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.
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?
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.
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.
Our growing population is degrading our natural ecologies, which sets the stage for future and worse pandemics.
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.
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.
Want to make the world a better place? Nothing has a greater impact than universal policy reforms incentivizing smaller and more equitable families cooperatively investing more time, love, attention, and resources into every child.
Current policies were designed with motivations to fuel the economy, not provide for child welfare, and these policies have fueled the crises we face today. In order to boost markets and economies, they have incentivized growth that has filled the world with billions of people and has led to climate change and the sixth mass extinction. By contrast, Fair Start policies promote equity and human rights, developing people for democratic communities, and maintaining the natural world for future generations.
Enjoy this presentation detailing what we mean by the Fair Start revolution and how it is the best way to reach world sustainable development goals.
Nothing will do as much good as improving family planning policies to shift the focus from what Wall Street wants now to what all future children need. It’s the first human right and obligation, it demands the collective intergenerational obligations most countries and the United Nations seek to avoid, and Having Kids is helping to make it a reality. With Fair Start, we aim to stabilize human populations at the United Nations low variant before 2100 through a qualitative transition focused on intergenerational human rights and self-determination, defined by a fair start in life for all kids.
In 2020, Having Kids, with an almost all volunteer staff and minuscule budget, made real strides:
Publishing our work, in publications from popular outlets like Salon to peer-reviewed and other academic journals, detailing how better family planning — enabled through policies like fertility delay incentives — can have 10 to 20 times the impact on climate, equity, and other crises as shortsighted policy changes.
Garnering positive reactions to our work from key thought leaders such as Paul Hawken, Larry Solum, Hugh LaFollette, and Elizabeth Anderson.
Engaging with the CDC on ways to address the fundamental driver of pandemics like COVID-19: Overcrowding, poor public health, and the degradation of nature.
As demonstrated in 2020, Having Kids acts as a “part replacer,” finding unsustainable and inequitable family planning modeling in systems of governance, discourse, corporatism, and culture, and replacing it with truly human rights-based Fair Start modeling. We are the praxis, more than simply an organization, of moving the way we all plan families from a focus on adults to a focus on future children.
For 2021, Having Kids has eight specific objectives, or key performance indicators, to further the overwhelming and quantified impact of better family planning.
We will persuade more companies to speak out for sustainable and equitable family planning improvements, including those we are in negotiations with now.
In partnership with a Having Kids legislative fund, we will introduce our first legislation, improving popular “baby bond” bills to instead incentivize families working together to give all kids a Fair Start, socially and ecologically.
We will file our first litigation, challenging intrusions on the right to terminate one’s pregnancy not as a violation of personal autonomy, but of the collective obligations we all owe future children.
We will target a wealthy family responsible for the climate crisis to urge them to compensate future generations by funding Fair Start family reform, and speak the truth to their power that this lexically primary obligation overrides all property rights. We will also focus on recidivist child abusers, from all parts of the economic spectrum, to urge them to admit the need for family planning reform.
We will submit proposed legislative and regulatory proposals that prioritize approval and accessibility of the male birth control pill, with policy reforms that treat contraception as the default for all teens. Kids should not be having or raising kids.
We will target investors supporting companies that promote unsustainable family planning policies that further inequity and ecocide.
We will expand our coalition of organizations, urging the U.N. secretary general and other U.N. leaders to admit that current family planning modeling is a failure, undercutting sustainable development and human rights.
We will initiate a #factcheck function on our platforms to correct misinformation in the media regarding the impact of population growth, and we will file actions against civil society organizations misleading donors with claims of progress that do not account for the overwhelming impacts caused by poor family planning and growth.
The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional a probate judge’s order that an Ohio man who has 13 kids by nine mothers to avoid procreating further because he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support. Polls in Ohio show that many people would have supported the Lorain County judge’s original decision and that people believe the right to have kids is contingent on parents being able to support them.
The court seemed sympathetic to the idea that having kids comes with responsibilities but ultimately found that the order did not sufficiently relate to the legal authority under which the judge issued it. In other words, it would be up to the Ohio legislature to step in and broaden courts’ authority to address poor family planning.
