If you do a term search on Google for recent media regarding issues around human population growth, you will find that the vast majority of messaging tells us women are not having enough kids and that we are in a “baby bust.” In other words, we are not having enough children to satisfy the ever-present push to ensure the economic growth – and greater returns on investments – that comes with more people.

A counterargument goes something like this: Policies that allowed that growth to happen drove the climate crisis, enslaved women to expectations of motherhood, and ensured no minimum levels of welfare or equity for children. These are all bad things, and it’s not clear that returns on investments – which generally favor the rich – are worth the trade. Everyone loves free money, but the climate crisis is kind of a big deal, right?

But there is a bigger problem with pushing women to have kids for economic reasons. Assuming that how we see future children is how we see our societies, the universal media push (driven often by journalists’ advertisers) to grow our population means that we are essentially economic inputs and comprise economies, measurable in things like gross domestic product. That is who we are.

This ideology is very different from seeing ourselves as members of a democracy in which, rather than trying to maximize the number of bodies (as consumers, workers, and taxpayers) irrespective of political equity, we try to maximize the civic capacity and effective political voice of each citizen, requiring true equality of opportunity rather than a massive gap between rich and poor. We would be focused on a metric like our empowerment, rather than product.

And if being in a democracy is what obligates us to follow the rules, because in democracy we make those rules, then being in an economy – essentially, because of who we are – would mean we do not have to follow the rules, rules that protect the property of the rich for example. Robbed of our actual role in the process, and left to gape at politicians over which we each have little or no control, why should we? If governments have simply become adept at hiding violence, for the most part, and now mostly partner with private concentrations of wealth to more subtly use economic incentives to control the populace as some think is the case, as opposed to fulfilling their obligation to ensure the self-determination of people directly applying their will in functional town halls, why follow the rules? None of this would matter if getting to those town halls was impossible. It’s not, thanks to Fair Start and other reforms.

The “baby bust” messaging is scary for many reasons, but it may also be the key to solving many of our political crises today. If we are worried about democracy we should stop seeing kids as economic inputs and use family reforms like Fair Start to make sure children will be comprising – in terms of maximizing our investment in them, and their development via collective family planning – town halls rather than shopping malls. Then we are freed by the rules under which we live because they are our rules.

Take action: Urge President Biden to put democracy before economy, and free future generations.

Your Holiness,

We laud your many commitments to social justice and environmental protection. You are bending the arc of the world towards justice in a way few voices can.  And while you have been criticized for your recent comments regarding the need to parent rather than raise pets, we want to offer the Vatican a constructive challenge. 

The Vatican has roughly thirty-three billion dollars in net worth. Would you consider donating just one thousand dollars to fairstartmovement.org to support a fundamental policy reform that would make every child’s right to a Fair Start in life the first and overriding human right.

Nothing would speak out against selfishness more than that and give the majority of people – those who will exist in the future – that which they deserve. It’s not about population. People are not numbers. It’s about the impossibility of separating values like welfare, equity, and nature from their creation.

As Nobel Laureate Steven Chu noted, population growth has acted like a Ponzi scheme that has pulled massive wealth to the top of the economic pyramid at cost to women, children and the environment. It’s a fundamentally unjust and exploitative system. And the greatest impact in reversing it, and furthering the Sustainable Development Goals, comes though changing our family policies to promote an ecosocial Fair Start in life as the first and overriding human right. 

There is nothing else that comes close to having the impact, long term, on the social justice and environmental causes you support. Without an ecosocial Fair Start in life – with guaranteed minimum levels of welfare approaching equity for each child, the restoration of nature, and democracies where voices actually matter – there is no real justice. All forms justice remain downstream – missing the fundamental phase in which we create and most define power relations.

Fair Start changes that. It’s the biggest win-win of all. 

His Holiness speaking out for Fair Start and donating would start a trend, changing the ultimate form of selfishness – the concentration of wealth that could be used to save and improve countless lives – into the ultimate form of impact. Many young people stand ready to support such a trend of giving and planning, putting people and nature before profits and property, and treating Fair Start redistributions as a peremptory norm overriding governmental processes.

Fair Start is not about population. It’s about people, starting from the source, limiting and decentralizing power, and thus becoming the relatively self-determining – or free – people we deserve to be.

Will you speak out for real social justice that most effectively furthers the values you have espoused, by supporting all children getting a Fair Start in life? 

