Today, Having Kids is calling on the United Nations to back up its commitment to protect children. The international community, including key United Nations agencies, requires minimum standards of care for children. But we don’t apply those same standards in family planning models. Why not? Could we afford to do that, through future child entitlements, if we promoted a universal ethic of sustainable families and shifted the savings? We think so. Help us urge the UNFPA and UNICEF to consider the change. Here’s what we sent to the UN:
Dr. Natalia Kanem
Executive Director
United Nations Population Fund
605 3rd Ave, New York, NY 10158
Henrietta Fore
UNICEF House
3 United Nations Plaza
New York, New York 10017
Dear Directors Kanem and Fore,
Having Kids is nonprofit organization dedicated to replacing subjective and parent-focused family planning models with the human rights-based and child-focused Fair Start model. We and other organizations have asked the Secretary General of the United Nations to speak out on the need for better family planning models that focus on delay, cooperation, and families that invest more in each child.
As the impacts of the climate crisis manifest, and studies confirm that simply improving access to family planning services will not accomplish what was previously predicted, there is an urgent need to revisit the ethical models that underlie and drive family planning laws, policies, funding, etc. Can we do better than treating the act of bringing a child into the world as a matter parents decide in isolation from their community? We think so.
The best reading of the Children’s Rights Convention is that it prohibits children from being born into conditions the Convention is attempting to reform. Preventing violations of the rights of future children, while respecting the rights of intending parents, requires something more internationally cooperative than a model where parents are walled off from others in their decision to have children.
We believe Fair Start modeling provides one cooperative path forward, and that public statement by the UNFPA and UNICEF regarding changing the underlying ethical modeling is the necessary first step. We believe it open the door for things like family planning delay and relocation payments, which under new modeling are more akin to entitlements for future children than incentives for parents.
More specifically, we are urging you, as heads of the key international organizations responsible for shaping family planning modeling, to speak out about the need for a universal ethic of sustainable families who cooperatively work together to give every child a fair start in life. New modeling, which would require explicitly abandoning old modeling that treats family planning as a matter of parental privacy or autonomy, could be the most effective solution to many of the crises facing the world today.
A child-first model, based on giving all kids a fair start in life, would advance all 17 of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. The following is a framework for a possible statement:
The responsibilities referred to in the ICPD Programme of Action ensure progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals and the goals of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Helping parents fulfill those responsibilities could be achieved though policies that, without discrimination or coercion, 1) encourage prospective parents to delay parenthood, 2) encourage communities and their governments to ensure all parents the resources they need to give their child equal opportunities in life relative to other children, as well as 3) encourage prospective parents to choose a sustainable family so that they can invest more time and resources in each child.
The international community, including key United Nations agencies, requires minimum standards of care for children. But we don’t apply those same standards in family planning models. Why not? Could we afford to do that, through future child entitlements, if we promoted a universal ethic of sustainable families and shifted the savings? We think so.
Thank you for considering our request.
Sincerely,
The Phelps-Mathews Family
Erika and Willow
Executive Director of Having Kids, and her daughter, age 11
Having Kids is a 501(c)3 nonprofit 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.
Today the national child-protection organization Having Kids called upon the leaders of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to amend the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act (“CAPTA”) to require states to enact legislation that allows judges to prohibit offenders convicted of certain felonies from having children as a condition of probation. CAPTA allows states to apply for federal grants for child abuse prevention and treatment programs but also enumerates certain “eligibility requirements” that each state must comply with in order to receive funding.
Having Kids’ proposal seeks an amendment to Section 106 of CAPTA to include, as funding eligibility requirements, that a state have Fair Start order legislation enacted. Such legislation would, in the event of a conviction, temporarily prohibit an offender from having additional children during the pendency of any probation in order to prevent the abuse and neglect of any future children. While the Congressional Findings from the CAPTA Reauthorization Act of 2010 hold that “substantial reductions in the prevalence and incidence of child abuse and neglect and the alleviation of its consequences are matters of the highest national priority,” national statistics from the past 5 years show that the epidemic of child abuse and neglect in the United States is not improving. In 2016, there were an estimated 676,000 children across the country who were victims of abuse and neglect, up 3% from 2012. The number of child fatalities that were the result of abuse and neglect steadily rose each year with 1,750 fatalities in 2016 versus 1,640 in 2012. That is approximately 5 children dying every day in the United States as the result of abuse and/or neglect.
