Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

As Afghanistan descends into a human rights catastrophe, we should look for the mistakes that created the crisis and learn from them. Afghanistan has had one of the highest birthrates in the world, driven by a dominant patriarchy.

Given this, did the United Nations intervene decades ago to protect women and children through aggressive family planning programming meant to ensure compliance with the Children’s Rights Convention, and to free women from the structure that treated them primarily as mothers? It did not, instead choosing to embrace the isolation modeling that treats the act of having children as as something left to the subjective whims of the parents, and nobody else’s business.

This was a major missed opportunity, laying the foundation for the birth and development of a ballooning number of children in conditions that would ensure the chaos we see today. In creating its system, the UN bent to pressure from male-dominated members – including the United States – who saw population growth as an easy way to create economic growth.

Both involve the exploitation of vulnerable entities – women, future children, and the nonhuman world – to empower men. The story of Afghanistan is the story of ignoring the impact of massive family size, abysmal child welfare, vast inequity, and the failure to prepare children as effective members of democracies.

Eerily, it finds echoes in the patriarchy here in the United States eagerly pushing women to have more and more kids.

What’s the solution? Had the United Nations adopted and implemented the correct interpretation of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to found a family, which treats the provision as the dominant human right and child-centric in nature (focused on the most vulnerable entities, and those with the most at stake), this situation could have been avoided.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to change course and stop creating nightmares like what we are seeing in Afghanistan.

This past Fourth of July, two everyday people Cassie and Matt – exemplified what it would mean to constitute communities that are actually free, in part by compensating future generations for the harm we have caused them through the climate, inequity and other ecosocial crises.

They are living the truth that justice for future generations overrides all other obligations, including property rights. Older generations lied about the “private” nature of family planning to protect concentrations of wealth and power from distributive obligations to future generations. That lie is fundamentally blocking justice.

Listen to this brief podcast to understand why.

Cassie, an activist and nonprofit professional said this about family planning:

Current corrupt concentrations of power push a growth model that promotes unsustainable family planning policies. They see us ordinary people as economic inputs in their machine, to use for our reproductive and other labor. It’s our job to fight that narrative and elevate the worth of every individual to have their basic needs met, on day one. My partner and I hope to adopt children one day and I feel the urgency to ensure that my future child, and all children, have the resources and opportunities that are their right.

Matt, a donor to the Fair Start Movement, said this:

I support the Fair Start Movement because I know that any claims I have to property and wealth are subject to ensuring every child a fair and equitable start in life, the first and overriding human right. I’m willing to step forward, as a donor, and say that. I challenge others to do the same.

Together, they are exemplifying a real new deal, one that fixes the fundamental source of the biggest problems in the world today, and leads to a comprehensively liberated state of affairs. It’s not about population. It’s about people, the vast majority of people, who will exist in the future. It’s about putting their interests first. And if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for a child. Government derives from the people which derive from their creation. A just creation norm thus precedes and overrides everything else, including the government assigned property rights that have created massive power differentials between rich and poor.

We can spread this modeling, and this simple discourse: “Part of your wealth is my and my future child’s family planning entitlement and incentive.

TAKE ACTION:

1. Do you feel your child or future child deserves a level playing field and equal opportunities in life, relative to wealthy children – the many  millionaire and billionaire kids who will impact your child’s life?
2. What if your child or future child had a human right to that fair start ? Would you advocate for policies, and direct action, to ensure that right?
3. If you are someone with wealth, would you be willing to speak out in support of that right and those policies?

Can you help us find groups of people to enlarge the discourse that future children’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life overrides property rights, and necessitates distribution that will incentivize the most comprehensive and effective solution to the crises we face – Fair Start family planning?

Urge those you know who are willing to step forward and say this to contact Ashley Berke at Ashley@fairstartmovement.org

Kudos to Fair Start Movement coalition member, Population Matters for bringing attention to the topic of sustainable families. The group awarded $695 to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to be gifted to the charity of their choice, for making the decision to limit their family to two kids. The award, which is garnering headlines and serving to break the taboo, was timed to coincide with the U.N.’s World Population Day.

Prince Harry revealed the couple’s plans to limit their family size due to environmental concerns back in 2019. Earlier that year we wrote to Megan as well, urging the couple to serve as role models and incorporate sustainability into family planning. It took courage for them to make that statement and it likely would not have happened without the great teamwork and encouragement from Population Matters and Jane Goodall. 

Despite the endless supply of alarmist stories about declining birthrates, cultural perspectives are beginning to shift and recognize the numerous social and emotional benefits of choosing to have only one or two kids. Choosing a smaller family is also the most effective way to reduce climate impact. 

The environmental impact of smaller families:

• 20 TIMES: Having a smaller family is 20 times more effective at reducing climate impact than changing diet or forms of transportation. Learn more about climate impact and family size. 
  
• BILLIONS: By 2100 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. 
  
• 1 MILLION SPECIES face extinction thanks to population growth-driven human activity, the U.N. reports.
  
• Child-first family planning provides a clear human rights-based solution and path forward. It’s sustainable and equitable, and reflected in the worldwide trend towards smaller families that can invest more in each child and ensure a safer future.

It’s time for more environmental organizations to inspire eco-conscious parents to choose to have smaller families to reduce human impact on animals and the planet.

Take Action: Share this headline with your favorite animal and environmental organizations, and urge them to follow suit in promoting more sustainable families. 

