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  • 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.

  • 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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  • Connect the Dots Colorado workshop: The Most Effective Way to Help People, Animals, and the Environment

    Better family planning ranks as the most effective way to mitigate the climate and other environmental crises, protect children, and reduce inequity. It is also one of the most effective ways to protect animals, getting to the fundamental source of problems like factory farming and the disappearance of wildlife.

    From 12-1:30 Mountain Time on Thursday May 14th, 2020 there will be a virtual meeting and discussion of draft legislation that would implement Fair Start family planning in Colorado, as part of the Having Kids Connect the Dots Colorado campaign. This work builds on the theoretical discussion/planning from our 2019 George Washington University forum, https://fairstartmovement.org/forum/, and seeks to crystallize a truly human rights-based approach to family planning in Colorado.

    We believe that as tragic as COVID-19 has been, the pandemic also provides a unique opportunity to bring about changes in Colorado that could help mitigate future crises. We know that overcrowding, economic inequality, and consumption of wildlife are each drivers of epidemics, but we also know that none of these drivers can be addressed in isolation. Therefore, we need your help in connecting the dots between access to contraception, economic equity, and environmental protection as we seek to draft a comprehensive Fair Start bill for Colorado.

    A Little More about Our Model:

    Having Kids advocates for a Fair Start model that encourages parents to have smaller families and to delay having kids until they are ready. It also works to ensure that communities and governments provide the resources necessary to guarantee that all kids have a fair start in life.

    The model begins upstream to solve many of the problems that threaten our planet and future generations. Choosing smaller families is 20 times more effective at reducing climate change than adjusting dietary or transportation habits alone. The Fair Start model also helps to reduce the negative impacts on animals that come from factory farming and the degradation of animal habitats related to overcrowding.

    Advancing the Model by Promoting Economic Equity:

    Having Kids commends and supports Senator Booker’s proposal to guarantee a sustainable child income through baby bonds.  We believe that Colorado could continue this momentum by adopting a similar proposal. Given that the current pandemic has exacerbated inequality, as well as the numerous economic, health, and social benefits of waiting to have kids, we propose structuring the bonds in a way that incentivizes delaying pregnancy until at least age 25. Please see our model policy for the District of Columbia and the attached draft law review article as a guide.

    Advancing the Model by Recognizing a Right to Nature:

    One of our goals is to guarantee that every child has the right to enjoy nature. To this end, we propose amending the Colorado constitution to recognize a right to nature. This concept may sound radical, but twenty one states already recognize a constitutional right to hunt and fish.  We believe that if these states can protect an individual’s right to exploit nature, Colorado can perfect the right to enjoy nature. Several countries, including Sweden and Norway, recognize a right to “outdoor access” and can help guide a pathway forward for Colorado.

    Other Questions?

    If you have any questions or recommendations, please do not hesitate to reach out to Nicole King, a DU Law student who is helping to coordinate this event and to draft any proposed legislation. Nicole has a MA in Global Health affairs and previously worked for Colorado’s Title X family planning program, so she is excited to dive in. Please feel free to contact her at nking@crownlinellc.com or 908-420-7467. 

  • Earth Day: Covid-19 Is Showing Us the Fundamental Taboo We Need to Break

    Earth Day: Covid-19 Is Showing Us the Fundamental Taboo We Need to Break

    I love and want to protect my child, so I don’t want her to have to live in a crowded and polluted future filled with billions more people, many of whom never got what they needed to really grow up and work well with others. When can I say that out loud? 

    As a mother of one child, I think about the future a lot. What will her environment be like? What will the people with whom she shares the world be like? Will she be safe?  Our society isn’t equipped to provide each child a fair start from the very first days of life, and we know that whether a child gets the education love, care, and attention he or she needs in the first three years of life can determine how they interact with others for the rest of their lives. 

    And the truth is, her future most depends on one factor, more than any other: family planning.     A family choosing today to have one additional child can exacerbate the climate crisis by 20 times that of other choices, such as those around diet or transportation. Beyond that, overpopulation is one of the key drivers of pandemics. 
    Several studies show that small changes in average fertility rates will have massive impacts on population growth and that smaller families are the best way to confront climate change and other related environmental crises. By 2100, world population could vary by billions of people depending on whether the average woman in the world has one child more or fewer in the near future.  Nothing will matter as much for my kid’s future as the people with whom he will share this world. Who we are matters most of all. 

    Yes, immediate threats are distracting, but success comes in focusing on what’s important and what’s urgent and from being more proactive than reactive. I can try everything possible  within the bubble of our family to ready my child – and all those efforts will go to waste, depending upon what other parents do.  Yet I have to write this post under the pen-name Kelly, because calling for family planning laws that ensure parents are ready before they have kids geared toward alleviating the societal ills bred by income inequality or that support smaller and more sustainable families, is taboo. I actually fear I would be condemned by friends and family, and that my business would be threatened. This is the taboo we need to break.

