Fair Start Movement

Category: Children’s Rights

  • Fair Start Family Planning: The Frontier of Social Justice?

    Fair Start Family Planning: The Frontier of Social Justice?

    The idea that every kid deserves a fair start in life — and that ensuring this fair start is the most effective way to protect our environment, animals, and democracy — is gaining traction. From Salon to Newsweek, media are starting to realize how treating family planning as a private matter has created the social and ecological crises that threaten our future. That realization is supported by a raft of peer-reviewed publications, which also light a pathway for policies that can get us and our kids out of the nightmare we are creating for them:

    ·         We know kids all need a fair start in life to succeed, and Fair Start judicial orders are a simple way to legislate and constitutionalize family planning reform.

    ·         Those orders can be part of comprehensive state and federal legislation recognizing the incomparable impact of better family planning. It’s the most effective way to help kids, animals, and the environment — in many cases, 10 to 20 times more effectively than downstream approaches.

    ·         What’s a practical way to ensure fair starts? Recent studies suggest that redistributing resources from the wealthy to incentivize parents to work together to level the playing field at birth, and to improve initial conditions for all kids, will work.

    ·         Reforming our policies to give every kid a fair start in life is the only way to build democracy from the ground up and comprise the future of people truly capable of self-rule.

    Learn more about the only truly fundamental social justice reform at HavingKids.org.

  • Why Conservatives Should Support Family Planning Reform

    Why Conservatives Should Support Family Planning Reform

    David Brooks recently made an argument in The New York Times that should resonate with conservatives: Inequity, and many other related crises, stem from the family and the way we raise our kids. His argument speaks to the sense among most conservatives that deep changes in our culture, and the decline of the family as a preparative institution, is the root of many evils from debilitating loneliness to widespread drug addiction.

    But Brooks stopped short of offering a truly effective solution to the problem. Why? Any solution would have to start with an obvious but controversial truism: If we want to ensure families prepare children to succeed, we need to start before those children are born and actually ensure that parents are ready to raise and develop children responsibly. That process does not happen magically.

    How Family Planning Should Be Reformed

    It requires reforming the way we plan families. How, exactly? As a recent Having Kids research paper published in the Loyola Chicago Law Review pointed out, one step forward would be to successfully incentivize prospective parents to wait to have kids until those would-be parents have met certain milestones. The cost savings of taking these steps to ensure responsible parenting are unparalleled, especially when we factor in the huge impact on pressing crises like climate change and extreme child poverty.

    In other words, it’s good to make sure the state will not have to pay the costs of parents failing to actually raise the kids they have, rather than our paying taxes to make sure the state continues to do a horrible job of post-hoc parenting. Moreover, this process can reduce population growth and the big government, centralization of power, and mind-numbing bureaucracy that comes with it. All this moves us toward governance that’s actually representative of the people themselves. That vision of freedom is the opposite of Mao’s policy of pushing women to have more kids, which made China, now with well over 1 billion people, the greatest threat to freedom in the world today.

    In short, ensuring every kid a fair start in life, in part by paying would-be parents to prepare, is a policy that works. Conservatives should support family planning reform because it embodies these fundamental conservative values:
    • Promoting responsible parenting and families
    • Ensuring our promotion of responsible parenting is efficient by acting before problems arise, and
    • Guaranteeing the American idea of freedom, or personal autonomy, that is possible only in a democracy of well-prepared citizens capable of self-rule and with true access to equal opportunities in life.

    Where Personal Freedom Really Begins

    There is, of course, a push among conservatives to ignore values like responsible parenting, fair starts in life, and participatory democracy in favor of policies that create kids as consumers, future workers, and compliant taxpayers because promoting a high birth rate will inflate the economy. That is simply selling out our values and foisting on our kids the costs of bad parenting in what Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called a pyramid Ponzi scheme. We are a democracy before we are an economy, and there is no reasonable conception of personal freedom that does not start with accounting for and developing the people who actually constitute our political systems and, as such, have power over us. And accounting for future citizens of our democracy means ensuring responsible parenting.

    The many who gave their lives to protect what they perceived to be a unique form of freedom did not die so that the United States could become a threat to itself, ecologically through the climate and other environmental crises, and socially through the decline of the family as an institution that prepares kids for functional society. Better family planning is our best solution to both the environmental and social problems we face.

    Learn more here.

