Category: Children’s Rights

The impending overturn of Roe. v. Wade has starkly and publicly revealed the new reality facing the United States. The anti-choice, pro-gun, ‘anti-everything-good’ conservatives are playing their hand face up. They have shamelessly stopped pretending to play by the rules and – if you’re listening – they’re telling us exactly what our future looks like. For 99 percent of us, it doesn’t look good.

The powers that be – mostly old, white, dusty antiques like Mitch McConnell, Eugene B. Meyer, Donald Trump – are climbing the castle walls in their 50-year strategy to cement in place their power and influence. As the world changes around them, as American society embraces all different stripes of people, the old guard conservatives and the wealthy 1 percent are terrified of losing their grip.

The Fair Start Movement  approaches this fight from a new and different perspective. We believe that: No government, state or federal, has legitimate standing to mandate the birth of every child conceived unless it is prepared to care for those children beyond the birth canal and give them a Fair Start. free from the climate crisis through a return to nature, and free in terms of having an influential role in one’s democracy.

At this critical crossroads in human history, we must acknowledge that every child born has a right to start out in decent circumstances. We must account for the wellbeing, equity and personal development of future generations if we are to foster a real democracy where each person’s voice matters. We must accept that our current system destroys the environment and does nothing, in fact takes negative action, to mitigate the oncoming crises. 

We already see progress. Many people agree with our vision and are committed to real, positive change. As we build a truly democratic population, wherein everyone has a voice that is heard, we will move away from the toxic, crumbling society of today. 

We will honor individual rights and guarantee universal healthcare. We will return to nature by respecting our place in the ecosystem, giving and taking sustainably. We will escape the domination of the selfish, greedy, wealthy few whose plan for the future – assuming they have one – accounts for their survival alone.  

In the meantime, we must work within the system we have. The State must accept its obligation to invest heavily in common-sense family planning programs and science-based sex ed. Those items alone will automatically lower abortion rates and teach young people the truth about having and growing a healthy family. 

The State must break its unconstitutional commitment to Christian moral dictates and adopt a reality-based approach to governing. It is absurd and completely unacceptable that 350 million+ people of every faith are governed based on the ethos of bronze-age men. 

We must shift our paradigm away from the endless-growth-economy fantasy, which demands that mothers continually produce their supply of workers and consumers. Prisoners to boot.

TAKE ACTION:

Let’s hold accountable those responsible for the current societal roadmap that pushes the opposite of a Fair Start for our children. Urge any organization you are part of to support and join our Tell the Truth campaign, which would obligate disclosure of this information.

The human rights advocacy group Having Kids today urged the National Institutes of Health to prioritize funding and research for male contraceptives like the male pill as a way to improve family planning, and reduce unwanted pregnancies.

Read our special report, and campaign announcement, here.

“Having Kids believes that in light of the world’s current population increasing at the rate of 80 million persons a year, and projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, it is imperative that NIH make research and funding for the development of male contraception an extremely high priority over the next five years,” wrote Katherine A. Meyer, an outside lawyer for the group, in a letter to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Meyer noted that while clinical trials of some male contraceptives have shown promise, more research is needed to ensure they are safe and effective.

“NICHD can play a crucial role in making this a reality,” she wrote.

The letter noted that groups such as the Population Council and private foundations have funded male contraception research, but can’t afford the large, phase-3 clinical trials required by the Food and Drug Administration. NICHD could give this effort a boost by seeking congressional appropriations for research, and directing current funding toward this clinical research.

Also today, Having Kids issued an illuminating report and campaign announcement on how federal agencies have failed to take into account population growth when examining the environmental impact of federal actions under the National Environmental Protection Act.

The report noted that the Council on Environmental Quality, which issues regulations interpreting NEPA, under President Richard Nixon did take population into account. Six months after signing NEPA into law, Nixon said In a letter to Congress that the CEQ “is concerned with all aspects of environmental quality – wildlife preservation, parklands, land use, and population growth, as well as pollution.” Every subsequent CEQ report during the Nixon Administration addressed population in its analysis. But over the last 40 years or so, CEQ stopped identifying population growth as a significant factor affecting the environment.

Having Kids works to promote sustainable and more equitable families, as a way to help children, restore the environment, and protect animals.

