Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Last week, the Trump administration reinstated Ronald Reagan’s Global Gag Rule policy, which prohibits the granting of U.S. foreign aid to health service providers abroad who advise abortion as a family-planning option (not just those who provide the service itself). This move comes on top of an existing U.S. law which prohibits the use of American taxpayer dollars for abortion services anywhere in the world.Here are four rarely stated and nonpartisan reasons why reinstating the Rule is a dangerous move.

• It will hurt children. The Rule will create a situation where vulnerable women who do not wish to have a child might be forced to do so, even if they know they will not be able to feed, clothe, and otherwise care for that child. And that will mean children living—and dying—in conditions none of the Rule’s proponents would allow their own children to live in. A good life requires more than simply being born; it requires the parents to have actual resources. Being pro-birth is not the same thing as being truly pro-life or being prepared to give kids the resources we ourselves would want and that they legally and morally deserve. Will those behind the Rule pay for the care of the severely disabled children affected by the Zika virus who will be born as a result of the policy? If not, why shouldn’t they?

• It will widen the global gap between rich and poor, and it will underscore the poor’s demands to take resources from the rich so that their kids get a fair start in life. Will the children affected by the Rule get a fair start in life, relative to the born-rich children of Mr. Trump and the other wealthy pro-birthers pushing this policy change? Probably not. Given that any human-rights-based and democratic system requires that all people enter the system as free and equal persons, the Rule degrades the system and heightens the likelihood of justified class conflict.

• It exacerbates the degradation of our atmosphere. While those living in many part of the word affected by the Rule probably have a negligible impact on climate change relative to those living in the U.S., the fact is that any rule interfering with a woman terminating her pregnancy blocks the most effective individual move a person can make—choosing a smaller family—to protect the environment. Given that the U.S. Department of Defense recognizes climate change as a threat to our national security, the Rule poses a threat to us and future generations.

• It interferes with building democracies around the world. U.S. efforts to help build democracies around the world operate on the backs of international development programs that work by promoting smaller families with higher investments in each child. The Rule moves in the opposite direction, ensuring crowding, inequality, lower rates of education, and other factors that create a human environment incompatible with the development of true democracy.

In short, if you care about kids, equality, the environment, or democracy, you will have reasons to oppose and work against the Global Gag Rule. Having Kids will stand with you as you do.

At Having Kids, we’re concerned about the quality of life each child will have on this planet. We want them to have access to education, food, a safe and caring community, and a livable planet. We promote the idea of having smaller families, supported by the community and parents, so that current and future generations can live a better life. But having meaningful conversations about family size can be challenging, and we need to find a respectful way to do it.

For example, a village in India recently intervened to stop a family with seventeen children from having any more, because of concerns about the wellbeing of the children. In the United Kingdom, a son publicly criticized his mother for having eight children, in part because he and his siblings were forced to parent the younger siblings. And in the United States, there has been a backlash against the Duggar family and their decision to have 19 children. But this type of criticism is divisive; it does not move us forward together.

Is there a better way to have this discussion? Can we move beyond simply criticizing large biological families? One alternative is to instead find common ground with people who want to create larger families, and to explore ways for everyone to agree on best, but alternative, outcomes. The Duggars, for example, recently adopted their first child, finding a way to help children and protect the world those children will live in at the same time. Many people find ways to parent by helping others raise their children. Can communities do more to share the responsibility for caring for the children that live in them, like communal day care and mentoring programs? Parents certainly need the help, and this is one simple way for those who want a large family to parent children in need.

Whatever common ground we seek, the key is starting a positive conversation about what everyone wants and needs, both now and in the future, and how to get there. Having Kids wants to start those conversations.

If you listen to conversations the people around you are having about choosing to have children, you might notice strangely conflicting advice. You’ll constantly hear that having kids is the most important decision a person can make in life, with lots of people lining up to give advice about how to decide. But at the same time—and from the same people—you’ll also hear that the decision is personal, and that each person alone will know the right time to have kids, the number of kids to have, and the reasons for having those kids.

How can both be true? How would anyone know that the decision to have children is an important one, for someone else, if the decision were truly personal or private to each person? The truth is that the decision to have kids is more interpersonal than personal, and that it involves factors we can all collectively see and consider: the time and other resources required from us, the impact the world around us will have on our children, the impact those children will have on the world, and more. In other words, when a couple chooses to save money before they have a child so they can pay for his or her basic needs, they are making that decision not because it is right for them, but because it is right, plain and simple.

Yet we continue to hear incomprehensible statements like this: “It’s the single biggest life decision a person will make.” . . . “But ultimately, it’s a leap of faith.”

So why do we talk about the decision to have kids as subjective and personal? The little-known fact is that there is a narrative around parenting as personal and subjective (something we at Having Kids call the “isolation model”), which has become almost universal. The isolation model was intentionally created and propagated between the middle and end of the twentieth century by many governments around the world who, working through the United Nations, were trying to improve family planning. However, the process involved several critical mistakes. These mistakes resulted in the peculiar claim—still promoted by the United Nations and almost all of the major foundations and nonprofits engaged in providing family planning services—that family planning and parenting decisions are only subjective and personal.

There are several costs of this narrative and of the isolation model. Here are a few:

• Demands for family planning services (like access to contraception and abortions) become easily dismissed because they are based on personal or private reasons, rather than the weighty and widely held (or objective) values like being able to adequately take care of a child or concern about further degrading our polluted environment.
• Couples around the world are told it’s their personal choice to have children, but in patriarchal parts of the world where husbands make household decisions, women are frequently turned into into involuntary mothers for most of their lives.
• Parents are dissuaded from working together to ensure that the resources children need are actually there for them, as the subjective isolation model separates families into spheres of personal decision-making and helps them ignore objective values.
• Democracies, which were premised on citizens entering their political systems as free and equal people, fail as some children enter the world with massive resources while others enter with virtually nothing. They are neither free nor equal in a meaningful sense of the words.
• Families in communities are seen as isolated, and there are no incentives to help one another and support children throughout the community.

Many of the problems in the world today—from inequality to poverty to the degradation of the world environment—could have been mitigated had governments not created and left prospective parents adrift in the fog of confusion that is the isolation model. But it’s not too late to change models. One simple alternative to the isolation model is to broaden our perspective to include the needs—needs we can all see and understand—of parents, future children, and the community.

Trying to decide whether to have a child? Consider what you would have wanted to have coming into the world. Consider whether you would want a fair start in life relative to other children in your generation. Consider what your community might look like in 25 years if the parents in that community worked together to plan and provide or the children they would have. Consider the natural environment your child and other children and the animals they will come to love will need in 100 years to thrive, and the impact the decision to have those children will have on that environment and those animals.

The decision to have kids is truly an important one, and worth working together on. Welcome to the Having Kids model. Welcome to a better future.