Ashley Berke, Nandita Bajaj, Carter Dillard

FairStartMovement.org 

FAIR START RESEARCH

• A clear link exists between rapid unsustainable growth and poverty. Better family planning increases economic prospects by allowing greater investment in each child.  
• According to the World Bank, in 2015, almost 2 billion people (26% of the world’s population) were living on less than $3.20 per day, and nearly half of the world (46%) was living on less than $5.50 a day. 
• The costs and benefits of overpopulation under globalization are now distributed by class more than by nation. Labor bears the cost of reduced wage income; capital enjoys the benefit of reduced wage costs. 
• The United State and much of the capitalist 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. 
• Family size affects those in developed countries as well as underdeveloped nations: In the U.S., the Kansas City Star reported that of more than 6,000 prisoners in 12 states, 1 in 4 was a product of the foster-care system; there is a foster-care-to-prison pipeline in many states. Foster children are also diagnosed with PTSD at a rate greater than Iraq War veterans, and every year, more than 4,000 former foster care kids end up homeless after leaving the system. Meanwhile, the number of American children in foster care increased 12% between 2012 and 2017. 
• 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. 
• Current pronatalist policies sow the seeds of nation destabilization by further increasing inequality. 

Can We Really Prevent Child Abuse? One Family Rides in Search of an Answer

A father and his son have set out on a bicycle ride across the nation, from South Florida to Los Angeles. After being raised in abusive situations, and being fortunate enough to find a safe place, now they will not run, they will ride to fight for all children to have a fair start.

On average, according to FBI statistics, 450 children are murdered by their parents each year in the United States. More than one a day.

Why can’t governments prevent that? 

The truth is they can.

But a few bad policies – family planning systems that push population growth to fill shopping malls rather than parental readiness to ensure functional town halls, underfunded child protection agencies, misplaced systems of rights that treat children as parental property – are standing in the way. 

This father and son, inspired by the horrific death of Gabriel Fernandez in 2013, and many others,  set out to expose and change those policies. And along the way they’ve seen the other costs of those policies – the ones that push helpless children into the hands of abusive parents – in the form of nature overrun by people mass produced and uncared for,  and systems of government that look nothing like the inclusive democracies in which we are supposed to live. 

But they are also seeing support – a gush of online support, an advocate in the capital of their home state, and the animals in what remains of nature, helpless like the children this ride honors. 

The father says this of his son: 

“Now he plays the vigilante of sorts. Taking matters into his own hands, with me as his sidekick and back up. He pounds the streets with his statistics and petitions with a will to change the world for his peers.”

Help them end  this, the child abuse, the filicide,  that started their ride and keeps them pedaling towards better places and safer spaces. 

Follow them on YouTube. 

Sign their Change.org petition.

Join their group on Facebook. 

You can also help change the way we plan families by promoting Fair Start reforms universally. 

The wealth and power of those – both public and private – at the top of the wealth pyramid was created using an unsustainable and unjust system of growth that 1) violated multiple human rights, 2) foisted its costs on the majority – women and future generations – in ways that prevented self-determination, and 3) is most comprehensively and effectively redressed long term using just and sustainable Fair Start family reforms.

The system of growth rested on obvious myths – like being born rich versus poor was a matter of some magical “fortune” or hand of god, rather than a failure of nations to implement policies that would ensure birth equity. That myth was designed to prevent concentrations of wealth and power for paying what they owed – under human rights obligations – as investments in future generations.

Those promoting the system treated the act of having children, something inherently interpersonal, as instead personal in order to preserve fundamental – familial – power structures. They used a misperception of privacy and empowerment, within the home or marketplace, to rob people of those same things at the much more fundamental level – in the inclusive and reflective democracies they were entitled to and which are most determined by the first border of human power – creation .

Those preventing us from constituting ourselves as free and equal people via Fair Start reforms cannot – fundamentally – justify power relations. They prevent our becoming free by moving the flow of power from top-down to bottom-up, through a discourse of collective family planning that physically limits and decentralizes the power we have over each other.

Let’s be more specific, and less abstract:

• Current family planning models ensure horrific child abuse by not ensuring parental readiness, with hundreds of children tortured and killed by their parents each year in the United States. These children were never free.

• Current family planning models replicate wealth disparities that are inherited from colonization and slavery, including a massive gap between white and black children. These disparities put people under one another, detracting from freedom.

• Current family planning models are totally disconnected from democracy, hiding the way poor family planning dilutes the role we should play in our democracies to meaninglessness and opening the door to democratic decline. We cannot be free in democracies where our votes do not matter.

• Current family planning models are the fundamental cause of the climate and every other ecological crisis, with population growth contributing exponentially – daily – to the crises. These climate and other crises put us under the power of others, as the freedom of nature recedes.

These losses of freedom cannot be separated from one another, or from the family planning norms that create them. To make policies just, we have to make their foundation – people – just, and free.

How can we identify who is a precon, and who is moving towards freedom by helping constitute future generations – the majority of persons – in a just way via child-centric planning? Precons will remain abstract and self-contradictory when pressed on how they will promote the relative self-determination of future persons, even when they are asked to use simple metrics like wellbeing and equity. They will contravene values, like healthy ecologies, they clearly value as demonstrated through their own actions when it comes to ensuring those values for future generations – the majority. They will put existing property rights over investing equitably in the majority of persons – future generations.

