Fair Start Movement

Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

One Form of Protest to Change the World? To End Child Torture?

When we talk of changing the world we actually mean changing the behavior of the people in it.

We mean changing things like this mother recording the death of her three-year-old after hitting him repeatedly.

Given that the majority of people will be those who live in the future changing behavior, might be best thought of as having and raising kids well. What the heck does that mean? In the Twentieth Century, based on significant developments in the fields of child development, civil society came largely to agree – in what would eventually be called the Children’s Rights Convention – on the birth and development conditions children deserve. These resources would create a world we should all value – filled with nature, equality of opportunity, and democracies where each person would matter.

Changing the way we plan families can end abuse.
See Family Planning: An Overlooked Approach to Child Maltreatment Prevention – Child Welfare Monitor

What went wrong? Governments and big businesses colluded to reinterpret human rights regimes to ensure population-driven economic growth, rather than child-centric family planning consistent with the human rights regime. That move – over time – created the world we live in today – beset by the climate crisis and massive inequity. The men that engineered this scam robbed us of true/participatory democracy, and the freedom of consensual governance, in order to build concentrations of wealth and power.

They used poor family planning and growth to slowly push and crowd people out of town halls and into shopping malls, robbing us of our freedom.

And the charities they paid off to lie to us did just that: With child welfare organizations ignoring the conditions in which children are actually born and raised while helping relatively few numbers of children after the fact, and environmental and animal rights groups focusing on low-impact campaigns while population and inequality exploded, and the groundwork was laid for the climate crisis.

Be effective.

Finding these men, their accomplices, as well as those who inherited the wealth and growth of that scam, and taking their wealth through leaderless resistance organization and by all means effective to fund family reforms that incentivize and entitle families to do what the Convention intended would be the greatest act of justice – impacting more people, and furthering true objective values more fully – than any other one act a person could commit.

We might be inclined to resist such forms of protests because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that are those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.

We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do – including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.

We can think of the child described above as we engage them – and anyone who opposes giving kids a fair start in life – for they are fundamentally to blame for what happened to that child. They reject a change in the way we plan families that would have prevented the child’s death, in order to ensure and exploit growth.

Exxon, and their former leadership who helped ensure the climate crisis, have rejected this change.

TAKE ACTION: TELL EXXON WHAT’S AT STAKE IF IT AND ITS FORMER LEADERS DO NOT EMBRACE FAIR START.

Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power others have over them through Fair Start family reforms like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance where people are actually empowered to make the ultimate rules under which all must live. And there is only really one way to do that: Parental readiness policies that avoid things like parents torturing their children to death, birth equity redistribution of wealth to ensure true equality of opportunity, and a universal ethic and default of sustainable families.

November 17, 2022
Words on Basic Justice – Who We Should Become – From Fair Start Co-Director Gabby Mora

By Gabby Mora

Children are the future. Isn’t that what everyone says? It is a lovely sentiment. Sadly, very little is done to secure that future. Without a fair start to life, millions of children are doomed. This is where Fair Start Movement comes in.

We believe that all children deserve the same rights; they should all be born at the same starting line. This line is more of a zig-zag, though, as those in power invest in keeping the wealthy at the top and everyone else to fend for themselves. And as we have seen, this method is only making things worse for the rest of us.

Fair Start Movement focuses on two things: (1) push for family planning practices where would-be parents wait until they are mentally, emotionally, and financially ready to have children, (2) educating people on why sustainable families are better for the individuals and society as our planet’s resources are depleting quickly, and (3) advocate for policies that invest in programs and services that help all children, not only those born into wealthy families.

For as long as I can remember, the message has been “having children is your purpose, and the more children the better!” I made a choice of not having children because honestly, I do not want to bring a child into the world as it is, especially with the environmental issues we face. But there are millions of families out there who will continue to have children and we need to change things for them.

What we have been doing as a society is not working. When one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with around 720 BILLIONAIRES, how can we justify unhoused, starving children? Things need to change.

TAKE ACTION NOW – CHOOSE FROM DOZENS OF WAYS.

November 16, 2022
Herald the End of Superpower

Writing in The Hill, Benzel and Kotlikoff may be correct that the U.S. is seeing its last days as an economic superpower, relative to China and India. But as the climate crisis deepens now is a great time to assess the costs and benefits of chest-thumping nations trying to outdo one another.

