Fair Start Movement

Category: Children’s Rights

  • Meghan and Harry Support Smaller Families. When Will Environmental Orgs?

    Meghan and Harry Support Smaller Families. When Will Environmental Orgs?

    Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are not afraid to break taboos and do what’s right. Recently, they talked about their fears and hopes for their son Archie’s future, given the way humans are destroying the planet and our kids’ futures. They took a bold step last year, promoting the idea of smaller families as the most effective way by far to protect the future.

    They are opening a conversation and laying the pathway for polices that promote sustinable and equitable family planning. Environmental organizations should be leading the charge but have been hesitant to do so, fearing backlash from donors. Urge them to stand up and support the most effective long-term solution to our biggest social and ecological crises.

    Contact the heads of these key organziations and urge them to support Fair Start family planning or other models that are as effective:

    Tweet:
    • Carter Roberts, @Carter_Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund
    • Annie Leonard, @AnnieMLeonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA
    • Michael Brune, @bruneski, executive director of the Sierra Club
    and urge them to take a stand on the most effective way to protect our future: policies that promote sustainable and equitable family planning.

  • Family Planning After Coronavirus: Why We Need Male Contraception

    Family Planning After Coronavirus: Why We Need Male Contraception

    By Sarah Johnson

    I can’t help but admire the strength and resilience I see on display every day in my nursing colleagues with whom I’ve served for the past 22 years. Like many Americans, we confront this next phase of the epidemic with a mix of worry and hope. 

    However, as medical practitioners on the front lines battling the coronavirus, it is impossible for us to ignore a feature of American life that the virus has made all too clear: the deep inequality facing communities of color, who are dealing with disproportionate infection and death rates from COVID-19, as well as longer-term health challenges like lack of access to birth control. In these communities, the epidemic will cast a long shadow — not only as families struggle to recover spiritually and economically, but as young women navigate critical moments of their lives with limited or nonexistent support from medical experts. 

    For our society to rebound, we must understand and address the root causes of the inequality that the virus has laid bare. Family planning has played a significant role in improving the lives of women and people of color since it was declared a human right, but we still have a ways to go. As we imagine a world after the arrival of this pandemic, we must ensure that the U.S.’ outdated family planning model is replaced in order to address lingering inequality and to prioritize children and communities over corporations and profits. A common-sense set of solutions is the “male pill” and long-acting, reversible male contraceptives such as Contraline and the RISUG. If fully tested and approved in the U.S., such options could empower men to share more equally in family planning, leveraging their own bodies. And studies indicate that men may be open to the idea.

    This is why Having Kids calls upon the United States Congress and the National Institute of Health to prioritize the development and deployment of male contraceptives. 

    Why Male Contraception Is Essential

    Why is male contraception important? Research shows that smaller families benefit children. It also indicates that the economic disadvantage correlated with larger families tends to perpetuate economic inequality that undermines democracy by leaving undue influence in the hands of the few. Yet in the name of economic growth, we see corporations targeting moms with costly ad campaigns to have more children for the purpose of growing the consumer base. We see sexual stimulants prioritized over birth control, and we see the U.S. tax system incentivizing larger families when incentivizing delays in pregnancy may better position women and children for equality. Economic growth-based family planning not only puts in question the planet that we’ll be able to pass down to our children, but it also leaves us more susceptible to future pandemics due to population overcrowding and decreased distance between humans and animals.

    Today in the United States, nearly half of pregnancies unintended, costing us about $15 billion each year. I remember several years ago telling one of my patients, a 37-year-old African American woman in Oakland, Calif., that her pregnancy test had come back positive. She instantly froze and began to cry. She wanted the baby, but she did not have the financial resources to take care of the child. She was then faced with a very difficult decision. Scenes like this play out every day across America and the world. 

    In a few short months, the pandemic has made family planning even more difficult. Condom shortages and lack of access to birth control during this social distancing period can lead to serious socioeconomic consequences for young couples. Going forward, we must empower men with equal opportunity to safely participate in their right to family planning using their own bodies. 

    Male Birth Control and Modern Family Planning

    What options are already on the table? Aside from the “pullout” method and abstinence, there are more than 12 options for pregnancy prevention available to women. Meanwhile, two options are available to men on the U.S. market: condoms or vasectomy. While there have been several attempts over the past several decades at developing viable options for males, critics say that sexism may be the largest barrier, in part evidenced by the early termination of clinical trials on a male version of “the pill,” due to side effects these critics say women have been experiencing for decades.

    The obstacles in front of us are not insurmountable, and we cannot afford to decelerate on the road to scientific breakthrough. In today’s politically polarized America, any solution that pushes us forward while side-stepping traditional political divides should be a no-brainer. Falling squarely within the pre-fertilization category of birth control options, male contraceptives are less politically contentious, in part thanks to the current pope’s less stringent stance on contraceptives. Abortion tends to dominate the family planning public discourse, but the real conversation should be about modernizing family planning, so that women and their partners can have equal access to resources and information to plan better lives for themselves and their families. 

    Downstream approaches to improving children’s welfare are failing kids and endangering our future. The most effective way to eliminate the greatest threats to children, the environment, and our democracies is to ensure better conditions for every child from the moment they are born. Let’s start at the source. When communities and parents cooperatively embrace better family planning, we can invest more in every child and create the future we all deserve.

    For these reasons, we at Having Kids call upon the National Institute of Health and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, who lead the congressional committees on health that oversee family planning matters, to increase funding for the development of male contraceptives. 

    As we salute nurses for their work on the front lines of the pandemic, we should also think about the long-term resilience of our healthcare system and our communities, and how state-of-the-art family planning drives better patient outcomes for a healthier, better-functioning society.

    Sarah Johnson, a family nurse practitioner with 15 years serving patients in critical care and 22 years in allopathic medicine, graduated with an M.S. in Nursing with high honors from Georgetown University and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a founding board member of Having Kids, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness for The Fair Start Model, a human rights-based, child-focused approach to family planning.

