Fair Start Movement

Category: Educational Guides & Resources

  • Why We Can Ensure A Child’s Right to a Fair Start In Life, Ecologically and Socially, By All Means Effective

    Why We Can Ensure A Child’s Right to a Fair Start In Life, Ecologically and Socially, By All Means Effective

    A lot of people have asked the crew here at Having Kids what we mean when we say that we can all further a child’s right to a #FairStart in life, ecologically and socially, by all means effective. What it simply means is that as a peremptory norm, a child’s right to a fair start, enabled through cooperative resource distribution and responsible family planning, overrides things like the property rights of the wealthy, or the right of intending parents to have limitless numbers of children with no cooperative planning to ensure their welfare and equity. #Fairstart comes first.

    Why are the rights and responsibilities that surround having kids peremptory? If power derives from the people, then the norm that accounts for their creation and subsequent empowerment overrides other norms. It is the first necessary condition of legitimacy. It involves literally constituting the political entities that then develop subsequent norms. In other words, nations were not “constituted” at historical points in the past by god-like founders, but are either constituting legitimate systems of governance with every child we have, or they are not, depending on how they do it and the values (like welbeing, consent and nature) at play.

    We say “all means effective” because we refuse to ignore the moral reality of the order of norms, and because the freedom and wellbeing of future generations and nonhumans – the most vulnerable and numerous classes of entities – depend on our using #fairstart to liberate them. Does that mean we promote things like violence? No – we explicitly reject violence and other forms of coercion because we believe they cannot further #fairstart, but by creating cycles of violence, in fact harm kids and their development.

    Learn more about #fairstart, and why we are focused on concentrations of power in icons like Elon Musk.

  • Pandemic Parenting: How Did We Get Here?

    Pandemic Parenting: How Did We Get Here?

    Parents and their kids are suffering under the weight of the Covid-19 pandemic. A recent study shows significant declines in mental well-being for families with children as the quarantines drag on and other crises loom.

    What went wrong?

    Our family planning policies, cultural attitudes, corporate advertising, and other factors have historically pushed women to have kids, often before they’re ready, in order grow the economy. These forces not only created overcrowded and unhealthy conditions that helped the pandemic spread and created ecological impacts such as the climate crisis that are setting the stage for the next pandemic.

    Who created such policies? Elites at the top of the economic pyramid made these policies to ensure big business a constant stream of cheap labor and hungry consumers. Politicians went along because more taxpayers meant bigger government. The people who pushed population growth, instead of human rights-based policies, are responsible for much the suffering we are experiencing today.

    It’s time to turn the tables.

    We have a right to the wealth and resources being hoarded by companies, rich families, and bloated governments — those with disproportionate power who are blocking real democracy. That money belongs to us. The best way to use this wealth would be to reverse the unsustainable growth paradigm and replace it with policies that move us toward 1) parental readiness, 2) ensuring every child a fair start in life, and 3) smaller and more sustainable families.

    Take action: Urge Congress to reverse the exploitation of families and to instead embrace Fair Start family planning.

  • Why Conservatives Should Support Family Planning Reform

    Why Conservatives Should Support Family Planning Reform

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

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

    How Family Planning Should Be Reformed

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

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

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

    Where Personal Freedom Really Begins

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

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

    Learn more here.

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

    Why Good Family Planning Is the First Human Right and Responsibility

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • Elon Musk Is Threatening Our Democracy. What Do We Do?

    Elon Musk Is Threatening Our Democracy. What Do We Do?

    Elon Musk puts the wealth of elites over democracy. We see that this week as he flagrantly defies Covid 19 lock down orders for one of his factories, putting an entire community as risk. Does he, and people like him, wield too much power? Is there a solution to the threat their power poses to others?