The alternative is the international law regime set up after World War 2, the one designed to prevent nations dominating one another. That regime is just missing one piece: A just system of family policies that would prohibit the growth, and exploitation of future generations, the Benzel and Kotlikoff article highlights.

A just families system would replace growth-based national dominance with the goal of ensuring equitable families that raise children consistent with the Children’s Convention. That would move us away from a superpower, and towards the ideal of human rights: Sustainable and participatory democracies composed of people who truly have equal opportunities to thrive. Rather than vie for supremacy, we should urge the United Nations to do its job and help change family systems to create that future.

November 9, 2022
Matt Ball, Early Fair Start Organizer, Has a New Book Out!

Matt Ball, longtime activist, husband, father, and early member of the Fair Start Movement, recently published his third book, Losing My Religions. A mix of memoir, essays, musings, photography, and travel log, Losing tells the story of Matt’s efforts to make the world a better place, while offering a fearless analysis of his many mistakes.

As one reviewer put it:

[H]e plays with quotes, stories, and a wily, at times even serious irreverence. He lets us into the world of his own joys, realizations, and daily suffering. Family, religion, consciousness, health, life, reality, and everything are given a series of pulsating reflections and staggering vulnerabilities that are hard to put down.

From a professional full-time writer:

A tour de force! The narrative and visuals (everything from Death Valley to chocolate crinkle cookies) are so lively. It’s really unlike anything I’ve read before.

And from Australia:

It’s only just after 7 am now and I read the first 70 pages. It’s very unusual writing and I have found it efficient in that I couldn’t put it down – even though I repeatedly thought I’d only just read one more page.

The ebook version is free; you can get the files and learn more at LosingMyReligions.net

Matt and Anne’s child Elwen, many years ago.

Here’s an excerpt from his chapter, “God, the Greatest Murderer of All Time”:

Abortion is awesome. It isn’t icky. It isn’t a “necessary evil.” It isn’t “I personally oppose abortion, but….” It isn’t something non-politicians should shy away from. Anything that can help women have more control over their reproduction is awesome. Anything that can help make every baby a wanted baby is awesome.

Just consider what the other side is saying: They, through the powers of the state, want to control when a woman can reproduce. They don’t want every child to be a wanted child.

We want every child to be a wanted child.

Think about it: take two pills and expel a tiny clump of cells with less sentience than a cockroach. The world is spared yet another unwanted child, and on average, poverty is reduced. The woman regains control of her life, and in the future, can bring a wanted and provided-for child into the world.

And from “Fight the Power Part 1: To breed or not to breed:”

Of the people you know well, how many were provided a happy, healthy, balanced, lie-free, totally-loved childhood? (Religion counts as a lie.)

And many parents are far less happy than you would think (or than they will let on). As is probably obvious, parents feel internal and external pressure to sing the praises of their children. But simply Google “Are single people happier?” or “Are childfree couples happier?” and you will find seemingly endless studies showing that having kids is definitely not the key to happiness. Doing this search while I write this, the top results say, “the data suggest single people are happier and more satisfied with their lives than commonly believed,” and “Couples without children have happier marriages, according to one of the biggest studies ever of relationships in Britain. Childless men and women are more satisfied with their relationships and more likely to feel valued by their partner.” And this happiness is in spite of our genetic and familial and social pressures to breed.

If you think your life would be empty without a child, your life has bigger problems than a child could or should fill. If you think your life won’t be full without a child, are you sure you want to fill it with pain, screams, worry, regret, poop, worry, anguish, apprehension, guilt, and then a topping of worry?

Matt and Anne.

…

I truly think that there would be a lot more happiness if fewer people got married and many fewer people had kids. Even before the pandemic, this seemed to be happening with folks currently in their twenties and thirties. So maybe more kids these days are breaking free of the pressures and doing what’s right for their own life satisfaction.

And “Test Your Marriage”:

Getting “fixed” was yet another example of how society promotes procreating. As happened to all my friends who got vasectomies, I was questioned very seriously if I really wanted this. (YES.) (Although it was uncomfortable, and seeing smoke rising … down there … well, there were moments….)