  • Reframing Population and Family Planning to Focus on Justice

    Reframing Population and Family Planning to Focus on Justice

    Media are abuzz these days about women not having enough kids in order to grow economies. It’s an odd thing to hear, given that others are rightly pointing out that world population will continue to explode by billions of people in the decades to come, exacerbating the population-driven climate crisis and causing untold suffering. It’s also odd given that overcrowding and poor population health set the stage for the COVID-19 pandemic and the dismal reaction to it, and it’s setting the stage for the next pandemic.

    The debate centers on profound differences in values regarding what the differing camps want the world to look like in the future. 

    Are we missing a more important conversation about family planning and population growth?

    Prior family planning approaches have primarily framed having children with a narrow focus on what parents want more than what future children need. This ignores the intergenerational nature of that decision — the ethics of which probably matter more than any other area of human behavior. Thinking in terms of what parents want keeps our focus on the here and now, rather than on the future, and excludes the interests and needs of the future child, the communities we inhabit, and the world our children will impact. This short-term thinking and framing is hurting kids, animals, and the environment, furthering inequity, and preventing us from reaching modest sustainable development goals. 

    Right now, the way we think about population hides the way we are hurting kids. What if we could protect our future by giving children what they need? 

    Can we choose a better model that gives everyone more of what they need? The way we currently deal with population does little to protect our future, drives inequity that threatens everyone, and reduces the quality of our lives by ensuring an overcrowded world filled with people who did not get what they needed as they grew up. 

    Want something better? The key, discussed more below, involves interpreting our Constitution in an intergenerational way and shifting away from family planning systems that focus more on what parents want than what future children need. 

    This new approach involves a child-centric model that both recognizes the implications of our previous flawed family planning approaches as well as our obligations and duties to the children we are bringing into this world. If we don’t fix our fundamental conception of how we plan families, we will continue to create social and ecological crises that could have been averted. We can reframe the discussion away from population.

    Let’s start with the premise that framing is crucial.

    Whether we think about population or start from a different concept, framing could change everything about how we perceive the subject. Framing is the act of first defining, through the choice of initiating language, how people think about the subject matter under discussion. What does the word “population” bring to mind? The debate surrounding “population” tends to focus on quantity, and falls prey to the common human coginitive dissonance of temporal myopia by framing the issue as static – as a noun. This is misleading. Shouldn’t we think of people in the world, and the act of having kids, as more dynamic and qualitative than quantitative and static? Shouldn’t we talk about the behavior that precipitates population growth? Shouldn’t we consider future quality of life and orient our family planning laws and policies around what future children actually need? What good is talking about population change without a normative baseline, or optimum population range, against which to evaluate that change. 

    One way to decide how to frame or define a subject involves asking why we care about the matter. Rather than simply counting people, perhaps what really matters is how we fundamentally relate to them. 

    To create new possibilities and frames, we need to use new language. That language should recognize the central role the creation of new citizens plays in every social policy decision we make. Instead of approaching family planning and population in the narrow way we have, we should talk about it with a broader frame that encompasses four interconnected and inextricable things we cannot avoid in the act of having kids:

    1. The quantity of the people we create.

    2. Their qualities, such as empathy, and other key traits that determine how people socialize. 

    3. Their positioning in life relative to other children.

    4. Their relation to their ecologies.

    The quantity of the people we create

    The current concept of population does capture well the quantitative impacts of having kids, which are enormous, acting as a force multiplier of things like catastrophic greenhouse gas emissions. But when we talk about overpopulation, the question remains: over what? How do we know what an optimal population will be? How could we know without first having decided on the ethics of having the kids that will create the population?

    This is where values other than quantities of persons come in. 

    Right now, we tend to think of population growth as inevitable. What if we had the choice to protect our future instead? 

    The qualities and traits of these children

    The concept of population does not capture the qualitative nature of creating another person, which includes things like the most crucial period of childhood development, such as the development of qualities that determine how well we empathize and socialize with other people. These are inextricable from personal well-being and childhood development, rights guaranteed by international treaties like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child but rarely delivered.

    The current concept of population hides the way our creation determines much about who we are. This includes qualities about us that impact our ecology — such as whether we identify as consumers and workers in our economies or whether feel we should live in democracies where we have meaningful roles in making the rules under which we live (i.e., whether we see ourselves in terms of shopping malls or town halls). The former can tolerate high populations with lower levels of education; that would anathema to the latter. We need a concept and a language that captures this. It should account for how having kids changes the nature of society — and the quality of our lives — by changing the qualities of the people who comprise it. 

    Their position in life relative to other children

    The concept of population does not capture that we cannot create children without determining their positions relative to other children. This includes the opportunities they have in life, with some kids today born billionaires and others born slaves. The way we currently think of population buries the way the act of having children creates inequity. This positioning includes the inevitable estrangement from one another that comes with population growth. We need a concept that accounts for how having kids determines how those kids stand in relation to one another. We also need a concept that connects this positioning, and economic inequality, to the other aspects of family planning, such as the environmental impact, which has been well-established. 

    Right now, the simple idea of population hides the way some parents exacerbate the divide between rich and poor and threaten social stability. What if everyone had equal opportunities in life instead? 

    Their relations to their ecology

    The concept of population does not capture the simple fact that we alter the ecologies children need to thrive by the very act of having them — consider the shortening of pregnancies due to the population-driven climate crisis. What does that mean for the future ecology our kids will experience? Mass extinctions, accelerating climate change, dying oceans, increased risk of pandemics, crowded cities with drastic inequality — these are all crises we now know we and our kids will face. We need language that captures this dynamism and its impact on quality of life. We need language that also accounts for this sobering fact and that the communities where we have children (e.g., the industrialized world versus elsewhere) vary dramatically in terms of their ecological impacts. 

    Can we devise a way of cooperatively planning our families that improves our ecology rather than degrading it? 

    Taking seriously these four aspects could help us shift the frame from the quantitative idea of population to the qualitative nature of creating children, the communities they will compose, and the relation of those communities to the ecology they require to thrive. This will not happen overnight. We need to start by changing the conversation.