    My child deserves a better future than the one she is on track to get, and the way to break off that track starts with a family planning system whereby we take the resources from the rich to level the playing field for the children of the poor, incentivizing smaller and sustainable families for everyone along the way. That is truly fundamental change. 
  • Earth Day: 7 Effective Moves to Restore Nature

    Earth Day: 7 Effective Moves to Restore Nature

    Forget all the feel good advertising for “green” products. Want to actually be effective in protecting the environment? Promote: Promote: 1) smaller, more sustainable families, 2) communities and parents working together to ensure that all kids have a fair start in life – including a habitable planet. Now that’s being effective.

    Here are 7 next steps:

    1. Tell Congress to include Fair Start family planning in the Green New Deal.
    2. Overcrowding set the stage for Covid-19, and the next pandemic. Urge the WHO to promote a family planning policy that actually mitigates the threat.
    3. Celebrities influence how we plan families. Urge them to lead by example and to choose smaller families.
    4. Our governments are so eager to grow populations of consumers, workers, and taxpayers, they are actually flooding failing child welfare systems with more and more kids. Urge them to change course.
    5. Shouldn’t the United Nations be promoting child welfare, equity, democracy, and the restoration of nature, rather than using babies to create economic growth. Tell UN Secretary General Guterres to change course, and to flatten this curve.
    6. The wealthiest corporations and families in the world have no claim to their astronomical wealth against the right of every child to a Fair Start in life. Find and peacefully / legally engage the people at the top of the population pyramid to fund Fair Start family planning. We have a right to those resources.
    7. Protecting the environment starts with recognizing the human right to nature. Support another nonprofit? Urge them to recognize the right, and contact us at info@fairstartmovement.org submit amicus briefs in the recent federal litigation in the United States seeking to enshrine the right.
  • Having Kids Petitions CDC to Support New Earth Day Population Policy to Avoid Next Pandemic

    Having Kids Petitions CDC to Support New Earth Day Population Policy to Avoid Next Pandemic

    Poor family planning and population growth enabled COVID-19 and will enable the next pandemic

    In preparation for Earth Day, the national organization Having Kids has petitioned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to support dramatic changes in family planning policies that would substantially reduce the initial threat, transmission, and impact of pandemics such as COVID-19. Those changes will also halt the destruction of our environment, which heightens the threat and impact of pandemics.

    Read the letter here.

    The facts are clear: As the World Health Organization has recognized, 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 the novel coronavirus. Yet this fundamental driver is often ignored in policymaking. The U.N. has issued world population projections with massive variability. That variability will drastically impact the threat that diseases pose to humanity worldwide. 

    That variability, and the projected population growth, represent missed opportunities to invest more in public health and specifically in the development and health of every new child born, which in turn exacerbate the initial risk, transmission, and impact of disease. That variability also  represents missed opportunities to eliminate economic and health inequities, which both exacerbate pandemics and are compounded by them. That variability represents the threat of further worldwide ecocide, which worsens the threat of pandemics in a variety of ways, including through the acceleration of the climate crisis. 

    There exists a clear, and human right-based, pathway toward reform that the CDC is obligated, under its mandate, to support. 

    “We can fight pandemics and change the direction the world is headed by promoting smaller and more equitable families,” Having Kids Executive Director Erika Mathews says. “We just have to start a serious conversation about ensuring the future we all want.” 

    Having Kids is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing parent-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model. 

  • Having Kids Petitions Congress to Deal With Fundamental Driver of the Coronavirus Pandemic

    Having Kids Petitions Congress to Deal With Fundamental Driver of the Coronavirus Pandemic

    Poor family planning and population growth set the stage for the rapid spread of the disease, and will for the next

    Today Having Kids, the national child protection organization, petitioned U.S. Sen. Cory Booker to focus on changing the way Americans plan families as the most effective way to prevent pandemics. The science is clear: Overcrowding helps drive pandemics and worsens their impact. Insufficient family planning policies, both here in the United States and at the United Nations, exacerbate that threat, ensuring much more crowding in cities as world population is set to grow by billions of people in our lifetimes.

    Read the letter here.

    TAKE ACTION HERE.

    As the WHO has recognized, overcrowding exacerbates pandemics and is perhaps the most fundamental threat to public health. Overpopulation is a key factor in the spread of a variety of diseases including coronavirus, yet this driver is often ignored in policymaking. The U.N. has issued world population projections with massive variability. That variability is caused by the U.N.’s adherence to a dangerously outdated family planning model that ignores human rights and democracy. Governments in many countries are compounding the problem by pushing women to have kids they don’t even want. That variability will drastically impact the threat that diseases pose to humanity worldwide.

    Stimulus packages provide a unique opportunity to stabilize today’s families while protecting future generations. Having Kids is asking Booker and his colleagues to align future stimulus packages with the priorities of a child-centered Fair Start model. We specifically recommend the following strategies:

    • Guaranteeing a sustainable child income through baby bonds 
    • Expressly protecting family planning services in stimulus legislation 
    • Expanding access to long-acting reversible contraceptives 
    • Considering measures to prevent child abuse 

    “We can fight pandemics and other threats by promoting smaller and more equitable families,” Having Kids Executive Director Erika Mathews says. “We just have to refocus our family planning systems around what every child needs.” 
    Having Kids is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing parent-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model.

    Take Action: Add your name to urge Sen. Booker to pursue Fair Start funding in the next stimulus.