But no one grills you about bringing an entirely new person into the world. No one questions you about that decision at all. That. Is. Fucked. Up. Reverse that – make everyone who wants to breed pass an inquisition and let anyone who wants a vasectomy get one free and without hassle – and the world would be a vastly better place.

If you’d like to learn more from Matt’s “half-failed life of airplanes, agony, animals, basketball, bliss, cameras, chaos, cops…,” and discover how his life’s lessons led him to realize the importance of the Fair Start Movement, please check out LosingMyReligions.net. But be warned, you might have this reaction:

I am riveted. For the next 36 hours, I want to curve myself into a comfy chair and read every word, every quote, gaze at every photo…and then read it again.

November 7, 2022
Take Action: Did Peter Singer’s Population Ethics Undo His Work on Animal Liberation? Absolutely.

Peter Singer is regarded by many as a founder of contemporary animal rights, largely based on his book Animal Liberation. But few realize that he has also taken public and influential stances on family and population policies, in this 2018 public lecture, for example. He avoids making concrete conclusions about population policies in this lecture and elsewhere,

Nowhere has he advocated for effective interventions – like overriding property rights to wealth in order to fund Fair Start family planning incentives/entitlements – and other peremptory norm measures would have bent the arc of unsustainable growth downwards towards what many see as optimal world population ranges. Those ranges, like all population matters, actually involve people – and the fundamental creation of power relations between them. And power and population ethics begin with human rights, the objective frame that after WW2 should cabin utility, Effective Altruism, and all other lesser and more subjective forms of policy Singer normally employs.

These are the facts. The growth Singer did not seriously address put more animals in places like factory farms than his ethics – interpreted by many as promoting mere dietary changes – took out. That growth also fundamentally exacerbated the climate crisis, which will be the greatest source of human and nonhuman suffering.

And while fertility rates may be falling, we are far from optimal and many – including Singer’s followers – are pushing to reverse that trend and increase family size to drive economic growth.

How is animal liberation possible in the face of a wave of human population growth causing massive extinction? How is promoting veganism for what is effectively a small percentage of a growing human population that mostly exploits, tortures, and kills nonhumans true animal rights? How does that growth further human rights when the growth enriched relatively few people, at cost to equality and the political stability it brings?

Singer’s work is based on an error called the constitutive fallacy, or ignoring the way our creation and development do and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and nonhumans. Who we are might be different mixes of nurture, or nature, or influential power relations, but all flow (and among self-determining peoples should flow) from our creation. We cannot separate values like nature and equity from who we are and our power relations with others, which stem from our creation.

For example, our economic birth position mostly determines whether we are rich or poor as adults. Another example would be that it is impossible to ensure the empathy people need to treat nonhumans well without addressing the conditions in which people are born and develop because empathy largely depends on years zero to three in childhood maturation.

Another example would be that if we assume we ought to treat nonumans well, we would have to structure an effective legal system that would obligate that. But because there is such massive attenuation (caused by the growth that is eradicating the nonhuman world) between people and their representatives, we cannot do this. Another example would be world leaders attempting to determine the costs and benefits associated with Anthropocentric environmental baselines like the Paris Agreement, a mistake that only accelerated ecocide, rather than using an organic baseline like being relatively self-determining people and the conditioning of wealth on equitable family planning investments that make that possible. (This last example gels with the constitutive fallacy as political adherence to national constitutions, or even international law, as basic and overriding norms, as opposed to adherence the obviously antecedent and more basic family planning norms that create us, the people.)

In other words, in Singer’s prescriptions for animal liberation come from outside of who people ought to actually be, in terms of the creation of the fundamental power relations that define them.

Some have argued that it’s unfair to say that Singer’s population comments (or lack of comments) have “undone” his work for animals, given that virtually no one knows what his views on population are. Per this argument, there are probably zero policy-makers who’ve done anything based on Singer’s population views. Perhaps few or none have decided to procreate or not procreate based on Singer’s silence on the issue.

This response treats population as something, an issue, that we can separate from what we do. But how can we do anything, or suggest that others should do something, without first determining the acceptable power relations that determine who we are, and should be? We cannot separate what we narrowly think of as population – or who we are – from what we do. The former is always a factor and precedes the latter.