    When population is framed with this broader set of criteria, it becomes clear that population is the central consideration for all social policy. Population is not some exogenous policy area we can choose to work in or to ignore. The people on the planet today, and how they limit what’s possible, are largely the product of what was done or not done in past family planning systems. We just have to shift and temporalize our thinking, or overcome the cognitive dissonance of temporal myopia that makes it hard for us as humans to see this. If a policy choice involves people, it involves family planning. Family planning, and the failure to plan, is the foundation of everything social. People are the first building blocks of any policy, and that which creates people, develops their traits, and gives them agency most accounts — and in free societies should most account — for the quality of life on this planet.

    Replacing the simplistic idea of population with the fuller and more accurate concept of constituting gets us more. 

    If we care about the future, and our kids’ futures, shouldn’t we care about future generations, the conditions into which they are born, and the people they will become?

    Given that the population is always changing and is the product of our actions, it’s more accurate to use a verb and to focus on the cause (having kids) before the effect (population growth). The concept of “constituting,” as in the reference to “We the People” in the United States’ and other constitutions, could be ideal. Just the way the climate crisis is not a thing but a process, and more relational than individualized, we are not a static people historically constituted, but a people who are constituting their own nation in a dynamic and ongoing way. 

    Notice how constituting gels with the ideal of “child-centric” family planning — as in, “We the people constitute our future.” The thinking is qualitative, forward-looking, committed to freedom, justice, and equity, and the most effective way to deal with many of the crises we face today. Contrasted with the simplistic concept of population, which hides what’s at stake, the idea of constituting speaks to the dynamic and overriding question of intergenerational justice. 

    Constitutions derive from the idea of people coming together consensually, as free and equal people, to make the rules under which they will live. Constitutions, and the act of constituting, are emancipatory, and meant to capture the complex idea that we can become free by coming together if we do so under very specific conditions. If we apply the idea of constituting intergenerationally, to the act of having kids, it can capture the values and meanings the concept of population cannot. “Constituting” as a concept is ideal for another reason – it’s the perspective, lens, or frame we would  use when justifying the power other people – in the social contract – have over us. 

    In other words, what matters most is not the idea of population as numbers, but the formation of groups of people at the most fundamental level, where other people have power over us. That is what we have to first account for: who the “We the People” are and will be. The social contract, and the legitimacy of government, meant that we should be coming together as free and equal people. But that opportunity actually happens all the time — with every child born. The process is not static; it’s dynamic. The key source of justified governance is not some antiquated document or written constitution to which most people have no relation. It is the constant constituting or re-creation of actual people through family planning. And the key will be moving past a system that treats people as economic inputs to one that creates truly democratic communities where people control the rules under which they live. 

    Remember, framing matters. Technically, we were not constituted as a nation; if we value each person equally, we have to believe that we are constantly reconstituting as future children enter the word. “Constituting” captures, much better than “population,” the antecedent, relational, normative, dynamic, and endogenous nature of the thing, because it proceeds from a perspective of needing to justify the social organization (or the social contract) around us or the power others have over us. That’s the perspective from which free and equal people would orient.

    “Constituting,” as opposed to “population,” captures the fundamental human rights-based lens or perspective that free people would have when thinking about the people with whom they share communities: How is the power others have over us justified? Are we constituting a community of free and equal people, or something else, such as a hierarchical economy? What control do you really have over the rules under which you are forced to live? Aren’t you worth more than being one vote lost in a sea of millions of votes for presidents and other antiquated figureheads with massive control over our lives?  

    If we think in terms of the value-heavy verb of constituting and the four facets above that it captures, we are changing the frame and the way we think about the creation of the people with whom we share the world. This changes the debate. Notice how George Monbiot dismisses the relevance of population growth when critiquing Michael Moore’s new film “Planet of the Humans.” But how can humans be irrelevant to an anthropogenic climate crisis? If we unpack the idea of population, as discussed above, we find a concept that is more qualitative than quantitative, dynamic than static, endogenous than exogenous, normative than descriptive, and multifaceted rather than one-sided and numeric. Monbiot could reframe his thinking on this issue and much more effectively advance the environmental values we all share. 

    Why does this framing change matter? 

    For some, a shift in framing lets them see past myths, such as that population, or the people with whom we share and will share the world, is amorphous and out of our control. Or the myth that some kids are born into fortunate conditions, with what they need to succeed in life, while others are simply not. That’s not the case. Our birth conditions have nothing to do with fortune, God, or some invisible force at work. That is what the wealthiest among us, many of whom inherited and did nothing to earn their benefits, want us to believe. Inequity at birth is simply humans’ failure to ensure fair start family planning

    And for others, moving past the concept of population, and toward constituting, goes past simple myth-breaking and will lead to effective ways to promote human freedom. 

    The U.S. Constitution was born of a revolution to ensure that people could constitute independent, or free and equal, people. That meant both freedom from others, and the freedom to choose valuable options in one’s life, or freedom of opportunity. 

    But for many reasons, the Constitution was never applied intergenerationally. 

    And there is no way to be free from other people, or for each person to have equal opportunities, without accounting for the quantities, qualities, and relative positioning of people entering the world. How we are experiencing the COVID-19 crisis is a perfect example: The chances of us contracting the disease, of the resources each person has to avoid the disease and get help if we contract it, how we are changing our environment to increase the risk of the next pandemic, etc. — all are first and foremost contingent on our quantities, qualities, inequities, etc. Population density, vast inequities in how the disease impacts people, the presence of underlying health conditions and other vulnerabilities, the way anthropogenic environmental impacts are setting the stage for the next pandemic, and more all flow from our family planning systems. 

    And because we have ignored those factors, as well as for other reasons, human rights and democracy are in decline today. Instead of constituting communities of people where everyone has a voice over the rules, we have media pushing women to have kids in failing social systems, and in the face of ecological crisis, to further inflate the economy. Instead of seeing communities as free and equal people in town halls, the politicians, pundits, and companies pushing women to have babies envision a world of crowded shopping malls. But how you would see people and want them to be in a democratic town hall, versus a shopping mall, is very different. 