  • Why Good Family Planning Is the First Human Right and Responsibility

    Why Good Family Planning Is the First Human Right and Responsibility

    Do the family planning policies in your country ensure all children receive what they need to succeed and a fair start in life relative to other kids? Do they ensure that the child will have a meaningful democratic role in making the rules under which they live, and the freedom and security of the natural world around them? If not, then those policies and the governments that push them are fundamentally illegitimate, or “preconstitutional,” and the people may reverse the violations by all means effective.

    This is the claim Having Kids researchers recently published the Willamette Law Review, and the article is now suggested reading on the influential Legal Theory Blog administered by Georgetown law professor Larry Solum. In short? For people to be free, their governments have to be legitimate; to be legitimate, governments have to be inclusive of the people they claim to represent; and to be inclusive, they first have to comprehensively account (from a logical baseline) for each child, as well as the conditions in which that child is born, develops, and becomes able to meaningfully participate in democracy. In other words, family planning policies have to limit and intergenerationally decentralize the power each of us exerts over one another. Those policies have to free us from one another.

    TAKE ACTION: The United Nations was designed to protect international peace and security, in part by protecting human rights. Instead, leadership there has promoted the interests of illegitimate governments that exploit, rather than invest in, future generations. Urge them to reverse course and do the right thing: https://fairstartmovement.org/uncandobetter/

  • Kate Middleton: Can We Improve Our Kids’ Future?

    Kate Middleton: Can We Improve Our Kids’ Future?

    Having Kids has quite a history urging the royal family to take the lead on helping the world transition from a parent-focused family planning model to a child-focused model. It started with our famous open letter to Kate Middleton and Prince William. It later included our celebrating Meghan Markle’s and Prince Harry’s public announcement that they were choosing a smaller family for environmental reasons.

    A slew of recent articles in Marie Claire, Express UK, and the International Business Times now question whether we are giving good advice. The truth is, Having Kids wants the best future for all children. And the facts don’t lie: The most effective way to fight the biggest crises facing our world — including the climate crisis, child poverty, and growing inequity — is through family planning that promotes smaller and more equitable families. By having smaller families, we can invest more time, love, energy, and resources in every child. Better family planning will also ensure a smaller and more resilient population more capable of thriving in the degraded ecology of the future.

    If we truly love children, including Prince Louis of Cambridge, we will actually do that which protects their collective future. And the only way to do that, given the self-exacerbating collective action problem at the heart of our family planning system, is to start to work together to plan the best families we can.

    Take action: Urge the editors of Marie Claire, Express UK, and the International Business Times, via these links or the contact information available on their websites, to tell the whole story of why Having Kids spoke out to the royals and why we will keep doing so.

  • World Population Day: Target the People Threatening Our Future

    World Population Day: Target the People Threatening Our Future

    A universal policy promoting smaller and more equitable families is the most effective way to protect our future – ten to twenty times more effective than other policy reforms.

    The Secretary General of the United Nations must take the lead here, and make informal statements that will help change the way we all plan families. He can choose not to put population growth and the economic bubble it creates above human rights and the right to a Fair Start in life, which is the first and most important human right. If he does not change course, he is choosing to exploit and endanger future children, rather than support a system in which we collectively invest more in each child by changing and improving the conditions in which they are born. He gave his own two kids a privileged start in life relative to the poor children of the world, but it does not have to be that way.

    As Secretary General he is obligated to speak the truth of human rights to the powers of the world, his silence on this issue threatens his legitimacy, and it will lead to the people rising over him to ensure the better future we all deserve.

    TAKE ACTION: Engage the Secretary General directly to do what human rights require, and to support a Fair Start in life for all kids: 1) Email Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesman for the Secretary-General, at dujarric@un.org, 2) contact the United Nations at 212-963-4475, or 3) engage the Secretary General in person to demand action.

  • Covid-19 and Family Planning: Get the Facts

    Covid-19 and Family Planning: Get the Facts

    As the pandemic kills millions, governments and public health officials rarely want to talk about family planning and the factors that fundamentally drive pandemics. Why? Because these officials are intentionally relying on unsustainable family planning models designed to promote economic growth, but which also exacerbate the threat and impact of pandemics.

    The decision to stick with these old models cost lives, and will cost more.

    Here are the facts.

    • 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.

