKE ACTION: 1) Urge Bechard at elizabeth@elizabethbechard.com to tell the truth about the connection between family planning and our shared future, and 2) tweet the Editor of Yale Climate Connections, @bud_ward, and urge him to ask the questions that really matter for our shared future.

  • Want to Hold Rich White Men Accountable to the Law? Let’s Start with Elon Musk.

    Want to Hold Rich White Men Accountable to the Law? Let’s Start with Elon Musk.

    Police brutalizing people of color and the poor is nothing new, but the issue is finally getting the attention it deserves.

    Meanwhile rich white men like Elon Musk, who’s looted billions in profits during the pandemic, can ignore COVID-19 shutdown orders and reopen a car factory rife with racism, and nothing happens. People like Musk and Donald Trump – born rich – are playing with their space toys, launching a mission that does little good for most people, and seems like some version of the movie Elysium, while black men are being killed down here on Earth.

    • In the United States, one set of laws exists for the rich and another one applies to the poor. This system is illegitimate.
    • This double system will persist as long as an extreme imbalance of wealth and power remains. Violence is one form of power, money is another, and the solution has to deal with both. We need to focus on a fundamental fix to the massive imbalance right now, and the one with the greatest impact – by far – for the most numerous and vulnerable classes.
    • Because a child’s right to a fair start in life is the fundamental human right that overrides all other interests including property rights, we can use that right to redistribute resources, end the inequity, and build the real constitutional democracies we all deserve.

    Take Action to Hold Musk Accountable

    Contact the California governor here, explain why Musk committed a crime when he reopened the California Tesla plant, and demand action. Let’s see how legitimate our system really is.

    Find and engage Musk in person, lawfully and peacefully, and demand that the resources he’s using to colonize space, worsen inequity, and turn his own six children into billionaires be used instead to fund Fair Start family planning and the constituting of real democracies. Musk, whose wealth originated from a system of colonization and exploitation in Africa and who very likely has a net negative impact on the environment, has publicly mocked the Occupy movement. He has also consistently promoted family planning systems designed to create massive economies filled with workers and consumers that serve the rich, rather than human rights based systems that empower people. Instead of speaking out, Musk is deliberatly using SpaceX to distract people away from an issue of justice, to focus instead on his newest display of wealth.

    Finally, we can move from a regressive legal system based on violence at its worst, and incentives as a lesser evil, to one based on true self-determination, starting with the birth of every child. Urge our leadership to adopt Fair Start family planning as the fundamental basis for our laws and policies.

  • New Generations Are Changing the Way We Plan Families and Are Demanding Fair Start. Take Action.

    New Generations Are Changing the Way We Plan Families and Are Demanding Fair Start. Take Action.

    Author Deanna Young (Deanna also recently called Donald Trump out for violating international law.)

    In the past, women were generally expected to have kids, few thought about whether large families were actually sustainable, and almost no one considered the possibility of would-be parents cooperatively working to maximize the conditions into which their children would be born.

    And though the way we plan families is evolving toward a model that’s more sustainable and equitable, what’s the next phase? How do we catalyze this transition? 

    Readiness for Parenthood: Opening Up the Discussion

    It’s actually pretty simple: Break the taboo around publicly discussing what it means to be ready to have kids and around what we deserve from the wealthy and from our governments to give every kid a fair start in life. Some moms, pressed by the Covid-19 crisis, are starting to do just that. 

    I don’t have a child, but I may one day. And the most effective thing I can do to protect that future is to demand a human-rights based system of family planning over the oppressors in big business and big government who are blocking that collective process, join those voices, and speak out. 

    I and many other young voices are willing to delay having kids until we are ready, have smaller and sustainable families, and work together to ensure a fair start for all of our kids. 

    Younger generations are willing to embrace a collectivist vision around parenting, opening up the discussion around readiness for parenthood by authentically and transparently discussing our own capacities for properly parenting any children we may have. We realize that a lack of social concern and governmental provision has made parental readiness an assumption — but not a foregone conclusion — for young adults. And we know that the discussion around the decision to have kids is bigger than ourselves, which is why we’re willing to forgo some degree of personal privacy to speak out about it. Achieving collective goals — like fair starts in life for each child born in the future — requires an organized focus and intention toward the greater good.

    Ross Douthat and the Push for Procreation

    The people who benefited from poor family planning and the flow of consumers, cheap labor, and taxpayers it created are pushing back against the trend in delayed pregnancies and lower fertility rates. Ross Douthat, driven by his religion, is one of the best examples of those pushing women to have more kids, irrespective of how it’d affect the environment, economic inequality, and our democracy. 

    His attempt to pull us backward is a manifest threat to our and our kids’ future. The question is not why women should have more kids: It’s what Ross is doing to ensure a fair start in life for all kids relative to the well-to-do start he is giving his own kids.

    Action Step: Reach Out for Answers

    Tweet Ross @DouthatNYT, or find and engage him peacefully and lawfully in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, to get answers.