    People who want to grow economies push women to have more kids, with less investment in each child, and no minimum level of welfare, or equity, for each child born. In these schemes, people are just economic inputs, rather than citizens who must be sufficiently developed to co-rule their democracies. In these constant-growth schemes, it’s OK to push more and more children through failing educational, welfare, healthcare, and other systems. In this worldview, it’s perfectly acceptable — if not desirable — that the average American adult reads at the level of an eighth-grader. 

    The idea of endless growth proceeds from state-based, and top-down, views of people as consumers and labor, rather than a bottom-up view of people as citizens with control over the world around them. Constant-growth systems push in the opposite direction from inclusive family planning systems that would create, or constitute, true democracies of capable and self-determining people. 

    The constant-growth worldview is antithetical to the personal autonomy that would be promoted and protected by a human right to nature, guaranteed minimum levels of well-being for children, and limitations on the right of abusive parents to have unlimited numbers of children who will be seized and spend much of their lives in state custody. 

    Make no mistake: The people pushing poor family planning because they see babies as money are hurting people — and at the most fundamental level. They take no care to avoid children being born into horrible conditions, they further a culture in which women are expected to have children, they exacerbate the climate and other ecological crises, and they ensure the dominance of massive economic systems where the average citizen has no effective role in making the rules under which they live.

    We can reverse the exploitation of future generations, and nature, by using Fair Start family planning to move resources from the entities at the top, both public and private, who have benefited from growth at cost to kids and our communities, and instead investing those resources in ways that give kids a fair start in life. 

    How does that work? Rules like property rights and tax obligations come after, and are subordinate to, the family planning rules that determine our creation. In other words, we are before we do. Because constituting comes first and involves the very first rights and obligations that lead us to become free and equal, the process overrides other rights and obligations — such as property claims and tax obligations — that interfere. The process of constituting — and thereby legitimating through the creation of our societies — overrides everything. The right to a fair start in life, and the process of constituting democracies filled with people who get what they need in their childhoods, is the first human right that puts the human in human rights. It comes first. 

    If the conservative-minded wish to avoid paying taxes, why not see that money be used more effectively, to constitute future generations in ways that ensure responsible parenting, and a safe and secure world for our kids? If the liberal-minded worry about the uber-rich using their wealth to oppress others, why not properly and effectively allocate that wealth based on the dynamic nature of our constantly constituting new societies? 

    We can truly constitute from the roots up. Our governance remains relatively preconstitutional, and illegitimate, until we do. We have a right to protect our future.

    Let’s move past the concept of population, which you by now may recognize as a concept used for centralized state and corporate planning and control, rather than valuing people qualitatively, and toward the action of constituting free and equal societies. We cannot be free until we account for and include the people with whom we do and will share this world, the way we would in a democratic town hall, rather than ignoring them the way we would in a shopping mall. 

    Where do we go from here?

    It’s time for another American revolution. But this time, it should be a bottom-up intergenerational revolution that, simply by demanding more for each child, actually ensures the constitution of capable people that democracies require. The social contract works only if it is made intergenerational and if we constitute as such. Doing so will allow us to build stable communities where we commit to one another and embrace our obligations to our neighbors, our shared political life, and the planet. It will create the opportunity for a more meaningful sense of self and a more active role in our relationships with others. It is also our best chance at avoiding many of the existential risks humanity faces.

    The revolution begins with parents demanding the resources they need, and deserve, from those who are destroying our future so that parens can give all kids a fair start in life. It’s vital to understand constituting here: We have a right to take the resources at the top of our economic pyramid because the ongoing act of justly reconstituting ourselves as free and equal communities always comes first. A child’s right to a fair start is the first and overriding human right that overrides other claims, and ensuring it is the best way to protect our future and our quality of life. Parents have a right to those resources in exchange for responsible and cooperative planning, and it’s time we help parents take them. 

    If we are constantly constituting our legalities, rather than have been historically constituted, then no entitlements proceed the need to redistribute power in ways that assure that “we the people” are coming together — intergenerationally — as free and equal people. That simple and antecedent override would allow us to constitute free and equal communities by any means effective.

    Change the way you see these issues. It’s not about population; it’s about constituting our future. It’s not about numbers; it’s about our and our kids’ quality of life. 

    TAKE ACTION: We can start the process of constituting free and equal communities in a dozen ways, including moving toward child-centric family planning. Choose one today by clicking here and do what’s most effective to protect your future. 

  • Effective Planned Parenthood: Offering Children a Quality Lifestyle and Contributing to Planetary Sustainability

    Effective Planned Parenthood: Offering Children a Quality Lifestyle and Contributing to Planetary Sustainability

    By Betty Martin-Finneran, Ph.D.

    As I reflect on my lived experience of ineffective, accidental parenthood, this famous quote comes to mind: “I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor; rich is better.” This quote has been attributed to both Mae West and Sophie Tucker, but who cares who said it? I will put it bluntly: Too many hungry mouths to feed will slow down your progress and your share of the riches of life. I believe that most of us want to be rich, although many will not admit it.

    Growing up in a large family had the downside of providing me with a poverty consciousness as opposed to a consciousness of wealth, because I grew up in a household in which there were not enough financial resources to sustain the needs of 10 children. Accidental childbirth was the rule, not the exception, in the 1950s. I was fortunate. I loved to read about ordinary people who overcame challenges of all types. Fed up with living a poverty lifestyle, I joined the Air Force after graduating from high school. My tour in the Air Force funded the start of my college education and inspired me to become an educator.

    As a teacher and tutor, I interact with parents from many socioeconomic levels. It seems to me that like my parents, far too many of these parents were not clear about their motives for parenting. I wonder whether the partners had a clear communication about bringing a child into the world beforehand: Did they consider their financial readiness to provide a quality lifestyle for a child?

    Effective vs. Ineffective Parenting


    I have had the pleasure of teaching and tutoring children whose parents are financially prepared for effective parenting. These parents have sufficient financial resources to not only send their children to expensive private schools, but also to hire tutorial services to supplement the child’s education as needed. It has been my experience, as a teacher and tutor, that the recipients of ineffective planned parenthood struggle, fight for survival resources, and live in fear. Frustrated by their parents’ and society’s inability to give them access to the resources they so desperately needed from birth, marginalized children tend to join gangs and are not interested in obtaining an education. Survival of their microcosmic society matters most.