Having Kids has developed model legislation, based on some of the leading research in the field, that would authorize courts nationwide to do this. We have also developed federal legislation that would facilitate funding to improve the way our system protects kids and our communities from poor family planning. Of course, the right to have kids comes with responsibilities. And our failure to ensure those responsibilities through better policy has fundamentally created the social and ecological crises we are experiencing today.
We can do better, and Having Kids is leading the way.
Every child’s right to a socially and ecologically fair start in life is the first and overriding human right. It physically constitutes us as the free and equal people we should be. It is the right that frees us from one another.
That right is the first and necessary condition of human freedom and political legitimacy, and we may pursue it by all means effective. Social justice begins with Fair Start family planning policies, and balancing the right to have children with the community and parental responsibilities that come with that right and protect us all.
Having Kids is an international human rights organization dedicated to improving family planning systems worldwide with a simple idea: Every child has a fundamental human right to a Fair Start in life, ecologically and socially, which overrides all competing interests. Our modeling is the subject of several peer-review works, and it includes clear policy pathways for implementation.
Our biggest crises — health, economic, and environmental — are complex, but they all point back to a single issue: failures in family planning. This is reflected by the nearly 50% of pregnancies that are unplanned in the United States. If we hope to effectively make progress on the crises we face, it is essential that we stop looking at them as separate issues. They are intersectional; we cannot address them individually. And they demand an informed and coordinated approach from this administration.
They begin with family planning.
Family planning is an economic issue: The U.N. has called the United States the most unequal society in the developed world. Right now, nearly 40% of children in the U.S. live in or near poverty. Unequal opportunities translate into unequal lifelong outcomes by the time children reach age 5. Decades of research indicate that better family planning is the most effective way to break the cycle of poverty. It enables future parents to pursue higher education and achieve career stability, allowing them greater lifetime earning power for families that sets children up for greater achievement and welfare outcomes.
Family planning is a health issue: We have seen both COVID-19 and climate-affected environments disproportionately affect the health of low-income and BIPOC communities. This occurs because economic disparities among these groups translate into health inequalities.
Family planning is a climate issue: Unsustainable population growth is undoing the work to curb carbon and other emissions. It is time to look beyond fossil fuels to the primary and fundamental driver of the climate crisis. We must account for a sustainable population growth if we are serious about reversing course on climate and promising a healthy, habitable future for the next generation.
The policies of the United States and other nations will severely harm future generations if we do not make changes now. Improving the way we plan families is the most important investment we can make for the health and well-being for all children.
Here are three things the Biden administration must do in 2021 to address the social, health, and ecological crises we face today:
Respond to the Climate Crisis by Targeting Its Fundamental Driver
The most effective long-term way to mitigate the climate crisis is by promoting smaller families for all. This move can have 20 times the impact of other policy choices. And there are now clear policy levers that would promote smaller families, and well as parental readiness before having children as another means of improving child welfare. Focusing on building resilient future generations would go beyond the Green New Deal, which lacked this key focus. It would move us toward a true social contract to come together as free and equal people, but one correctly designed to be 360-degree intergenerational.
Multiple studies have confirmed the incomparable impact of new family planning policies. Yet governments and industries that are accustomed to unsustainable population growth have instead embarked on policy initiatives designed to push women to have children.
Your administration has the opportunity to lead on this issue, in part by promoting tax reforms that convert traditional child tax credits into Fair Start baby bonds designed to promote smaller and equitable families. In short? Convert incentives for all people to have kids into a steeply progressive tax system that incentivizes everyone to wait until they are truly ready to parent and to work together to have smaller families with a level entry field for every child.
It should be the administration’s policy that the United States will lead in helping the world reach an optimal population range as soon as possible. This population will be built around the human right to nature rather than continued nationalistic and unsustainable growth policies that consider babies to be economic inputs, treat nature as a resource, and exacerbate the climate crisis, inequity, and child poverty.
Respond to COVID-19 by Making Future Generations More Resilient
In a recent dialogue between Having Kids and the CDC, the agency noted the connection between reduced birth rates and the beneficial impact on our ability to respond to COVID-19. In short? Poor family planning hurts public health, creates overcrowding, and sets the stage for the next public health crisis.