“We believe that in order to truly make an impact in the prevention of child abuse, we must ensure that children are not born into potentially life-threatening situations,” said Anne Green, Executive Director of Having Kids. “It is a matter of national importance that we not only take care of abused children after the fact but do all that we can to prevent the abuse from happening in the first place.”
Take action: Email the senate committee members and tell them that you support Having Kids’ proposal for a Fair Start amendment to the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act.
November is National Adoption Awareness month, and an opportunity to change the world. How? Public figures play a large role in many peoples’ family planning decisions – including timing, size, and whether we adopt or have biological children. We follow their lead.
What celebrities do, in terms of family planning decisions, will help define our and our kids’ future.This month Having Kids will be urging celebrities to model responsible family planning, and adopt, over choosing a large family. While good hearted everyday people are going out of their way to save children in need, many celebs are modeling totally irresponsible behavior. Shouldn’t we be helping kids in need, and building an ecologically sustainable world?
TAKE ACTION: Politely urge Joanna Gaines to choose adoption @joannagaines
Could taking resources from the wealthy and using those resources to fund delayed parenthood, and a fair start in life for every child, solve many of our ecological and social crises? An article due to be published this winter in the Loyola Chicago Law Reviewargues that it is.
The impact of better family planning on sustainable, and even regenerative, development is well-known. But poor modeling in the mid-20th century created barriers between ensuring resources that all children need and coordinating the time, place, and manner in which parents would bring those children into the world. New modeling is removing those barriers, and one emerging policy involves subsidizing delayed parenthood with the aim of improving childhood equity.
Simply put: The policy shifts power from wealthy (usually white male) elites to women and children through family planning-linked forms of guaranteed minimum incomes.
These transfers go beyond incentives. They involve the entitlements that are part of every child’s right to a fair start in life. And the evidence is clear: The subsidies mean increased earnings, education, well-being for women and children, and environmentally sustainable prosperity for all.
This June, the House of Representatives voted in favor of granting statehood to Washington D.C. “The Washington, D.C. Admission Act” (H.R. 51) would admit most of the current district as the 51st state. For the first time, the District’s 702,455 residents would be represented in Congress.
Republicans, however, have been quick to paint the individuals who live in the District as unworthy of representation. Senator Tom Cotton stated, “Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing…Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state. A new state of Washington would not be.” To make matters worse, Senator Steve Dane’s of Montana implied that D.C.’s residents were not “real people” like those found outside of the beltway.
Such remarks stand in sharp contrast to the idea that every person – regardless of their career opportunities or zip code – deserves the opportunity to meaningfully participate in democracy. In fact, these comments show a disrespect for basic human rights. The United Nations recognizes that each person is born free and equal and the right to take part in government and public affairs. Yet Senators Cotton and Dane remain steadfast in their views that the District’s population should not enjoy this right.
Real Statehood
While granting D.C. statehood is certainly an important step toward bridging the gap between rights and reality, it is not a sufficient one. A driving cause of this schism remains largely overlooked: our current family planning paradigm prevents us from constituting our societies in a way that allows us to fulfill the rights that we already recognize. By exclusively focusing on the rights and obligations of the human beings that exist today, we miss a critical preceding step: that we constitute ourselves in a way that allows all future human beings to meaningfully participate in making the laws that govern them.
The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for just about every 747,000 Americans. This “representation ratio” is the highest it has ever been in our nation’s history and is significantly higher than in other industrialized countries. Research suggests that as the representation ratio climbs, our democracy becomes less effective. With fewer representatives per capita, individual citizens have to fight harder to be heard by their elected officials. Additionally, the makeup of the legislature is less likely to reflect the demographics of the people they represent – both in terms of race and income level. When faced with representatives who are largely unrepresentative, many communities feel shut out of the policy making process and avoid engaging entirely.