    In contrast, I have noticed that the attitudes of the children who are recipients of effective planned parenting show signs of making positive contributions to the planet’s sustainability. Without the fear of limited survival resources, effectively parented children are more thoughtful and compassionate toward humankind. They question the nature of what is happening in the world and want to know how to stop social injustice, especially gang activity and school shootings. Working with the parents of the effectively parented children revealed that they parented on purpose. They were most often well-educated professionals who were if not rich, financially well off.

    ‘Positive Checks’ on Overpopulation

    I read a thought-provoking article by Arthur M. Marx (2018) titled “Overpopulation in the Era of Climate Change.” He spoke of what Thomas Robert Malthus (1798) referred to as a “positive check” on overpopulation. Gang membership and increased school shootings, in response to perceived shortage of resources, are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to planetary threats. The issue of overpopulation has continued to mushroom. According to Malthus, Mother Nature periodically enforces “positive checks” on overpopulation.

    Marx offered: “What would happen if people could not restrain themselves from churning out more little bundles of joy? In that case, Malthus suggested that positive checks on human life spans would kick in — and by “positive,” he famously meant three particularly negative consequences: war, disease, and famine. Put another way, if too many humans were coming into the world, then more would have to depart into the not-so-sweet hereafter sooner rather than later to mitigate the consequences of overpopulation.” This writer suggests that we must all do our part by examining our motives for parenting in alignment with planetary sustainability.

    “We must also stop proliferating,” Stephen McCarty wrote this year amid the coronavirus pandemic. As I stated before, accidental, unplanned pregnancy was the rule, not the exception, in the mid-20th century for the population who could afford children the least. Working as a teacher and tutor in underserved communities, I have noticed that this mentality among the parents has not changed much. It is if these parents are sleepwalking.

    Enter COVID-19, our wake-up call! I find it synchronistic that Marx’s article appeared almost a year and a half before COVID-19. All that has happened since the COVID-19 blessing or curse has given me food for thought: Is the current pandemic a macrocosm of the effects of worldwide overpopulation?

    I offer that we need to fund the education of persons who are considering parenting more than or at least as much as we fund projects to help underserved children.

    About Dr. Betty Martin-Finneran

    Dr. Betty Martin-Finneran completed her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies at The Union Institute & University Graduate College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her area of concentration was Transformative Learning with a strong Jungian transpersonal psychology emphasis—sacred psychology. She completed her Master of Science Degree in Information Management Technology at Grantham University in Kansas City, Missouri. Currently, Dr. Martin-Finneran works as an Instructional Associate at Berryessa Union School District in San Jose, California. In addition, she is an online and face-to-face ESL instructor at Techworld Language Solutions of Troy, Michigan.

    Works Consulted

    Malthus, T. R. (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population. Retrieved May 17, 2020

    Marx, A. M. (2018, April 15). Overpopulation in the era of climate change. Magellan TV. Retrieved May 17, 2020, from https://www.magellantv.com/articles/overpopulation-in-the-era-of-climate-change

    McCarty, S. (2020, April 20). Why Covid-19 is a human overpopulation problem – perhaps humans are the virus? Retrieved May 17, 2020, from https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/3080360/why-covid-19-human-overpopulation-problem.

  • 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. 

  • Reflections on Motherhood in a Pandemic

    Reflections on Motherhood in a Pandemic

    *This post is authored anonymously.

    I had a moment of seeing behind the proverbial curtain this weekend, glimpsing the grinding gears and strained puffing of the system we rely on to keep our ways of life afloat. A number of factors led to this: Mother’s Day this year arrived during a global pandemic and stay-at-home order, and I was at the (hopeful) tail end of three weeks of fevers, fatigue, and coughs for me and my family, all while I shouldered the responsibility of keeping myself and my staff employed and paid, along with the additional cognitive and emotional workload produced by the pandemic and its cascading effects. 

    This is a time of erasure of the boundaries and social fictions we employ when things are functioning, or at least more or less functioning, when the very foundations of our societal infrastructure to keep people physically safe, socially connected, and able to acquire resources for survival and fulfillment are not existentially threatened (albeit temporarily for most of us).

    The ‘Have-It-All’ Narratives as Social Fiction

    In normal times, what these boundaries and social fictions allow us to do is to live by some convenient narratives and patina of orderliness that disguises some stark truths. These are the “have-it-all” narratives mainstream society particularly presents to mothers as both incentive and imperative: having children, fulfilling romantic relationships and friendships, community engagement, cultivation of a meaningful and growing internal world, and ambitious career accomplishments.

    Society constructs equally bombastic promises and goals for how we treat our children: seeking equality of opportunity, including broader access to high-quality early childhood care and good schools, rich worldly experiences and skill development, reliance on familial and community support, and modeling of knowledge and behavior to supplement the parent-child relationship with the goal of producing fully actualized human beings. The fact that this is the language of our cultural mythos and that these are real areas of pursuit and achievement for vast swaths of people is a massive achievement, full stop. This is the well-deserved badge of honor worn by the successes (more or less) of feminism and other rights-based movements, and (again, more or less) the excesses afforded to us by economic growth and standards of living in the Western world over the past several decades.

    Nothing I am saying here should detract from the profundity of this shift, seating power in the hands of the individual to seek and, in some cases, to find achievement in some or all of those areas. This is a massive liberation from earlier systems. Still, there are important things these narratives obscure, and until now, there has not been a reason for them to be at the center stage of our cultural discussions. Certainly there has been some hand-wringing over the grandiosity and brittle promise of these narratives in recent decades as people have struggled to realize their promise and live them. These conversations have often been relegated to their own corners of bookstores and coffee shops and then the internet, places that house special-interest think pieces, academic literature on “matrescence,” and “mommy blogs,” often coupled with a lot of reassurance about how wonderful motherhood and children really are.

    The Tension Between Motherhood and Individuality

    So what does not get said? What did I glimpse behind the curtain? The difficult truth in all of this is that the choice to become a mother brings with it an irredeemable cost to one’s individuality. Mothers are beholden to their children’s needs first, and with that their role in the family system, and only secondarily can they answer the call of their own individual pursuits and identity.

