Fair Start Movement

Category: News & Fair Start Headlines

  • Kids have a right to nature. Tell the UN to recognize it.

    Kids have a right to nature. Tell the UN to recognize it.

    The United Nations is meeting this week to determine new targets for biodiversity, worldwide. Having Kids is petitioning the relevant parties to address the fundamental driver of extinction: Overcrowding caused by poor family planning .

    Read our letter here.

    Human population growth is the fundamental driver of extinction and other ecological and social crise and the greatest contributor to the climate crisis. As our species expands across the globe, it is literally consuming the biodiversity it needs in order to thrive. That expansion, aided by governments and corporations that benefit from the resulting economic growth, is a violation of the human right to nature. 

    The facts are clear: 

    Hence, we are obligated to all advocate for better family planning modeling.

    Take action: Urge the UN biodiversity chief to speak out on the need for a new family planning model by contacting her here: Elizabeth.Mrema@un.org

  • Coronavirus: Overcrowding is making it worse. We can fix that.

    Coronavirus: Overcrowding is making it worse. We can fix that.

    Today, Having Kids petitioned the World Health Organization to address the fundamental driver of the coronavirus and many other public health threats: overcrowding driven by poor family planning.

    Read the letter here.

    As the WHO has recognized, overcrowding exacerbates epidemics 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 facts are clear: 

    Hence, we are obligated to all advocate for better family planning modeling. 

    Take action: Urge the WHO to address the fundamental driver by contacting them here: https://www.who.int/foodsafety/contact/en/

  • Article: Ensuring Our Survival on Earth

    Article: Ensuring Our Survival on Earth

    Scientists and environmentalists commonly offer a few steps that everyday people can take to help mitigate the climate crisis: reduce your carbon footprint via travel, eat less meat, switch to clean energy.

    But that list typically omits the single most impactful decision we can make: having fewer kids.

    Carter Dillard details why solving our population and environmental problems starts with having fewer kids and embracing a human-rights approach to family planning here at AlterNet.

  • Better Parenting in the Age of the Climate Crisis

    Better Parenting in the Age of the Climate Crisis

    Kudos to Jedediah Britton-Purdy for his eloquent explanation of why he chose to have his young son, James, despite the climate crisis, as many others are forgoing parenting altogether as they take. Jedediah’s hope for the future, and for James’ future, shines through his writing.

    But did he miss something crucial to protecting that future? Hope is not a strategy.

    And if we want to, as Jed says, “build a world that is both safer and fairer,” we should start with the actual building blocks of the future and remember that having a small family is the most effective way to mitigate the climate crisis. It’s more effective on a magnitude of 20 times than things like changing one’s diet or transportation.

    And that’s not taking into account the way better family planning can improve child welfare, reduce inequity, and perhaps most importantly, build democracies that are small and inclusive enough for each person’s voice to matter and to not be drowned out in a crowd.  

    Family Planning and the Environment

    What matters most is that Jed just had James and that he exemplifies the evolved thinking true environmentalism requires by connecting his family planning behavior and its impact on the collective. We can go further and all realize that responsible decision-making like Jed’s can be promoted collectively through better family planning policies and laws that reflect the love Jed obviously has for nature, children, and democracy.   

    TAKE ACTION: Urge the Atlantic, by writing to themasthead@theatlantic.com, to report on the greatest and most fundamental solution to our social and ecological crises: Child-first family planning.

  • Beyond the Environment as Resource

    Beyond the Environment as Resource

    The Washington Post is right to shine a light on the connection between hunting and our environment, a connection that is breaking down as Americans lose interest in hunting. With the decline in hunting comes a decrease in conservation funding from hunting licenses, firearms permits, and more, with wildlife and environmental agencies suffering the consequences.

    This trend screams for a paradigm change in the way humans think about — and make efforts to care for — the environment. We must establish a new paradigm for future generations of valuing nonhumans for more than their ability to kill them.

    Prevailing Attitudes Toward the Environment


    The old paradigm is centered on the idea that the “environment is just a human resource.” This thinking treats the environment as part of a world economy and considers it valuable only if people assign value to it, like any other commodity we buy and sell. This myopic, anthropocentric thinking helped create the climate crisis and the other ecological crises that now threaten our children and future generations.

    Codifying the Human Right to Nature

    What does the shift from this old way look like? It looks like recognizing our fundamental human right to nature. This right rises above and cabins the subjectivity of markets and human shortsightedness. It looks like institutionalizing that right in law.

    That paradigm shift is now before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a suit challenging the government’s total abdication of its most basic duties by failing to mitigate, and in many cases by exacerbating, the climate crisis. We have a right to nature — and seeing it is the paradigm shift toward having a truly symbiotic, nonviolent relationship with the ecology that keeps us alive.

  • New York Times: Population Is About People and Shared Values, Not Economic Growth

    New York Times: Population Is About People and Shared Values, Not Economic Growth

    It’s downright jarring to see the New York Times report on the climate crisis and mass extinction with alarm but subtly treat low birthrates as similarly threatening to our future. Smaller families are the most effective way to mitigate the threat of the climate crisis and many other environmental and social dilemmas.

    Lower birthrates might be a threat to unsustainable growth-based economics, where we see babies as free money in the form of new consumers, cheap future labor, and compliant taxpayers. But lower birthrates are a boon to shared values like investing more in each child and creating a safe and healthy environment. And they are a boon at the key moment in human development where those values matter most of all. 

    What matters most is the people with whom we and our kids will share this planet as its ecology degrades. That is the most fundamental question of all.