    These factors are currently moving in a direction that exacerbate the threat and impact of things like Covid-19. We are moving in the wrong direction. Right now the United Nations takes the position that these factors are not our collective concern.

    That makes no sense. And because of that position, countless pregnant women are now at severe risk from Covid-19. Governments and public health officials dropped the ball by not taking family planning more seriously in the past, and now we are paying the price. If we want to address the fundamental drivers of social and ecological crises like Covid-19 we will change the way we plan families, and begin to constitute legitimate and democratic communities, not bloated economies incapable of dealing with threats to public health.

    TAKE ACTION: Urge world leadership to do what they should have done long ago, and adopt universal, sustainable and equitable family planning policies.

  • The Fourth of July: Can We Really Become Free?

    Freedom is a complex concept that has little to do with beer and fireworks, and more to do with a form of political evolution few people understand. People like Elon Musk invoking the concept to harm others when he reopened factories despite Covid-19 shutdown orders, and Donald Trump creating a caveman’s rendering of the holiday complete with a display of force, don’t help. That’s how children think about freedom, and it’s reminiscent of the movie Team America.

    On the other side of the political spectrum we have Elizabeth Warren, and her plans to obligate us to pay for other parents’ child care with no assurances that those parents are ready to be good parents, or will have ecologically sustainable small families. Does being part of this country really mean we have to sign up for that obligation, irrespective of what it will do to our future? Is the government going to act as a sort of meta-parent going forward, despite the fact that it’s usually horrible at doing so?

    There is a better way to think about freedom, and to take the action necessary to actually achieve it. First, we can realize that true change comes by thinking ahead, focusing on the way we plan families. Second, we can make sure future children have the freedom to equal opportunies in life by accounting for the conditions in which they are born, and designing small family policies that also urge prospective parents to redistribute resources in very particular ways. Third, we can make sure future children will have freedom from others, and from social threats like the climate crisis and Covid-19, that is only possible in smaller democracies where each voice is heard and matters, and communities are surrounded by a restored, safe and natural environment.

    We pursue this fredom it by decentralizing corporate and governmental concentrations of power and distributing them equitably into future generations. And because we are talking about literally building legitimate democractic communities through the people who will actually comprise them, we may do so by all means effective.

    Let’s take action to truly become free people, and make this holiday mean something.

  • Real Animal Rights Starts With Fair Start Family Planning

    Real Animal Rights Starts With Fair Start Family Planning

    Having Kids researchers recently published an article in Animal People Forum.

    The thesis: How could there be a coherent conception of nonhuman rights that does not account for the creation of the humans that torture, consume. and drive nonhumans into extinction? It’s hard to see how that would be possible.

    Instead, animal rights would have to start with some assessment of what the existential relationship should be between humans and nonhumans. When we engage in that assessment we find that compassion for nonhumans and humans align, and that compassion counsels us to create smaller human families, invest more in each child using equity as our guidestar, and use all means effective to dentralize bloated nation states and massive monopoly corporations into smaller democratic communities comprised of highly empathetic people capable of actual self-rule. Read the full Animal People Forum article here.

  • Fair Start Family Planning: Using One Problem to Solve Others

    Fair Start Family Planning: Using One Problem to Solve Others

    The pandemic is a good time for the uber-wealthy, the few thousand billionaires who together hold more wealth than 60% of the people on this planet, to worry about losing their place in the world’s pecking order. History has shown that plagues and pandemics are when transitions of power often happen, when the balance between rich and poor has historically shifted. And it’s hard to believe that targeting these people for a fairer distribution of power would be unjust.

    But can we use inequity to solve other problems at the same time?

    What if we leveled the playing field for kids through new family planning policies that created socially and ecologically regenerative communities? There is a policy pathway. In short, it involves gearing the progressive distribution of resources around financially incentivizing all parents to a) be ready before they have children, b) to work together to give each child born a fair start in life, and c) to embrace smaller and more sustainable families that make all of this possible. In short, the rich would pay to level the playing field for the future children of the poor.   

    This would not only address inequity, but it would also represent the most effective way to mitigate the climate and other ecological crises, and to build human rights and democracy. Fair Start family planning gives whole new meaning to the idea of living our values. And because Fair Start family planning is the fundamental human right, it overrides other rights, including the property rights of the wealthy.

    Let’s use one problem to constructively solve many others. Learn more here about the Fair Start model.