    Yes, fathers or other partners, teachers, extended family, child care workers, and others in the community can and should help distribute that load very significantly. And yes, in normal life, mothers and children can “have it all,” or at least have most of it, most of the time. In a well-resourced environment for a person with a high level of skills and emotional acumen, this does not have to be a negative thing, at least not on a surface level. It means doing things for your child that you may otherwise not have done: participating in child-centric activities and making friends with people you otherwise would not, who are not in your “tribe” and who may not be fulfilling to you individually, so as to build your child’s community and experiences. It means relying on your partner and extended family to shoulder much of the burden so you can invest in your own individual growth with intention.

    The Shift to a Care-Based Ethic

    All of this is in itself a kind of important growth. But in becoming a mother, the shift has taken place. The point is that the ethical playing board changes with motherhood. This is true, although mostly hidden, even in the best times. No longer do the most relevant moral and political debates around fairness and equitable distribution of access to resources revolve around the tension between the freedom of the individual and the freedoms of other individuals or groups. For mothers, our central ethical duty is to nurture and provision our children, and to the extent it increases their likelihood of survival and growth, maximize that interconnectedness and resource provision when they are vulnerable and in need of it. This is a care-based ethic: No longer is it my job to primarily worry about humanity in general, or about myself. First and foremost, it is my job to focus on my own children. Anything that comes into conflict with that must take a back seat to it, including my own basic needs and aspirations.

    In times of scarcity and illness, the hierarchical nature of this is even more evident. Neither my partner nor I could fail to function in this pandemic, lest it harm our children in very real ways. Without schools, reliable and safe hospitals, access to extended family and friends, office buildings, and the other usual institutions to offload some of this day-to-day reality and allow a separateness of living spheres, it is clearer that if I were to be paralyzed by anxiety or by physical illness, it would impact my ability to do things as basic as care for my children and keep a roof over their heads. Added to that in the current climate is my responsibility to, with my partner, be solely responsible for their intellectual development, emotional health, and social outlet, and it throws this into greater relief. It is my ethical duty to function through it. 

    Things will return to normal for most of us (more or less). We have invested in a broad net of relationships and solitary pursuits that will go back to delighting and challenging us, and the machines of normal life will come back on in our worlds, both figuratively and literally. But this is a bell that can’t be unrung, and I hope it brings some clarity to what our duties are to our own children and those who we may or may not bring into the world in the future. 

    The Pandemic’s Last Effects: No More Pressure to Parent

    There are a few lessons and shifts in perspective I hope become lasting effects in the wake of this pandemic. First, society needs to stop making motherhood normative. We are all programmed by our evolutionary pasts to maximize our genetic survival and to reproduce as part of that, so we will have to intentionally think our way into what is best for each of us and override the default genetic programming. None of us has a duty to reproduce. Neither the evolutionary nagging, nor the more literal nagging some of us receive from those in our lives, nor the nebulous societal status markers that come with parenthood should carry weight. We can all be freed from that kind of pressure.

    We Should Ask: Is This What I Want?

    That leaves us each with a choice and a question to ask ourselves: Is this what I want? We need to recognize the tradeoff in choosing to have children, and especially to have multiple children, and the shift that comes with that. Identity becomes focused on one’s role in a broader system of relationships and responsibilities, including the parent-child, nuclear, and extended families and their communities. For some of us, thinking about shifting from an individually grounded life to one in which one’s own needs become subservient to the group is terrifying. For some, it sounds like the fulfillment of a dream. It’s those personality differences and preferences among us that should guide us in making these choices and in taking on our future pursuits with competency and clarity.

    We need to let go of the idea that one of these choices is somehow better or more noble than the other, or that anyone has the moral right to make that choice for anyone else. Making decisions from this point of view will likely mean fewer people will choose to have children (or to have multiple children), and those who do have them will be the people who are the most suited to do the task well and to be well-prepared. 

    For those of us who do decide to have children, and for the children themselves, we need to stop outsourcing our responsibilities to institutions that primarily function to separate children from the daily lives of adults. Certainly education, recreation, friendships, and broader communities are vitally important, and the quality of parenting and thinking about how we can do right by children and parents is not about the quantity of time spent together. It’s a reckoning with the fundamental vulnerability of children and, by extension, their parents who are engaged in the pursuit of raising them. As parents, we are reliant on things going right that are almost entirely out of our control, and yet, those are the most important things in our lives. This lasts for decades, until our children can fledge and our vigilance can lessen, although it will not go away completely.

    Legitimizing the Choices of Nonparents

    For nonparents, we need to recognize the legitimacy of their choice and the opportunities that nonparents have, both to be individuals in pursuit of their happiness, goals, and meaning, and to be interconnected on their own terms. This includes playing those community roles that benefit all of us. With this fuller understanding, all members of society including nonparents could be creating an environment that is supportive of kids and parents, particularly in understanding the vulnerability and lack of control both kids and parents have. This reasoning leads to supporting policy frameworks that give children and families the greatest access to resources for holistic well-being and growth, including physical safety, relational connectedness, intellectual independence, and self-efficacy. At the same time, we need to remove policy defaults that incentivize having children and we need to provide routes for meaning and prosperity to nonparents.

    In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull,” with the idea that one can find some solace in the privacy and the freedom of the internal life, no matter how authoritarian the external world becomes. This is not on offer once we become mothers. Leaving aside the literal changes and growth in the brain, which is a fascinating discussion on its own, a mother’s internal life always has multiple voices. Who we are has become inextricable from what we do, from the family system itself. This shift can manifest as a quiet din sometimes, or it can be very loud and very literal; it can be rich with novelty, awe, and emotional complexity, and it can enhance personal growth and self-awareness. We can pursue and achieve while our life is made better by having our children. But we must accept some truths, and sometimes in our lives those truths are visible and sitting in our living rooms, if we just take the time to look behind the artifice.