Singer’s claim that “we should help animals by not eating them” is wrong on its face because the “we” in his claim – the fundamental creation of power relations that permit growth, relations he accepts – does more harm to animals than changing diets does good. That’s the constitutive fallacy at play. And that mistake – not requiring things like the Children’s Convention standard in family planning policies to improve those relations, which would physically constitute just communities – does more than just harm animals. It fundamentally permits anthropocentric changes that cause irrefutable harm to all, against an absolute standard like infant health.

Backwards family policies fundamentally drive things like extinction, growing levels of birth-based inequity, rising numbers of unhoused persons, the exacerbation of the conditions that drive pandemics, a multiplying of climate impacts on multiple levels, and the degrading systems of participatory democracy. Yet these policies are easily reversible and with policies that actually liberate humans and animals alike by using wealth from the top to incentivize delays in parenting pegged to objective standards of parental readiness, redistribution of wealth between rich and poor kids, and a universal ethic of sustainable families, all of which create functional democracies.

Don’t confuse chaos with freedom. Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions, the impact of bad parenting on communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. They will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple test, in functional democracies.

Singer never seriously addresses this issue, through redistributive birth entitlements that empower us in terms of who we are before turning to what we should do, for example. That mistake of ignoring the primacy of who we should be (and the best answer is fair), given his position of influence and the crucial time for mitigating the climate crisis in which he was working, harmed future generations.

And as a result his work does not effectively protect nonhumans, promote equity, restore democracy, or even protect considered parental desire. An alternative approach which does not make the error would value each person born, and the value of self-determination, above the growth Singer never seriously opposed.

Is this type of fairness a threat to the ongoing processes of decolonization. antiracism, and other forms of anti-oppression? Eliminating the massive birth inequity caused by colonization – the one that disempowers the majority of people, those who will live in the future – and doing so while restoring nonhuman autonomy is the height of anti-oppression. Though admittedly, all of this argument flows from Eurocentric framing and should also be done from more indigenous frames.

It would treat ensuring minimum levels of welfare, and freedom, as more important than total welfare indictors like gross domestic product. It would elevate ethics in the creation of people – and the conditioning of political obligation on family planning policies that ensure people will matter – over the constitutions and governments whose authority to assign property and other rights derive from such people, again something Singer never considered.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer to #tellthetruth and admit that his family and population ethics undid his animal liberation ethics. Urge him to support a pivot from parent-centric family planning to child-centric planning. He should admit that before we can engage in Effective Altruism we are politically obligated to constitute just communities – and total liberation – through socially and ecologically regenerative family reforms like Fair Start.

Without this, his work could in the end do more to protect concentrations of wealth and power than nonhumans.

He should not allow his work on animal ethics to mislead people from the truth that we are committing ecocide through poor family planning, and should support paying back the costs to freedom that population growth has imposed on future generations. Also urge him to lead by example and treat property claims – like the extreme wealth he helped create in the plant-based industry – as conditional on our fulfilling every child’s right to a fair start in life. That wealth, and the power disparity it represents, is defended by the threat of state violence, not the true justification possible amid fair power relations.

November 5, 2022
Population Changes Raise Issues of Compensation, Not Competition

Parag Khanna’s recent push in Time to make mobility a human right in light of lower fertility rates and ageing in many nations seems well-intentioned. It’s certainly better than the legions of men crying out against a baby bust, as they urge women to have more kids to serve as cheap future labor and taxpayers. But Khana shares the same fundamental value with those men: Economic growth. And he places that over values like nature, equality, and participatory democracy.

Drought in Kenya has been exacerbated by the climate crisis.

The wealth of the past several decades was made and placed in the hands of a few, according to one Nobel Laureate, by externalizing its costs on future generations. It was made by not requiring environmental regulations that would have prevented the climate crisis, and not ensuring that all children enjoy birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention. Our priority should be to regulate and provide in this way, in part by compensating future generations through family planning entitlements, before we turn to mobility.