    Take action: Contact the Times at nytnews@nytimes.com and urge them to deal with the values at stake and not to promote unsustainable growth.

  • Want a Better Future? Focus on Ensuring All Children Better Birth Conditions.

    Want a Better Future? Focus on Ensuring All Children Better Birth Conditions.

    Having Kids’ work on ensuring all children at least some minimum level of welfare at birth has just been published in one of the leading journals in the field of child and family law policy, the Child & Family Law Journal.

    Read the article, “The Human Right to a Fair Start in Life,” here.

    What can you do to help? Understand that there is no such thing as taking child welfare seriously without changing family planning policies to ensure minimum levels of welfare at birth for every child. Beginning that transition involves changing the fundamental fallacy that having kids is a matter of personal privacy, or that it’s “nobody else’s business,” by focusing on the worst cases of child abuse and neglect and the failing child welfare system that is impacting our shared future.

    Children should not be born into abusive or neglectful conditions or situations in which they will be raised by the state.

    TAKE ACTION: Contact us at info@fairstartmovement.org to become a Having Kids state leader in your state and help us create truly fundamental change.

  • This Man Is Threatening Our Right to Nature

    This Man Is Threatening Our Right to Nature

    Having Kids promotes our fundamental human right to nature and the sovereignty of democratic communities over economic pyramids driven by population growth, mass consumption and corporate greed.

    TC Energy CEO Russ Girling is a key part of the system threatening our right to nature. He is behind the violence against the Wet’suwet’en peoples of Canada as they defend their land against Girling’s and TC Energy’s attempt to build the Coastal GasLink pipeline across their ancestral lands.

    Given the impact of the project on our degrading climate, Girling and TC Energy are a manifest threat to our children’s future.

    1. Girling and TC Energy are responsible for violating the human right to nature and the sovereignty that derives from it.
    2. As human rights, the right to nature and sovereignty supersede national authority and any other rights the nation attempts to guarantee TC Energy and Girling.
    3. Girling can offset the harm he is causing by pulling back from the Wet’suwet’en lands and repaying the money he and TC Energy have taken. This reparation could include funding Fair Start family planning policies that will build resilience in future generations as they face degraded ecosystems.

    How Can We Stop TC Energy’s Threat to Nature?

    Take Action: We can target the top of the pyramid. We are urging supporters to find Girling, to peacefully and lawfully engage him about fulfilling what our human rights require, and to publicize your bravery. As we obtain information on his whereabouts, we will update this post.
    Please also contact the Hon. Mike Farnworth, the minister of public safety and solicitor general of British Columbia, regarding the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s incursions and to make the points above. Additionally, you can sign this petition or engage him personally if you are in the area.

  • Having Kids in 2020: Unifying Thoughtful, Caring People and Their Social Justice Movements

    Having Kids in 2020: Unifying Thoughtful, Caring People and Their Social Justice Movements

    2019 was a great year for Having Kids and for the transition from parent-focused family planning to forward-looking, inclusive, and child-centric family planning. We published peer-reviewed research to show just how effective better family planning is at solving the world’s greatest problems, worked in coalition to urge the United Nations to move toward changing its archaic and disastrous family planning policies, designed early economic modeling for Fair Start-guaranteed income wealth transfers, celebrated Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s speaking out on better family planning, and solidified a campaign to accelerate getting male contraception on the market, among other advancements. 

    2020 will be even better. 

    “Rights” movements, including human, environmental, child, and animal rights movements, all have at least one thing in common: They are fundamentally, and effectively, promoted by family planning policies that revolve around objective values, the goal of creating just societies constituted of self-determining people, and the process of moving to cooperative planning, smaller families, and more equitable starts in life. These movements thrive on communities composed of empathetic and just people. These movements are obligated, by their fundamental and unavoidable commitments, to support child-focused family planning models that invest more time, love, and energy in future generations over family planning models that exploit those generations.

    These movements can unify around this most basic commonality and can target their opponents: pre-constitutional corporate, oligarchical, bureaucratic, and other hierarchical entities who promote subjectivist family planning policies that exploit the most vulnerable entities — the nonhuman world and future children — in order to feed off the fundamental chaos of a constantly growing population. These entities rule from atop pyramids of billions of relatively uneducated and unempathetic consumers, workers, and taxpayers living in vast inequity, consuming nature, and constantly struggling for socially secure positioning and influence they will never attain. These entities promote this social and ecological chaos because it ensures hierarchical systems, rather than free, self-determining communities.

    All rights movements can unify around child-centric family planning in order to target these entities at the top of the power pyramid in order to take their resources and decentralize their power in future generations as a means of most effectively promoting equity, democracy, and deep ecology. Rights movements may do so because human rights-based family planning is fundamentally constitutional, in the sense that we are before we do — and what makes us comes first. 

    Having kids, and the rights and obligations it entails, comes first. 

    This is a sense of fundamental and physical constitutionalism that goes well beyond traditional and outdated conceptions of constitutions as historical documents disconnected from the people they control. Instead, family planning-based constitutionalism — a real and tangible social contract between generations — truly empowers people right from the start. Human rights-based family planning is the fundamental norm. It constitutes societies and, as such, overrides all conflicting norms including big-government tax obligations and big-business property rights. We, both liberals and conservatives, have a right to the resources at the top of the pyramid, and we can use those resources to protect our shared values and our shared future as we liberate future generations. 

    It’s time to stand up. In 2020, Having Kids will help further define the battle lines needed to out the opponents of systems of rights — the lines necessary for truly fundamental reform. Please join us.