Fair Start Movement

Category: Action Alerts & Toolkits

  • Power Grid Failures Show Threats of Population Growth: Take Action

    Power Grid Failures Show Threats of Population Growth: Take Action

    The recent climate-driven grid failures in Texas highlight a key threat to our children’s future: Systems upon which more and more people are dependent, and which themselves are threatened by that very growth. Nothing exacerbates these “loop” problems, like the ecologies upon which we are dependent and which the climate crisis threatens, more than poor and unsustainable family planning.

    Not everyone is at the same level of risk in these situations. The wealthy people and their families who have benefitted from population growth, like Ted Cruz and his kids (who vacationed in Mexico while poor children in Texas died), find ways to avoid the risk.

    How do we solve this problem? While big government and big business want unsustainable population growth to continue, and who together created the unsustainable family planning systems that create growth by exploiting future generations, human rights point in a different direction.

    Infographic titled Better Family Planning, Simply Put with icons and three points: Delaying parenthood, smaller families, and community support, each explained with brief text and blue graphics.

    If we are willing to plan responsibly, we have the right to take the resources necessary from the top – and people like Cruz – in order to ensure all children a Fair Start in life. Why? Because having kids is the first and overriding human right. It comes before the exploitative systems that government and corporations conspired to create.

    Contact Ted Cruz and urge him to support Fair Star reforms that will protect Texans in the long run, and to ensure justice for all.

  • In a Country Divided, Can Our Children Unite Us? Take Action.

    In a Country Divided, Can Our Children Unite Us? Take Action.

    Whatever rhetoric comes from President-elect Joe Biden, the country remains more divided because of the election, with studies showing a growing divide and distrust between red and blue communities and increasing openness to violence on both sides. The impact of the second wave of Covid-19 on businesses, the continued killing of black men and women by police, and a former president soon unhindered by office, will not help.

    Biden is pursuing a business-as-usual approach to funding childcare that makes the situation worse long-term. This policy does not address the root of the problem: family planning. It does not ensure a minimum threshold under which children should not be born, does not address the way unsustainable family size drives the climate and other crises, and does not create inclusive communities.

    Why are your tax dollars being paid out without these safeguards?

    It’s a cliché to say that children, who are the future, can unite us. But novel policies that could change the way we plan for, have, and raise kids make the possibility of coming together real and meaningful beyond empty clichés. Those policies begin by our realizing that being truly inclusive starts by deliberately including children in communities through more cooperative family planning systems that eliminate marginalization, and ​focus as a priority on giving every child a fair start in life​.

    Those policies would also have to promote smaller families that create more democratic communities where everyone’s voice matters. This would be a stark reversal of our ​current family tax policies that promote quantity over quality, ignore fair starts in life, and promote the antithesis of inclusivity​.

    The best part? Such #fairstart policies should appeal to both liberals and conservatives, because they promote the traditionally liberal value of equity while also promoting the traditionally conservative value of autonomy by investing more in kids in ways that make them self-sufficient and capable citizens. Together, these values create a vision of free and equal people engaged in the self-rule the founders of the nation envisioned, or the ideal of town halls, rather than a vision of economic growth that through overcrowding and lack of a common core excludes people from public institutions.

    Moreover, new family planning policies like these would have a massive impact on the climate crisis that threatens all of us, with ​an exponentially greater impact​ than many downstream alternatives. ​Family planning reform is the only truly fundamental type of reform, and given the climate crisis, fundamental reform is what we need.

    Children can unite us, but to make that statement mean something, we have to start at the beginning, with the way we plan families. We have to start with a vision of a future of smaller, sustainable, and truly democratic communities where we invest more in kids and where all have a meaningful voice.

    Take Action: Urge Kamala Harris to use her position to educate Biden and to promote child-centric Fair Start family planning reforms. Copy and paste this message in your communications with her.

  • You and Your Kids Have a Right To Nature. Take Action.

    You and Your Kids Have a Right To Nature. Take Action.

    While many nations’ constitutions are clear in protecting the property rights of the wealthy, they are less clear in protecting the nature we and future generations need to thrive. That’s a mistake.

    Given that humans need nature to survive, we have a right to nature’s restoration and protection. A lawsuit in the United States is making that case, and will be heard in 2021.

    A recent Ecowatch piece covered the appeal, and why no political system that fails to protect a right to nature is legitimate.

    Here is an excerpt:

    “The world made [a] baseline mistake in developing environmental policy decades ago, choosing to treat nature as a resource for humans. The baseline was too low and allowed policies that fell short; indeed, it is one of the reasons our planet continues to superheat. We are making that same mistake now with regard to COVID-19, by financially stimulating factory farming and other forms of ecocide that degrade the buffer (or social distancing) between people that our pre-Anthropocene environment offered. Degrading that “natural buffer” exacerbates the risk of pandemics and determines how we can react to them. As the New Republic reported, the next pandemic could be hiding in the Arctic permafrost.