Despite these problems, our number of representatives has remained the same since the 1930s, even though the U.S. population has tripled since that time. While the D.C. statehood bill may grant much needed representation for residents of one city, it does not address the fact that almost all Americans are already severely underrepresented and will have painfully little say in shaping the laws that govern their lives for the foreseeable future.
Getting Intergenerational
Adding more representatives to the House may seem like the obvious solution. This strategy, however, is likely to be ineffective in the long term. According to Drew DeSilver, a Senior Writer and the Pew Research Center, we would already need to add nearly 700 members to our current 435 member House in order to achieve the representation ratio we had in the 1930s. This number will only grow as we add a projected 79 million individuals by 2060. As the number of representatives rise, the House runs the risk of becoming unsustainable and unmanageable, mimicking China’s National People’s Congress, which at 2,980 members, is harshly criticized for its inefficiency and largely symbolic existence.
Today’s policymakers can help solve this problem by considering the needs of all future children when planning their own families. By giving families access to the resources needed to plan for more sustainable families, policymakers can help parents across the country slow the rate of population growth. This would afford future generations the time and space to organize themselves in ways that are truly democratic, giving each person more time at the podium during townhalls and allowing representatives to truly represent their communities.
The District’s residents undoubtedly deserve representation. And so do all future children. We should all use this unique moment in history to ensure that our children’s right to participate in democracy becomes their reality.
Inequality is inherited. It affects kids for life. Unequal opportunities translate into unequal lifelong outcomes by the time children reach age 5.
And the impacts of inequality are more damaging the longer it is experienced. The longer a child is poor, the greater the risk of poverty in adulthood and of experiencing lifelong health problems and involvement in the criminal justice system.
Inequality, therefore, is a welfare issue. Studies have documented examples of rising inequality decreasing child welfare. Affluence plays a role, too. The growing divide between low-income children and their peers reduces opportunities for low-income children throughout their lives.
Poor kids become poor adults, and rich kids become rich adults, with the latter inheriting both obvious and subtle benefits they never “earned.” Racial and ethnic disparities that have persisted are a consequence of that. Inequality disproportionately affects children of color in the United States.
There is perhaps no city in the U.S. where inequality between rich and poor, and between black and white, is more evident than in the District of Columbia.
Washington, D.C., has a higher level of income inequality than any state in the country, with households in the top 20% of income having 29 times more income than the bottom 20%. The bottom fifth of Washington, D.C., households earned just 2% of total D.C. income in 2016, while the top fifth had a staggering 56%.
With the cost of living in D.C. being 450% of the federal poverty line, the city is becoming a harder place for poorer people and families to live. Add to this growing inequality and the fact that D.C. residents don’t have voting congressional representation (i.e., they’re faced with taxation without representation), and you have a largely disenfranchised, largely black population.
In addition, Congress restricts D.C.’s ability to raise revenue. The federal government pays no taxes on the land it uses or exempts in D.C., exempts itself from payment in lieu of taxes, and imposes added requirements on public services, such as the police force. Congress exempts those who work in Washington, D.C., but live just miles away in the states of Virginia and Maryland from contributing even 5% or less of their state taxes to the district.
How to Create Intergenerational Equality in D.C.
So how can we create intergenerational equality in the district?
One surefire way is a guaranteed minimum income for children.
Social welfare policy has been around since the passage of the English Poor Law in 1601. Social programs for child well-being became official United States government policy in 1935 with the passage of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children as part of the Social Security Act of 1935.
Currently, guaranteed minimum income schemes are being implemented in nearly all European countries (except Italy, Greece, and Turkey) in order to eliminate and overcome the problems associated with poverty.
The D.C. Council considered a guaranteed minimum income for its residents in 2018, recognizing the importance of combating such gross inequality. The Council commissioned a report by District’s Office of the Budget Director on the potential for such a program, and the report concluded that a guaranteed minimum income “could provide the District with a new, comprehensive tool to alleviate poverty in the city” and, in turn, improve child well-being, family stability, and health outcomes among the district’s residents.