  • Michael Moore and the Return of the Population Question

    Michael Moore and the Return of the Population Question

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    Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore are being heavily criticized for their new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” putting a focus on restraining population growth as the solution for many environmental crises. The criticism centers on a few themes: The focus on population distracts from more immediate solutions, such as radically reforming our energy policies and markets. That given steadily falling fertility rates, population growth has been sufficiently addressed. And most pointedly, that raising population growth as a problem in need of a policy solution invites draconian population control measures that will violate human rights.

    Gibbs and Moore could respond to the criticism directly: Reducing family size by one child is the most effective way individuals can reduce greenhouse gas emissions — twenty 20 times more effective than other changes, to one’s diet or transportation, for example. How could this key factor be a distraction?

    Also, arguing that the world has solved the population problem implies some general agreement on an optimal world population, baselines for environmental protection, levels of biodiversity, etc. In reality, despite a projected world population growth of billions in the next few decades, many are pushing to increase fertility rates and raise the population curve through cash payments, limits on abortions, and pronatal media rather than flatten. Why?

    Population growth often means (albeit unsustainable) economic growth. One’s view of an optimal world population depends on one’s values, and amid the debate, there are wildly different ideals. Even simply focusing on survivability draws huge variances. Whether we have dealt with the population problem by flattening the growth curve in the past century or so is not the question. The question is whether we have flattened it enough or whether we will actually choose to reverse course. 

    Finally, Gibbs and Moore have a ready response to the allegation that they invite violations of human rights: The most searching examinations of the right to have children have found the right is really the right to reproduce one’s self, rather than the right to a large family. The right to have kids, like the right to speak freely but not yell “Fire!” in a theater, is limited by others’ rights, including the right of our children to a safe, healthy, and biodiverse environment.

    A Better Way to Solve the Population Debate

    But is there a better way to resolve the debate? Population growth is preceded by the act of having kids, and perhaps we can find more common ground regarding the optimality of that.

    Four value propositions lay a pathway forward:

    • First, there seems to be common agreement that all children deserve some minimal level of welfare at birth, or the things we aspire to provide all children in the Children’s Rights Convention.

    • Second, while economic equality is controversial, ensuring everyone equal opportunities in life is not, though the process for doing so remains elusive. What if we focused the process on family planning and leveling the playing field by training the redistribution of resources around the start and first stages of every life?

    • Third, if we assume economies are preceded and limited by the rule of law and democracies that enable them, we can assume that family planning policies should be geared around producing citizens rather than consumers and workers. Developing future generations for democratic town halls looks very different from developing them to fill massive shopping malls, with the former calling for smaller families to create a future in which every voice could be heard and more investment in the education of each child to make their voices transcendent. 

    • Finally, given the damaging impact of the anthropocene on everything from pregnancy to the threat of pandemics to wildlife extinction, the safest baseline for environmental protection — consistent with the precautionary principle — is a restorative baseline that values nature as biodiverse nonhuman habitat rather than a human resource. Valuing nature as nonhuman space is more about ensuring our species the nonhuman nature we physically crave and need than an abstract debate about optimal populations and the mathematics of utility far removed from the lived human experience.

    And the pathway toward the highest standard of environmental protection starts with better family planning. 

    All Policy Roads Lead to Family Planning

    Combined, these value propositions promote a universal policy of smaller families achieved through incentives, delayed parenthood, and the equitable redistribution of resources to ensure every child a fair start in life. Regardless, given the volatility of future world population growth and all that risk entails, it’s simply not acceptable for anyone talking about the environment to not have a plan for family planning reform. Contrary to what some think, all polices involve people and hence family planning (or a lack thereof).

    If we want to target consumption, we have to stop producing consumers and start producing free citizens, or what John Rawls called free and equal people, to comprise actual democracies. That may first entail changing the fundamental framework we use to assess these issues, including the concept of population. “Population” refers to people, and if we unpack the concept, we find something more qualitative than quantitative, dynamic than static, endogenous than exogenous, normative than descriptive, and multifaceted rather than one-sided and numeric.

    The Guardian’s George Monbiot could reframe his thinking on this issue and further environmental values we all share much more effectively. Here are five questions that might help Monbiot and the rest of us start this process and move from a traditional family planning system focused on parents to one focused on future children. 

    Regardless of whether Gibbs and Moore confront their accusers directly or choose to open a new dialogue, they have helped to bring back the population question at a time when environmental catastrophes, constant social distancing, a growing pyramid of inequality, and threats to our children’s future seem draped before us.

    Let’s hope we can answer the question correctly.

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  • Why the Decolonization of the Global South Is a Model for Our Shared Future

    Why the Decolonization of the Global South Is a Model for Our Shared Future

    The United Nations’ work to decolonize the Global South after World War II was a human rights effort. Countries of the Global South, or what some have called “developing nations,” have a history of colonization. Before World War II, the people in the Global South were largely ruled by people and powers they had not voted for, they had not assented to, and who ruled by force.

    The rulers were Northern (that is, European) countries that asserted their will on the people of the Global South. The people in the Global South, therefore, were not living under democratic rule. 

    The concept of human rights, however, with its belief that people should have a say in how they are ruled and what kind of world they live in, also known as “self-determination,” led to the formal decolonization of the Global South after World War II. 

    A Human-Rights Approach to Future Generations

    Having Kids believes that we should take this same human rights-based approach the U.N. took when decolonizing the Global South and apply it to future generations: Let’s decolonize our future.

    Decolonizing the future would mean taking a child-focused approach to family planning and population generation, rather than the current parent-first approach. 

    First, let’s look at the U.N.’s efforts to decolonize the Global South.

    When the United Nations was founded in 1945, some 750 million people, nearly one-third of the world’s population, lived in territories that were dependent on colonial powers. At the end of the war, Global South colonized territories had been formally administered under mandates from the League of Nations, separated from countries defeated in the war, or voluntarily placed under the system by their administering power. Eleven territories were placed under this system.

    After the war, the U.N. Charter created the Trusteeship Council as the main organ of the U.N. that was to monitor the decolonization situation in 11 specific “Trust Territories,” which were subject to separate agreements with administering states. 