Tweet:

• Carter Roberts, @Carter_Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund
• Annie Leonard, @AnnieMLeonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA
• Michael Brune, @bruneski, executive director of the Sierra Club
and ask them to take a stand on the most effective way to protect our future: policies that promote sustainable and equitable family planning.

In the middle of the twentieth century world leaders misinterpreted the right to have children under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ensure a particular level of continued population growth to grow their base, to reinforce power structures, and to evade collective obligations to invest more in kids. Their family planning systems ignored the physical borders of human power and were designed as preconstitutional or illegitimate, to create lots of economic inputs for shopping malls, not politically empowered citizens with influential voices for town halls. The systems isolated parents, and required no minimum level of welfare at birth or the development of prosocial behavior in children, in violation of the Children’s Rights Convention, no level playing field between rich and poor kids, and no environmental sustainability. Public interest mostly groups went along with this plan.  

That move fundamentally created the ecosocial crises we face today, including the climate crisis, massive inequality, horrific child abuse and neglect, and failing democracies where the average voice does not matter. It also reinforced a fallacy, the constitutive fallacy, that we can abstractly derive just systems without going upstream, to the norms that account for the first creation of social relations. In doing so it gutted the possibility of consensual governance, or freedom from the power of others (or most accurately, relative self-determination).

The Fair Start movement was designed to correct that mistake, and promote child-focused and ecosocial Fair Start family planning centered around parental readiness, collective planning to ensure birth equity and a level playing field for all kids, and a universal ethic of more sustainable families. That is the correct interpretation of Article 16.

Fair Start is the first and overriding human right – the one on which all other rights depend – and it is the genesis of freedom. We can achieve a just transition towards by incentivizing better family planning though taking the resources from the concentrations of power that created and benefited from the crises we face today. Why? Because we first physically constitute just communities by limiting and decentralizing power, and future children have a right to those resources. That – a just claim to family planning incentives as future child entitlements – is the key to qualitative optimal world populations / democratic communities.

Fulfilling that claim means liberating the most numerous and vulnerable entities in the moral universe – those that will live in the future. Nothing has a greater impact in comprehensively maximizing social justice, and ensuring the transition involves a struggle between free people who promote Fair Start and fundamental justice, and preconstitutional people, or precons, who do not. We can tell the difference between the two by simply asking a few questions.

Do you support the simple ideas that 1) parents should be ready before they have kids, 2) that we have a right to distribute resources to give all kids an eco-social Fair Start in life, and that 3) a universal ethic of sustainable families for all is the best way to restore nature? Peer-reviewed research shows that prioritizing these elements in policy has ten to twenty times the positive impact on climate and other crises, relative to most other changes we can make.

Dozens of groups from the child protection, animal welfare, environmental protection, human rights and democracy sectors are joining various coalitions that further some version of the Fair Start core suite of ideals. Groups like WildEarth Guardians, World Population Balance, ProVeg International, Brighter Green, Population Matters, and Seeding Sovereignty are working on campaigns – from leaning on Joe Biden to issue a declaration of climate emergency based on a -300ppm standard, to supporting litigation in the United States that requires ecocentric (300 ppm or less) solutions to the climate crisis as a constitutional right. These campaigns each help further every child’s fundamental human right to an eco-social Fair Start in life.

Take Action:

Will the organizations you support join as well? Urge them to reach out to us at info@fairstartmovement.org to learn more!

After five years of research and evolution, we are excited to announce that HavingKids is becoming the Fair Start Movement. This comes from the input of many voices from diverse and intersectional areas in advocacy, as the organization pivots to more of a collective structure increasingly led by identities with more at stake. 

The Fair Start Movement is a collective of parents and young people, child advocates, activists, health practitioners, social scientists, ethicists, and institutions from a range of causes who come together to advance Fair Start efforts at the state, federal, and global level. 

We advocate for informed, inclusive policies rather than ones focused on short-term and unsustainable economic growth with damaging ecological consequences. We call on those with a platform to speak out, from celebrities to those in governance. We also build our movement through a growing coalition of organizations. But most importantly, we empower young people and parents to share their stories and force accountability from those who oppose giving kids a fair start and threaten our and our children’s future.

Child-first collective family planning, beyond the isolation of “nobody else’s business” is happening. Most people maintain a taboo against talking about collective family planning because they fear the top-down power of the state. The reality is that we perceive the state as a threat, which in a democracy makes no sense, because of our failure to implement Fair Start or comparably inclusive family planning models.

Our focus remains on work with the greatest long-run impact on the crises we face today: Rights-based Fair Start reproductive justice reforms that override all competing interests. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one. Our interventions are built around three pillars: 1) fertility delay and parental readiness, 2) distribution of resources geared around birth equity, and 3) a universal ethic of sustainable families.

We remain committed to our 2021 plans of action, including: 

Plans for our first peaceful demonstration as the Fair Start Movement demanding that Exxon officials, past and present, publicly acknowledge their obligations to compensate future generations against a zero baseline, given the climatological harm they have caused. They are obligated to right that wrong by funding climate restorative projects to ensure all kids an ecosocial fair start in life, a moral fact we are also urging the UN to institutionalize through correct interpretation of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s time for both governments and big business to stop working together to exploit future generations. Fair Start is the first and overriding human right, superseding the property rights of those who have harmed future generations, and who must compensate them through Fair Start and other effective mechanisms.

Join the coalition as an organization or sign up to follow the latest opportunities to take action.