However, the report cited concerns that a guaranteed minimum income for Washington, D.C., residents would hurt D.C.’s total GDP and employment and would reduce its federal funding for social welfare programs. The report ultimately recommended refining the proposal before proceeding with any legislation.
(It should be noted that the report arbitrarily limits its consideration of the economic benefits of guaranteed minimum income to increased personal spending. A more comprehensive and accurate accounting would include the savings that result from the improved health and safety of the districts’ residents, such as reduced public expenditure on medical and crime-prevention services.)
The Fair Start Guaranteed Minimum Income Solution
In light of this stark disparity between rich and poor and black and white, between federal officials and D.C. residents, Having Kids believes there should be a Fair Start guaranteed minimum income program for Washington, D.C., children, funded through taxation of a specific group of residents of D.C.: The 100 wealthiest federal legislators and all D.C.-based lobbyists registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995.
As Cory Booker said in an interview about his guaranteed minimum income legislation, the American Opportunity Accounts Act (also known as “baby bonds”), in the U.S. Senate in 2019, “It would be a dramatic change in our country to have low-income people break out of generational poverty.” The bill aims to level the playing the field by giving all American children the opportunity to generate wealth.
This Having Kids Fair Start Guaranteed Minimum Income proposal shrinks the wealth gap by specifically contemplating (1) household resources per capita, (2) level of access to public services such as health, education, transportation, and (3) above all, the relationship between children’s fair starts in life and their abilities to become successful, productive future citizens and taxpayers.
As D.C. license plates say, “No Taxation Without Representation.” D.C. supplements the federal government’s activities; these transient and wealthy D.C. residents should return the favor.
Constituting and Statehood
The United States Constitution was born of a revolution rooted in the belief that a group of people could constitute independent — free and equal — peoples. But for many reasons, the Constitution was never applied intergenerationally, and it was never applied to the District.
The United States, therefore, has a capital city where the citizens have no voting voice in the nation’s legislature in a world where human rights and democracy are in decline.
Like the U.N. did with the Global South, Congress should begin work to decolonize the District of Columbia. It should give D.C. residents statehood and finally allow its (mostly black) citizens a voice in a working democracy. As Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s lone nonvoting “representative” in the House of Representatives, said about the 2020 Washington, DC, Admissions Act, “Congress has two choices: It can continue to exercise undemocratic authority over the 700,000 American citizens who live in the nation’s capital, treating them, in the words of Frederick Douglass, as ‘aliens, not citizens, but subjects,’ or it can live up to the nation’s promise and ideals, end taxation without representation.”
How do we make real change? There are three fundamental problems with the way we have been approaching education.
Given that our early childhoods determine much of the personal development that then determines educational outcomes, true education policy starts with family planning reforms meant to assure parental readiness – including incentivized delay, and in some cases, geographic relocation. Focusing on schools comes way too late in the process – and ignores decades of science. Kids are educated early on at home. That phase really matters.
We are engaged in family planning reform now because existing systems are failing. So why are we using family planning policies that push more and more kids through these horrible systems? That’s a huge mistake. We should align family planning to maximize the impact of the systems that work.
Education policy often fails because there is a fundamental but unacknowledged disagreement about its fundamental role. Many think education is meant to increase economic growth – that babies are destined to be economic inputs. That is wrong. Economies are preceded and justified by functional human rights-based democracies that regulate them. The educational system required for democracies is virtually the opposite as that used for economic growth. Democracies require developing people for town halls, not shopping malls. That means fewer people, highly developed in ways that that make them capable of cooperative self-rule as free and equal people.
We can fix these problems.
Take action: Urge Biden’s new Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona @teachcardona to 1) explicitly recognize these problems, and 2) adopt Fair Start family planning as the fundamental human right and guidestar model through which education reform must be engaged.
Let’s Strengthen Biden’s Child Care Policy to Unite America
Helping families generally finds bipartisan support. And President Joe Biden has put forth a massive child care and tax proposal to keep child care centers open, help low-income families with child care, and offer tax relief on the cost of having kids. These are great moves.