    As the process of decolonization continued to advance, the General Assembly in 1960 adopted its landmark Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. The declaration affirmed the right of all people to self-determination and proclaimed that colonialism should be brought to a speedy and unconditional end.

    The ideas behind “constituting,” that is, choosing in the present how we want our democracies to be shaped and deciding who should be part of our democracies, is essentially the same human-rights-based approach behind Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. With the declaration, the U.N. sought to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”; was “conscious of the need for the creation of conditions of stability and well-being and peaceful and friendly relations based on respect for the principles of equal rights and self-determination of all peoples”; was “convinced that all peoples have an inalienable right to complete freedom, the exercise of their sovereignty and the integrity of their national territory”; and that “all peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” The declaration asserted “respect for the sovereign rights of all peoples.”

    To achieve the goals of the declaration, in its U.N. Charter, Chapter XI, Article 73, the United Nations mandated that member states, with regard to areas where people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government, must acknowledge “the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories.”

    The members of the U.N. assume responsibility to (a) ensure [peoples’] political, economic, social, and educational advancement, their just treatment, and their protection against abuses and (b) to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples.” Sounds like “constituting.”

    How to Enact Our Right to Self-Determination

    Like the founding of the United States, decolonization, came from a recognition of people’s right to rule themselves, to self-determination. After 1,000 years of colonization, human rights was born. Today, fewer than 2 million people live under colonial rule in the 17 remaining non-self-governing territories. The wave of decolonization, which changed the face of the planet, represents the U.N.’s first great success.

    We should follow up with this success by recognizing our own right to self-determination. Existing humans (me and you) have the same right to self-determination as the colonized countries of the Global South do. Together, we can decide how we should live and, most importantly, who (and how many) should be a part of our democracy.

    Let’s take the lessons of the U.N.’s decolonization efforts and use the Fair Start model as a way to create equality and further other human rights. We can decolonize future generations so that they are not born into a world where they are powerless and ruled by past outsiders.  

    — Alexandra Stupple

  • If There Is a Magic Pill for Today’s Crises, It’s New Male Contraception. Take Action.

    If There Is a Magic Pill for Today’s Crises, It’s New Male Contraception. Take Action.

    Having Kids is a nonprofit organization dedicated to replacing current subjective and parent-focused family planning models with the objective, human rights-based and child-focused Fair Start model​. Sensible family planning is among the best ways to promote quality of life for present and future generations, protect the environment, and reduce overcrowding as a hedge against coming pandemics. We are encouraging Congress and the key federal agency to act.

    We are writing the two key members of the House and Senate, as well as the head of the National Institutes of Health, to make this happen.

    Take Action: Add Your Name Here.

    Given the current pressures the COVID-19 virus pandemic is placing upon our environment, our institutions, and on families everywhere, particularly the most marginalized among us, and given the previously unsustainable pressures these systems and groups were already facing, we are urging Congress and the urge the Subcommittee on Health to prioritize, reallocate, and increase funding towards more sensible family planning tools like long-acting reversible contraceptives (“LARCs”) for men, as well as use its power to facilitate expedited clinical trials of these products. As no such widespread male contraception is currently available for couples, this product represents an opportunity for a remarkable return on investment in the form of more equitably sized family units and all the benefits that flow from them.  

    There are multiple reasons to pursue this strategy:

    • US Environmental Policy Requires Sensible Family Planning: The grandfather of US environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) declared that the US government has a “continuing responsibility” to act as trustee over the environment for future generations and it outlines a federal environmental policy to “use all practicable means and measures… to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony…” To that end, it requires government bodies to take a hard look at “population growth” and its effects on environmental health. Facilitating the production of LARCs is consistent with this policy.
    • Current Population Trends Require Male Contraception: The world’s current population is increasing at the rate of 80 million persons a year and global population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Choosing smaller families is the most effective way to reduce human impact on the planet and animals. For example, having one less child is nearly 20 times more significant than the adoption of other environmental practices, like driving a hybrid or changing one’s diet.  Accordingly, the long term environmental benefits achieved by even only a few couples employing LARCs can be enormous. 
    • Institutions Implicitly Recognize The Need To Manage Family Sizes and Population: The ​CDC acknowledges​ that “unintended pregnancy carries significant health and economic consequences and disproportionately affects poor women and women of color.” Moreover, the WHO has recognized that ​overcrowding exacerbates epidemics​ and is perhaps the most ​fundamental threat to public health​. Human overpopulation is a ​key factor in the spread of a variety of diseases​, and this now ​includes novel coronavirus​. The WHO has further stated that supporting family planning services is a “life-saving” strategy that policymakers should undertake during the current crisis.  LARCs help manage these risks.  
    • Gender Equality Requires More Focus On Male Contraception: To date, unfounded ideology has been the primary inhibition to male contraception. In the few instances when pharmaceutical companies have tried to create products for men similar to “the pill,” progress has often been halted by side effects that women have experienced for decades, such as depression, acne, increased libido, and shrinking testicles or ovaries. Society apparently will not tolerate these effects in men, but for women they are expected. Moreover, rather than create reliable hormone-driven male contraceptives akin to what’s available to women, the market seemingly focuses on the opposite – pouring its resources into products such as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra. It is Congress’s duty to help correct these market imbalances by facilitating the production of LARCs, not only because it makes pragmatic sense given the environmental and quality of life costs, but also for gender equality. 

    Having Kids previously raised these concerns to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Spring 2019, when it requested additional funding for LARCs.  Since that letter there has been no meaningful movement despite the fact that the need for such family planning tools has only been exacerbated over that time. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is but a symptom of the fact that we have too many unmanaged families living in too close proximity to one another.  

    For these reasons, we are encouraging Congress and the NIH to prioritize funding for research and development of male LARCs to offset the market’s failure to produce these drugs, as well as to expedite their clinical trials.  For example, NIH currently only spends $20 to $24 million on contraceptive research, which is a pittance compared to its current $41.7 billion annual budget for medical research. ​Taking action to create widely available and easily accessible male LARCs would ensure a higher quality of life for future families, it would protect the environment, and it would safeguard future generations from overcrowding, thus substantially reducing the threat, transmission and impact of pandemics like COVID-19.