    Solving the baseline problem will allow us to trace these calamities — like the unfolding death of the Great Barrier Reef — and help us back to an ultimate source, and, perhaps, to a solution. We can no longer use a baseline for environmental policy that treats nature or the nonhuman world as a human resource. This is the baseline most environmentalists use, and the one that created the Anthropocene era in which we find the world today. A much higher baseline would view nature as something that ought to be a nonhuman habitat or the homes of sentient species who have a right to survive and thrive. This would be a restorative baseline, and the one more consistent with animal liberation. Such a baseline would be most protective against things like climate change and the pandemics it drives. A policy based on this baseline would revolve around ensuring our children have the only environment proven — over millennia‚ that allows humans and all species to thrive. It would seek to eliminate the way the absence of nature in our lives is degrading our psyches.”

    Take action: Urge Congress to get ahead of courts and recognize our fundamental right to nature.

    A map of the U.S. with text stating it would take four Earths to provide enough resources if everyone lived like Americans, shown with four Earth icons below the map.

  • What Makes Pandemics Worse? Population Growth. Take Action.

    What Makes Pandemics Worse? Population Growth. Take Action.

    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.

    Decades ago world leaders were faced with a choice: Respond to explosive population growth by promoting smaller families and greater investments in child development universally, or take a relatively hands off approach, and hope that falling fertility trends would continue. Most countries chose the latter, which allowed them to grow and to exploit rather than invest in future generations.

    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.

    Infographic titled Better Family Planning, Simply Put with icons and three points: Delaying parenthood, smaller families, and community support, each explained with brief text and blue graphics.

    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?

    1. Overcrowding, or the quantity of people around us, helps pandemics like Covid 19 spread. Worldwide, public health officials are admitting that the failure to contain the pandemic is largely a function of the quantity and civic qualities of the people crowding the planet, which are factors that depend on our family planning policies. India is exemplifying this. Key UN agencies were urged to change modeling well before the pandemic, but did nothing.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Our growing population is degrading our natural ecologies, which sets the stage for future and worse pandemics.
    5. 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.

    TAKE ACTION: Urge the Biden administration to reform family planning policies, and do what has the greatest impact on the climate, Covid-19, vast inequity, and other crises we face.

  • Kate Middleton Speaks for Children’s Rights to Equal Starts in Life

    Kate Middleton Speaks for Children’s Rights to Equal Starts in Life

    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.

    TAKE ACTION:

    If you support any organization that claims to help children, animals, the environment, and/or human rights and democracy, reason with them as to why their mission is impossible without embracing family planning reform, and strongly urge them to join our coalition by contacting us at Carter@HavingKids.org.

    Learn more about the transition from parent-focused to child-focused Fair Start family planning policies at HavingKids.org.

    A comparison chart showing Current Family Planning with no minimum welfare, equality, or environmental protection, versus Fair Start Family Planning with welfare for all kids, equal opportunity, and strong environmental protection.
  • Tell Pope Francis That If He Wants Equity, He Should Support Fair Start

    Tell Pope Francis That If He Wants Equity, He Should Support Fair Start

    Infographic titled The Fair Start Model showing three connected illustrations: parents with a young child, a city with resources, and a diverse community. Text explains how planning and support helps children thrive.

    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.

  • Urge Time Magazine to See Falling Fertility As An Opportunity, Not A Crisis

    Urge Time Magazine to See Falling Fertility As An Opportunity, Not A Crisis

    Time recently highlighted the issue of changing fertility rates as a harbinger of a new era for the United States. But the author, Eliana dockterman, errs in thinking changing our old ways, where unsustainable population growth meant free money in the form of new bodies inflating gross domestic product, is a bad thing.

    Falling fertility rates are part of the overall trend towards population stabilization and gender equity, some of the greatest successes of our time. 

    It’s key in this process that we stabilize at a sustainable level – and given the climate crisis (which Docketerman never mentions) – we need smaller families to hit a safe level and we need them now. Delayed fertility and smaller families are one of the greatest ways to mitigate climate emissions. As we change average family sizes  and get over our addiction to growth, we are presented with another opportunity. Can we use new family planning policies to eliminate other crises, like the economic disparity, where the average black family has one tenth the wealth of the average white family in the United States?

    Yes we can, through policies designed to distribute wealth in ways designed to give every child a fair start in life.  Growth had to end sometime – hopefully it’s not too late. 

    Take action: Urge Time’s editor, Edward Felsenthan (@efelsenthal) to talk about better ways of planning our families that can make a brighter future for all.

  • Factory Farming is Fundamentally the Product of Poor Family Planning Policy. Take Action.

    Factory Farming is Fundamentally the Product of Poor Family Planning Policy. Take Action.

    Cory Booker is spot on in targeting the industrial agriculture complex that is destroying our environment and health.

    But he could go further, and be much more comprehensive and effective.

    That complex was created in response to, and is driven by, ballooning population growth. It also exploits and exacerbates the growing gap between rich and poor, in terms of who consumes and who produces the animal products. Booker should connect the dots, and tie his attack on factory farming to a new version of the guaranteed minimum income for children, or “baby bonds,” proposals he is known for. Specifically, those bonds could be funded by taxes on the biggest factory farming conglomerates, and be modified to incentivize smaller families that cooperatively exchange resources to give all kids a fair start in life. This would cut demand for the products of factory farms, restore our environment, and also restore the middle class – including middle class farmers – that is the antithesis of the toxic corporate structure at the heart of the United States food system. 

    Urge Booker to take a more comprehensive and effective approach. Contact him here.

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

    Fair Start Planning Is Essential to the Anti-Oppression Toolkit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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