October 28, 2022
Take Action: Urge USA Today to Report Fairly on Family Reforms That Impact Your Future

Smaller Families Are a Benefit Not a Burden

In a recent piece in USA Today Clay Routledge and Will Johnson cover the story of sea changes in American fertility rates. But while they are likely right about the cause of the trend towards being childfree or having smaller families, they proceed from two false assumptions. First, the change is beneficial not detrimental, given the climate crisis and the threat it poses to our nation. While Routledge and Johnson seem eager to return to unsustainable growth that ignores biodiverse nature, changes in fertility are one of the best chances we have to mitigate the crisis and invest more in the children who will need to be prepared for the degraded ecologies of the future.

Secondly, it’s simply not plausible to say one has to have children to find meaning in life. If we compare the lives of childfree Oprah Winfrey, and Stephanie Jimenez, who starved one of her six children to death, we will see that existential meaning takes more than creating other people. Instead we should opt for just and sustainable family policies that create a future where all have the opportunity to find meaning and success, by having children and otherwise.

TAKE ACTION: Urge President and News & Editor in Chief for USA TODAY, Nicole Carroll, to report on the need for Fair Start family planning reforms, the most effective solution to the crises we face today. Email her here: EIC@usatoday.com

October 17, 2022
Children of Amboseli Suffering in the Climate Crisis Drought: Take Action

By Guest Author Dickson Lekina Kimaki, Leader of Amboseli Love

Amboseli Love works hard to empower young Maasai women, and now amidst a devastating drought, driven by the climate crisis. But like many groups, Amboseli Love is taking fundamental action, embracing child-centric family planning and other policies that enable them to make overriding calls for things like climate reparations from the nations that mostly created the climate crisis. Fair Start supports their calls, and urges others to as well.

Like most poor women in African nations, the majority of Maasai women in Kenya are destined to live a life of poverty and cultural oppression. Just one generation ago, less than 20 percent of Maasai women in Kenya enrolled in school. Today, even with free primary school education in Kenya since January 2003, only 48 percent of Maasai girls enroll in school, and only 10 percent of girls make it to secondary school.

Dickson at work.

Typically, Maasai girls are circumcised between the ages of 11 to 13 and soon afterwards married to a man chosen by her father in exchange for cattle and cash. A Maasai woman will never be allowed to divorce, except in the most egregious cases of physical abuse, and will never be allowed to marry again, even if the husband her father chooses is an old man who dies when she is still in her teens. Instead, she becomes the property of one of her husband’s brothers. She will be one of multiple wives, and will have many children, regardless of her health or ability to provide for them. She will rise early every day to milk cows and spend her days walking miles to water holes to launder clothes and get water, and to gather heavy loads of firewood to carry back home. If she is lucky, she will have a donkey to share her burden. She will live a life of few physical comforts, dependent on a husband and a family she did not choose. Her life expectancy is 45 years.

If you educate a woman: She will know her rights and have the confidence and independence to stand up for them. She will choose whom to marry and when to marry. She will have fewer children, and they will be healthier and better educated than the previous generation. She will not circumcise her daughters. She will have economic security. She will spend 90 percent of her income on her family, compared to 35 percent that an educated man would spend. She will help support her parents. She will not forget where she came from.

TAKE ACTION: Learn more about Amboseli, Www.amboselilove.com, and please give through our partner organization Rejoice Africa Foundation by simple marking your donation “for Amboseli.”

October 13, 2022
The Death of Queen Elizabeth II Raises Valid Concerns About Race, Inequity, and Privilege

The Death of Queen Elizabeth II has saddened millions, but has also raised conversations about the past, race, inequality and political privilege.

Fair Start has previously encouraged the Royal Family to embrace more ecologically sustainable and socially equitable family planning, but the impact of a long-running racist and colonial empire / monarchy raise much larger questions:

Why are so many fascinated by monarchies in a world that purports to be committed to democracy? Does the racist and colonial history of the Royal family obligate reparations? Does the continuing focus on royalty undercut commitments to equality of opportunity, antiracism, and the dismantling of colonization?

One way to show a commitment to justice, at the most fundamental level, would be to embrace family planning reforms that include the needs of future generations and nonhuman animals, using nature and equity as guides to help families cooperate to ensure the best future possible for all children.

That model is at direct odds with the concept of monarchy, and even politically symbolic monarchies.

Wherever one falls in the debate about the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the moment provides the opportunity to reflect, and to try to answer questions that many generations ago could not have been publicly addressed.

September 15, 2022