We propose reforming federal family planning policies through forthcoming legislation designed to respond to COVID-19. And we urge cementing these changes by reforming Title X to promote a child’s equitable start in life as the guide-star value. Stimulus packages and regulatory reform provide a unique opportunity to stabilize today’s families while protecting future generations.
Become a World Leader in Human Rights-Based Family Planning
Family planning is a universal human right, and the United States can become a leader in the ongoing development of this right around the world. The best way would be to explicitly support a growing coalition’s call for the United Nations Secretary General to issue an informal statement embracing family planning reform as the first and most fundamental means of addressing the world’s key social and ecological crises, and moving toward the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.
By 2100, world population could vary by billions of people depending on whether the average woman in the world has one child more or one child fewer.
Simply stated, the current family planning model used by the United Nations was developed before awareness of climate change, the disproportionate impact of early childhood development on human well-being, and how birth conditions and early development exacerbate inequality and other factors. This old model makes our future less secure, healthy, and equitable.
The right to have children comes with responsibilities for parents and for 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 its political illegitimacy.
The United States should take the lead in urging the United Nations to abandon its current family planning modeling in favor of a truly future child-centric and human rights-based Fair Start approach. Our recent letter to the heads of the UNFPA and UNICEF detail the change.
We are hopeful for important progress to be made as we usher in an administration that believes in science and the advancement of human welfare. With these three steps, we believe the Biden administration can become a leader in promoting the evolution of our family planning systems to guarantee every child a fair start in life.
Matthew Yglesias’ new book, “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger,” is the thought experiment the title implies: exploring policies that might increase the population of the country threefold by using incentives to create larger families.
Cassie King with Having Kids has a message and invitation for Matthew:
The book has been harshly critiqued by most reviewers for its admiration of China and its placing economic growth before human rights, confusing quantitative growth with sustainable human development, ignoring and naively dismissing the environmental consequences of its proposal (the sort of thinking that created the climate crisis), reinforcing a patriarchal vision of women as mothers, and more.
All kids have a fundamental human right, ecologically and socially, to a #fairstart in life. It’s the first human right. Help us secure it against those who threaten our future.
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, enables people like Yglesias to promote economic growth over human rights, 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 noninclusive 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 that focuses on what parents want toward a new model that focuses on what all kids need. The new model, called Fair Start family planning, 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.
The most effective way to protect children, animals, our environment, and equality is by changing from family planning policies that focus on what parents want to policies that ensure future children what they need, both ecologically and socially.
The sooner you speak out, the better our and our kids’ future will be.
There are massive advantages to planning smaller and more equitable families.
It enables greater empowerment for women, more individual attention and more resources invested in each child, greater achievement in school, and more engaged, less crowded communities. But most importantly, research indicated that smaller families are better for kids. Smaller families also leave time, energy and resources for parents to invest in their community, and to ensure that the world their children will inherit is better and more equitable than the one we experience today. This list is by no means exhaustive. The bigger picture is that families and communities benefit. Read more reasons to have a small and more equitable family.
Have you chosen to have just one or two kids? Send us a video and tell us why. Email info@fairstartmovement.org
Pope Francis recently renewed his plea for economic equity in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, lamenting the failures of free-market capitalism as the massive gap between rich and poor grows. But is he missing a simple truth?
If we want to effectively address economic inequity, as well as extreme child poverty and the climate crisis, we have to start at the source. Universal family planning reforms that ensure every child a fair start in life are the most effective way to create equity, eliminate poverty, and restore the nature created by the god Pope Francis worships.
Promoting that change does not require any changes in the Vatican’s position on contraception or abortion; it simply takes calling for an equity-based standard for policymaking and prioritization in the redistribution of resources. Having Kids has a history of engaging the Vatican on issues around creating a more sustainable and equitable world.
Urge Pope Francis and addressing to make good on his words and support #fairstart reform. Write him by mail and address it to His Holiness Pope Francis, Apostolic Palace, 00120 Vatican City.