    Consider these the facts about Musk: 

    • Musk has claimed that his wealth is self-made, but he was born a relatively wealthy white child in South Africa during apartheid. His family owned an emrald mine in Zambia. He left South Africa amid the turmoil, while others stayed to reform the system.
    • As of May 2020, he has a net worth of $36.5 billion and is listed by Forbes as the 31st-richest person in the world. By contrast, the median American household worth is roughly $97,300. Musk has used this wealth to create a level of influence over industry, media, and politics that dwarfs average Americans’ influence over public affairs and their futures and that drowns out their voices.
    • Musk is part of the top of a power dynamic in which the world’s richest people own the same wealth and influence as as roughly the poorest half of humanity.
    • Musk is seen by some as an environmentalist, but he has consistently stoked fears of underpopulation and has promoted population growth policies that would exacerbate the climate crisis and many other environmental crises more than almost anything else we could do. In addition to the impact of his various industries, his commercial space ventures are a massive and growing source of light pollution that obscure one’s view of space and interfere with the practice of astronomy. 
    • As discussed above Musk, in a growing display of antisocial behavior, consistently violated the law, and risked lives, to maintain production and profits at one of his factories in California. The state appears to be acquiescing to the violation. He is being treated as if he is above the law because of his wealth and influence.

    These Facts Raise Questions

    Why is Musk above the law? Is he a fundamental threat to our democracy — and to our right to be self-determining people rather than people whose lives are determined by a small group of people? It’s undemocratic that some individuals, usually born wealthy, wield such disproportionate influence over our lives. If Musk is a threat, and if elected officials do nothing, are free people obligated to act to protect what so many have died for?  

    The problem we face is in knowing what to do, but that problem comes with a solution. We resist taking action against individuals like Musk because rather than using violence, he uses money to wield massive power over others. But as the climate crisis has shown, more subtle human power and influence, like social positioning and climate emissions can pose the greatest threat of all. Money is no exception. As Musk’s defiance of the order shows, money can easily threaten lives. 

    So What’s the Solution?

    The answer lies in Musk’s promotion of population growth, which is consistent with his response to the pandemic. Both evidence his disdain for human rights and democracy, and make him a unique target for those who want to promote human freedom.

    Musk’s statements show that he mistakenly equates democracies with economies in which future children are labor, consumer, and taxpayer inputs and in which the nonhuman world is a resource. That is incorrect. Democracies precede economies and are defined by strict human-rights parameters that make them function, such as the right to speak freely (and have an equal voice). Those rights give us a baseline for what’s an entitlement, cost and benefit, rather than the random “good fortune” Musk had of being born a wealthy white man in South Africa. He has actually invoked the concept of freedom, that countless people died to protect, in order to risk innocent lives as a means of extending his undemocratic control of others. That deserves a response, and his position on family planning gives a pathway for it.

    Musk is pushing for population growth and family planning policies that would try to replace democracies with economies that are devoid of human rights and would ensure that those with wealth control others. He is pushing for kids to be born irrespective of the number born, their levels of welfare and education, and their positioning relative to rich kids, He’s pushing for growth irrespective of its impact on our natural ecologies. In other words, he promotes the family planning model that created the climate crisis. He is pushing for a massive populace designed for economies and not democracies, and world where markets seem like the natural and inevitable state of affairs, and one that ensures the positioning of people like him. 

    And it’s the first, or lexically prior, human right – the right to a Fair Start in life – Musk may be trying to avoid when he ignores human rights and promotes the chaos of anarchic markets over the freedom of democracy. The right to have children, the right that puts the “human” in human rights, best orients from the perspective of the future child and their right to fair starts in life. That right is the engine that keeps democracies going, and it overrides competing interests, like Musk’s interest in dominating others and the skies, as well as his his passing that dominance onto his progeny. What he thinks is wealth he created is the product of a much larger and more complex social ecology that he is ignoring. And the fundamental right to a fair start in life, which represents the first peremptory norm and the constant reconstituting of our social ecology and democracy, overrides his claims to disproportional wealth, enabling free people to target Musk and other threats like him with a specific demand that would actually level the economic playing field. And it’s not about choosing government over people. That right also overrides the interests of big government and their bureaucracies, especially when the government (who these days is largely comprised of the uber-wealthy themselves) disregard the rule of law and let the wealthy take over.

    People like Musk exist because we have yet to take the overriding right to a fair start in life seriously and have instead pretended it was the hand of God that determined who won the birth lottery. Perhaps, given that right’s efficacy in addressing the crises we face, we should take it seriously now. 