But like far too many efforts, this proposal is morereactivethan proactive.
Without sustainable and equitable early childhood investments, the rest of us pay to prop up a losing proposition for American families. Continuing with business as usual pushes our current problems, from inequality to the climate crisis, onto future generations. How could Biden’s proposal be better? It could:
1) Cut all benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding.
2) Use those savings as cash incentives to power up family planning and early childhood investment systems in the United States to
c) promote environmentally just families for all regardless of income, ensuring resource availability for all, including future generations. Those changes – made as part of recognizing our sacred constitutional right to nature – would create massive long-run savings and catalyze sustainable development.We could start to give all kids a Fair Start in life.
Opponents to these changes will want to use Joe’s plan to incentivize unsustainable population growth, and use babies to grow the economy. Names like Ivanka Trump, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and growth-minded people at Vox like Matthew Yglesias want to use child care, and especially child tax credits, as incentives for women to have kids to reverse falling birth rates. That’s short-sighted, and ignores every child’s right to a socially and ecologically #fairstart in life.
In this way we can proceed from fundamental values, and achieve the personal autonomy the political right values, by applying the equity the political left values – but specifically prioritizing children. We can take power away from big business and big government, the entities the left and right respectively oppose, and invest it in future generations. Learn more here.
In response to a recent article on the struggle for creating meaningful animal rights through family reforms, one anonymous mother is choosing to speak out
The issue of population ethics is very fraught, and for good reason. Things can go badly when government interferes with the bond between parents and children, especially when the government is placed in the role of controlling whether people have children or keep their children–even worse when it’s some government entity that’s deciding what makes “good” or “deserving” parenting. No parent or child – or even hypothetical child – wants the parent-child bond threatened in any way, even as much as we all agree that it’s a necessary pseudo-parental role the state must take on when a child must be protected from abuse or neglect.
One thing that is uncontroversial to say is that regardless of whether we have or plan to have children, all of us want a world where all life is able to thrive, and an environment that will sustain that. Life, especially new life and vulnerable life, represents hope. We are all rooting for new and future life to succeed.
The problem is that we are facing a reality where the value of life and the hope for any given new life is rapidly diminishing. And for some new life, there is no hope at all – for example, male chicks born into the egg industry struggle to emerge from their eggs and live barely long enough for their feathers to dry before they are ground up alive. For most of us, the picture is not that dark, but we operate in a society where hope is an increasingly rare commodity and distributed in a dramatically unequal way. We are all only different from those chicks as a matter of degree, not kind.
The root cause of this is devaluation of life. We have not done enough to protect life or enable an environment to support it. Fair Start’s core thesis seems to be that this is because we are unable to see or rationally reckon with the creation of life as the starting point in our thinking about justice and fairness, and because of this, our – in fact all life’s – existential value and hope for survival is threatened. To me the essence is this: there is a point at which population – especially high-resource-consuming human population – becomes so large that it lessens the value of life. It lessens the value of the individual as well as the family, and increases conflicts over the right to life between and within species.
I can’t say where that line is or whether we have yet crossed it, but I think it would go against the laws of basic ecology and physics to say that line does not exist. What that means is that we have to find a way to responsibly bring this issue into the conversation, preserving the value of life and the protective bond between parents and children. This includes our role as parents in the metaphorical sense that all of us are guardians of society and protectors of future life, and our metaphorical role as children in the sense that we are all vulnerable and trading in the increasingly scarce resource of hope.
There are a number of routes to addressing this, some of which would be counterproductive or come with an untenable cost to the very values this relies upon – autonomy, valuation of life, the parent-child bond and protection, and hope. But this is exactly why we have to reckon with the issue, responsibly and thoughtfully, since leaving it out of the important conversations of how to repair and build the world we need to support life comes with an even bigger cost. It’s not just badly conceived and destructive remedies to this issue that we risk when we marginalize this topic, but a threat to the ability for any species to survive, including our own.
