Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Dear Sundar,

Congratulations on Google’s recent plans to invest in U.S. job creation, and on your ongoing commitments to social justice in this country. Our organization, Having Kids, is reaching out to you regarding an issue fundamental to social justice – the laws and policies that control the way we plan families and raise our children.

Google recently announced plans to disrupt liberal arts educational systems with its career certificate program. While the move expands economic opportunities for many, it places Google – an influential actor – at a crossroads between two directions this country may go in terms of family planning and educational policy, culture, and practice. The choice is fairly binary, given the nature of population growth.

A. We can treat the country as an economy to be driven – as Nobel Laureate Steven Chu recognized – by unsustainable population growth, buoyed up by family planning, rearing and educational policies that ensure no minimum levels of welfare at birth, no equal opportunities in life, political systems where the average person has little impact, and no fundamental right to a biodiverse and natural world. This approach responds to a perceived “baby bust” in population growth by simply creating more and more people as economic inputs. This is the approach championed by Ivanka Trump in her policies on family planning and education, and much of this was recently adopted by Congress in its stimulus legislation.

B. We can treat the country as a democracy, with family planning, rearing and educational policies which push in the opposite direction, creating fewer people in whose development we invest more, and in ways that are equitable. This requires cooperative family planning systems where parents, and the centers of wealth and power both public and private, work together to ensure all children are born above certain thresholds (like those specified in the Children’s Rights Convention). This move can help us approach equality of opportunities in life, as well as restructured democracies where each voice is heard. These moves, in turn, are consistent with future generations enjoying a biodiverse and natural world. This approach is the subject of recent peer-reviewed research, and can be implemented through things as simple as fertility delay incentives. All of this comports with the Sustainable Development Goals, and eventual stabilization at an optimal world population range of the sort Sir Partha Dasgupta has envisioned. This approach could be termed Fair Start family planning.

There are compelling reasons to choose the latter, or more investive than exploitative, approach. It has ten to twenty times the beneficial impact on key crises facing our species, from the climate crisis, to massive inequity, to failing democracies. But more importantly, it is the best interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promise of a fundamental human right to have children – one that every generation should enjoy. And because that right is uniquely peremptory, or lexically primary in that we are before we do, we are simply obligated – under international law – to implement it. Put another way, because human rights and democracies must precede and regulate economies, they come first and we must plan to comprise future generations as such.

We urge Google to take a stand in favor of Fair Start family planning reforms, and we stand ready to assist in any way we can.

Sincerely,

Cat Hughey,

Executive Director, Having Kids

Having Kids is working closely with leaders in Colorado to develop an amendment to the state’s constitution that would guarantee every child a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially. Click below to read the proposal:

• Our current family planning systems provide no minimum standard of well-being for future children, allowing children to be born into failing state systems because their parents cannot care for them. That exacerbates inequity and ensures rich kids stay rich and poor kids stay poor. 
• The United State and much of the world believed that new bodies were needed to produce more labor. This pro-natal, pro-capital belief has created a world in which huge inequities exist. For example, the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, which is more than 60% of the planet’s population.
• A recent study from Stanford has found that efforts to mitigate climate change could yield trillions in economic benefits. And the best wayto mitigate climate change is by choosing smaller families. Yes, it’s more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation. 
• By the year 2100, the world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime. If the average woman alive today has between 2 and 3 children, the world population will grow to as many as 16 billion by 2100.

The impending overturn of Roe. v. Wade has starkly and publicly revealed the new reality facing the United States. The anti-choice, pro-gun, ‘anti-everything-good’ conservatives are playing their hand face up. They have shamelessly stopped pretending to play by the rules and – if you’re listening – they’re telling us exactly what our future looks like. For 99 percent of us, it doesn’t look good.

The powers that be – mostly old, white, dusty antiques like Mitch McConnell, Eugene B. Meyer, Donald Trump – are climbing the castle walls in their 50-year strategy to cement in place their power and influence. As the world changes around them, as American society embraces all different stripes of people, the old guard conservatives and the wealthy 1 percent are terrified of losing their grip.

The Fair Start Movement  approaches this fight from a new and different perspective. We believe that: No government, state or federal, has legitimate standing to mandate the birth of every child conceived unless it is prepared to care for those children beyond the birth canal and give them a Fair Start. free from the climate crisis through a return to nature, and free in terms of having an influential role in one’s democracy.

At this critical crossroads in human history, we must acknowledge that every child born has a right to start out in decent circumstances. We must account for the wellbeing, equity and personal development of future generations if we are to foster a real democracy where each person’s voice matters. We must accept that our current system destroys the environment and does nothing, in fact takes negative action, to mitigate the oncoming crises. 

We already see progress. Many people agree with our vision and are committed to real, positive change. As we build a truly democratic population, wherein everyone has a voice that is heard, we will move away from the toxic, crumbling society of today. 

We will honor individual rights and guarantee universal healthcare. We will return to nature by respecting our place in the ecosystem, giving and taking sustainably. We will escape the domination of the selfish, greedy, wealthy few whose plan for the future – assuming they have one – accounts for their survival alone.  

In the meantime, we must work within the system we have. The State must accept its obligation to invest heavily in common-sense family planning programs and science-based sex ed. Those items alone will automatically lower abortion rates and teach young people the truth about having and growing a healthy family. 

The State must break its unconstitutional commitment to Christian moral dictates and adopt a reality-based approach to governing. It is absurd and completely unacceptable that 350 million+ people of every faith are governed based on the ethos of bronze-age men. 

We must shift our paradigm away from the endless-growth-economy fantasy, which demands that mothers continually produce their supply of workers and consumers. Prisoners to boot.

TAKE ACTION:

Let’s hold accountable those responsible for the current societal roadmap that pushes the opposite of a Fair Start for our children. Urge any organization you are part of to support and join our Tell the Truth campaign, which would obligate disclosure of this information.

The human rights advocacy group Having Kids today urged the National Institutes of Health to prioritize funding and research for male contraceptives like the male pill as a way to improve family planning, and reduce unwanted pregnancies.

Read our special report, and campaign announcement, here.

“Having Kids believes that in light of the world’s current population increasing at the rate of 80 million persons a year, and projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, it is imperative that NIH make research and funding for the development of male contraception an extremely high priority over the next five years,” wrote Katherine A. Meyer, an outside lawyer for the group, in a letter to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Meyer noted that while clinical trials of some male contraceptives have shown promise, more research is needed to ensure they are safe and effective.

“NICHD can play a crucial role in making this a reality,” she wrote.

The letter noted that groups such as the Population Council and private foundations have funded male contraception research, but can’t afford the large, phase-3 clinical trials required by the Food and Drug Administration. NICHD could give this effort a boost by seeking congressional appropriations for research, and directing current funding toward this clinical research.

Also today, Having Kids issued an illuminating report and campaign announcement on how federal agencies have failed to take into account population growth when examining the environmental impact of federal actions under the National Environmental Protection Act.

The report noted that the Council on Environmental Quality, which issues regulations interpreting NEPA, under President Richard Nixon did take population into account. Six months after signing NEPA into law, Nixon said In a letter to Congress that the CEQ “is concerned with all aspects of environmental quality – wildlife preservation, parklands, land use, and population growth, as well as pollution.” Every subsequent CEQ report during the Nixon Administration addressed population in its analysis. But over the last 40 years or so, CEQ stopped identifying population growth as a significant factor affecting the environment.

Having Kids works to promote sustainable and more equitable families, as a way to help children, restore the environment, and protect animals.

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