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Could taking resources from the wealthy and using those resources to fund delayed parenthood, and a fair start in life for every child, solve many of our ecological and social crises? An article due to be published this winter in the Loyola Chicago Law Review argues that it is.

The impact of better family planning on sustainable, and even regenerative, development is well-known. But poor modeling in the mid-20th century created barriers between ensuring resources that all children need and coordinating the time, place, and manner in which parents would bring those children into the world. New modeling is removing those barriers, and one emerging policy involves subsidizing delayed parenthood with the aim of improving childhood equity.

Simply put: The policy shifts power from wealthy (usually white male) elites to women and children through family planning-linked forms of guaranteed minimum incomes.

These transfers go beyond incentives. They involve the entitlements that are part of every child’s right to a fair start in life. And the evidence is clear: The subsidies mean increased earnings, education, well-being for women and children, and environmentally sustainable prosperity for all.

Take action: Urge the D.C. council to consider a pilot project implementing the policy.

Guest Contributor: Nicole King

This June, the House of Representatives voted in favor of granting statehood to Washington D.C. “The Washington, D.C. Admission Act” (H.R. 51) would admit most of the current district as the 51^st state. For the first time, the District’s 702,455 residents would be represented in Congress. 

Republicans, however, have been quick to paint the individuals who live in the District as unworthy of representation. Senator Tom Cotton stated, “Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing…Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state. A new state of Washington would not be.” To make matters worse, Senator Steve Dane’s of Montana implied that D.C.’s residents were not “real people” like those found outside of the beltway. 

Such remarks stand in sharp contrast to the idea that every person – regardless of their career opportunities or zip code – deserves the opportunity to meaningfully participate in democracy. In fact, these comments show a disrespect for basic human rights. The United Nations recognizes that each person is born free and equal and the right to take part in government and public affairs. Yet Senators Cotton and Dane remain steadfast in their views that the District’s population should not enjoy this right.  

Real Statehood

While granting D.C. statehood is certainly an important step toward bridging the gap between rights and reality, it is not a sufficient one. A driving cause of this schism remains largely overlooked: our current family planning paradigm prevents us from constituting our societies in a way that allows us to fulfill the rights that we already recognize. By exclusively focusing on the rights and obligations of the human beings that exist today, we miss a critical preceding step: that we constitute ourselves in a way that allows all future human beings to meaningfully participate in making the laws that govern them.

The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for just about every 747,000 Americans. This “representation ratio” is the highest it has ever been in our nation’s history and is significantly higher than in other industrialized countries. Research suggests that as the representation ratio climbs, our democracy becomes less effective. With fewer representatives per capita, individual citizens have to fight harder to be heard by their elected officials. Additionally, the makeup of the legislature is less likely to reflect the demographics of the people they represent – both in terms of race and income level. When faced with representatives who are largely unrepresentative, many communities feel shut out of the policy making process and avoid engaging entirely. 

Despite these problems, our number of representatives has remained the same since the 1930s, even though the U.S. population has tripled since that time. While the D.C. statehood bill may grant much needed representation for residents of one city, it does not address the fact that almost all Americans are already severely underrepresented and will have painfully little say in shaping the laws that govern their lives for the foreseeable future. 

Getting Intergenerational

Adding more representatives to the House may seem like the obvious solution. This strategy, however, is likely to be ineffective in the long term. According to Drew DeSilver, a Senior Writer and the Pew Research Center, we would already need to add nearly 700 members to our current 435 member House in order to achieve the representation ratio we had in the 1930s. This number will only grow as we add a projected 79 million individuals by 2060. As the number of representatives rise, the House runs the risk of becoming unsustainable and unmanageable, mimicking China’s National People’s Congress, which at 2,980 members, is harshly criticized for its inefficiency and largely symbolic existence. 

Today’s policymakers can help solve this problem by considering the needs of all future children when planning their own families. By giving families access to the resources needed to plan for more sustainable families, policymakers can help parents across the country slow the rate of population growth. This would afford future generations the time and space to organize themselves in ways that are truly democratic, giving each person more time at the podium during townhalls and allowing representatives to truly represent their communities. 

The District’s residents undoubtedly deserve representation. And so do all future children. We should all use this unique moment in history to ensure that our children’s right to participate in democracy becomes their reality.  

Take action: Let’s lead in D.C. by moving towards Fair Start family planning.