Free people, on the other hand, will begin the development of any policy by 1) treating self-determination as inverse to population growth (which means democracy is functioning, fundamentally, as it should and moving toward relatively self-determining populations) and 2) promoting our constituting new democracies of free and equal persons through a discourse of collective family planning that would create functional constitutional conventions of relatively self-determining persons.*

*note that the appeal of corporations may stem from their ability to imitate such groups relative to bloated nation states, but their purpose and structure make them anathema to true democracies.

Those moving towards freedom will first act in ways that support fundamental justice. They will want to come from a just place, and they will act as though people actually matter, politically. They will act as though each person is empowered equally. This is the litmus test for democracy.

TAKE ACTION:

• Urge the United Nations to reform the universal human rights regime around Fair Start models that ensure just and sustainable families. Let’s start with UN Secretary General António Guterres, @antonioguterres, and ask him for a simple and informal statement that family planning should be just and sustainable.

• If you support companies or nonprofits claiming to do good work, urge them to actually account for the historic impact of family planning polices on their outcomes, revise their claims, and make reforms that avoid growth undoing their progress.

• Expose false animal rights advocates who treat such rights as contingent on public processes, rather than as primary, and inherent in an ecocentric and biodiverse system of natural rights. Contact Ashley@FairStartMovement.org for actions to take.

Fair Start family planning

WHEN COMMUNITIES AND GOVERNMENTS PRIOTIZE A FAIR START IN LIFE AS THE FIRST

HUMAN RIGHT

WE INVEST MORE IN FAMILIES AND HELP PARENTS BE READY, EMPOWERED, AND POSITIONED

FOR SUCCESS

KIDS GET A FAIR START AND OUR FUTURE IS PROTECTED

Education is compulsory for children, beyond the massive return on investment it ensures, because it is seen as a prerequisite to democracy. Why? Democracy requires people are sufficiently developed, and have enough of a common core, to come to agreement on the rules under which they should live. But most education laws were written before recent developments in child psychology that show the core of the ability to socialize with others and come to agreement — empathy and a disposition for prosocial behavior — develop very early in our lives, including our infancy.

That’s a problem. How can we have functional town halls without preparing people to care enough for each other to work together? Also, consider the return on investment point above: Education has a huge impact because it determines much about the full measure of our lives, and is designed to impact the majority of our — and all future generations — interactions with others.

All of this suggests that while family planning laws and educational systems are often decoupled, they should not be. We learn at least as much as home as we do at school. Rather, our family planning systems should be the first aspect of educational systems — moving upstream to help assure the social development and educational goals are achieved, and enough to meet that “town hall” standard.

What’s blocking this coupling of systems, family planning and education, that would do so much good?

Big business exerts a lot of influence on our family planning systems, using them to ensure population growth and poor educational outcomes in their quest to create lots of people for shopping malls, rather than fewer people for town halls where their voice matters.

Republicans pushed for changes in the tax code to do just this, and democrats were quick to join the effort. Yes, that’s the level of influence they have in keeping education from really working. They push as many people, through failing systems, as possible to ensure more consumers, cheap future labor, and large tax bases. That’s not what functional town halls look like. But the taboo against change is deep. I’ve worked with animal protection groups and funders whose purported missions commit them to this change, but they won’t support it for fear of backlash– in the end contravening their missions.

What’s the solution? Our political systems are not the final answer when it comes to making policy. Human rights override those systems and empower people to demand change at a constitutional level. Given that creating people for democracy is so important, so primary in nature, we can help intending parents to target the concentrations of wealth and power that made so much money debilitating family planning systems to pay for the reforms we need. Why?

Because people come first, and people come from family planning systems — whether they work well or not. We need to make sure they do work well, for example, through regearing them around equity: every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life as the first and overriding human right. Without that, how can we come from a just place?

And that move is not as abstract as it sounds. It could be as simple as replacing our pro-unsustainable growth federal child tax policy with a truly equitable and ecologically restorative one that funds family planning-based humane education as a matter of the fundamental right to full — and effective — development as part of true democracies.

We might initiate this through a simple discourse of demand and override — in which the wealthy are urged to admit what they owe, we can lay claim to the funding that would link family planning and educational systems, and build the democracies we deserve, one child at a time. We could combine that with eliminating tax credits for wealthy families (150K+ a year as an example, or a multi-faceted eligibility approach to determination) and the savings could be used 1) to increase credits proportionally for lower incomes, 2) fund a federal human education pilot program under the Dept. of Education, 3) accompanied by a federal messaging campaign modeled on NTSB seatbelt campaigns to promote “delayed families for all.”

Let’s see family planning and education as part of the same system, and start making citizens for town halls, not consumers for shopping malls. That’s what freedom requires.

Take action in dozens of effective ways.