    This Isn’t Socialism or Capitalism; It Isn’t Economics at All

    No economies exist without laws, and no laws exist without a people capable of making them – imagine something like a town hall setting. Both the left and the right value protecting children’s future and their right to equal opportunities in life. But to get there requires limiting the total quantum of human power exerted upon our surroundings and decentralizing it intergenerationally — or finally realizing the duality of freedom from others and the freedom to equal opportunities in life.

    Both Big Business and Big Government, at the top of a Ponzi Scheme pyramid, are pushing women to have more and more kids as a means of creating future labor, and needy consumers, instead. Thy are making economies before democracy. Reasonable people on both the left and the right can work together to target key figures at the top of that pyramid to – instead – to build free democracies through better family planning. Together, we can secure that true form of freedom over its imitation: the anarchical and infantile “I get to do whatever I want to do” sort of freedom that has never made sense, that ends up hurting people and compromising their own freedom, and the form that is promoted by people like Musk who want to change town halls into shopping malls and to replace political freedom into employment and consumption.

    Look for the wizard behind the curtain in the case of Musk. You will see the appropriation and rebranding of other persons’ work by one individual, using wealth enabled by a system of laws he now flouts. The disparity of wealth and influence he enjoys is the product of mistakes in our system, not something naturally occurring.

    Musk appears publicly. Engage him, as you would in a town hall, personally, peacefully, and legally, and demand that he fund Fair Start family planning. Do what our government should be doing to make us free, and use Musk as an example.

    We have a right to a Fair Start share of his resources, and his violating the law presents an opportunity to truly build democracy, taking down the powerful who control us in the spirit of liberation. And while you are at it, urge the United Nations to speed along that liberation, take human rights seriously, and recognize Fair Start as a fundamental human right.

    Those most able must do what’s most effective to maintain a just system.

  • 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

  • One Mom Shares Why She Chose to Have a Small Family

    One Mom Shares Why She Chose to Have a Small Family

    Sam, mom of one, shares why she and her husband have chosen to have a small family.

    Why Should You Choose A Small Family?

    The advantages of planning small – that is only one or two kids, are numerous. Not only does having a small family enable greater empowerment for women, result in greater reported happiness, more individual attention and more resources invested in each child, greater achievement in school, and more engaged, less crowded communities. But most importantly, research indicated that small families are better for kids.

    This list is by no means exhaustive. The bigger picture is that families and communities benefit. Read more reasons to have a small family.

    Have you chosen to have just one or two kids? Send us a video and tell us why. Email info@fairstartmovement.org

  • What Does Better Family Planning Mean and Why Do We Need It?

    What Does Better Family Planning Mean and Why Do We Need It?

    Better family planning looks like:

    1. Delaying parenthood – Providing access to healthcare and education to help people wait until they are ready to become parents, and then spacing pregnancies. 
    2. Smaller families – Parents are able to invest more in each child and ensure a regenerative future.
    3. Community support – Communities guarantee that all kids have the resources they need for a fair start in life. Small families make this possible and sustainable.

    It’s simple: Fair Start family planning means smaller families sharing resources to invest more in every child. For some, the closest analog for this new model would be responsible family planning incentives. But Fair Start resources are actually entitlements held by future children, and funded through non-traditional means. Those opposed to remodeling favor our current system of unsustainable families, unearned privileges, and undemocratic influence, over giving kids a fair start in life.

    What the Fair Start Model Does

    The Fair Start model addresses the biggest problems affecting kids such as poverty, inequality, and neglect. The model breaks down the barrier between family planning and child welfare, aligning need with resource. The model links 1) where and when children enter the world, with 2) the provision of what those kids need for a fair start in life. In making that link the model has the greatest impact on child welfare, equality, animals and the environment – exponentially more impact than downstream approaches. In so doing the model corrects for cognitive dissonances that prevent us from seeing that how we plan families, more than any other one thing, determines the quality of life on Earth. By focusing our attention on future children the model temporalizes our thinking, allows us to plan ahead, requires us to cooperate, and thereby helps ensure the best outcomes. What’s a good analogy? In many ways our remodeling of family planning looks like the revision of the norms, in the late 20th Century, around using seat belts. Small improvements can lead to massive benefits.