Fair Start Movement

Category: Responsible Parenting & Smaller Families

  • Should Parents Be Licensed Before Having Kids? Share Your Thoughts

    Should Parents Be Licensed Before Having Kids? Share Your Thoughts

    In a now-classic essay, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers, the ethicist Hugh LaFollette, argued that parents should be licensed before having kids.

    In short, the government issues licenses for activities that pose significant risk or impact to society, such as driving a car or owning a gun, but not to birth children? Does that make sense?

    Read LaFollette’s classic work here. Then tell us what you think:

    Share your thoughts on the idea of licensing parents at info@fairstartmovement.org.

  • An Open Letter to Ellie Goulding

    An Open Letter to Ellie Goulding

    Dear Ms. Goulding — 

    We at Having Kids Inc. strongly support your decision to delay having kids and your new podcast about your decision not to rush into having children. The many career women of the world have evidenced that having children isn’t the “end all, be alll” in life. We encourage you to follow through on your inspiration to take on a new platform to share your story. Your decision to delay starting a family is very much in alignment with the Having Kids Fair Start model detailed below.

    The Fair Start model is simple:
    1.) Communities help parents to plan their families and wait for readiness before having kids.
    2.) We all ensure prioritized resource distribution to give all kids a fair start in life.
    3.) We all promote smaller and more regenerative families that make all of this possible.

    We believe it is the best interpretation of the fundamental right to have children. The Fair Start Model is 10 to 20 times more effective at protecting children and our environment, and at building human rights and democracy, than other policies that address these issues. For many reasons, it is an overriding human right that can be furthered by all means effective. We would appreciate greatly your helping us promote
    the Fair Start model.

    — Erika Mathews, Executive Director, and Betty Martin-Finneran, Ph.D., MS, Research Associate

  • Our Environmental Impact Starts with Having Kids. Take Action.

    Our Environmental Impact Starts with Having Kids. Take Action.

    In a recent piece, The Guardian and George Monbiot do right by at least discussing family planning, the fundamental driver of our ecological and social crises. But they miss the mark by using their pulpit to demonize and exclude those focused on family planning reform, as opposed to unifying environmentalists, and offering ways for anyone who cares about our future to work together on the most effective changes.

    This is not in dispute: People cause anthropogenic impacts, and people don’t fall from the sky. In the case of the climate crisis, choosing one child fewer has 20 times the impact of altering one’s diet. In the mid- to late 20th century, world leaders and environmentalists made a gamble that family size would fall quickly enough to evade catastrophe. All of us, including George, were wrong. Our children will suffer for that mistake.

    What’s the solution now? The right to have children is universal, but properly interpreted, it has to orient from what future children need more than what intending parents want because future children have the most at stake. In other words, social justice and the constituting of just societies has to start at the beginning by prioritizing a resource distribution that incentivizes smaller and more equitable families. We can start by targeting the industries most responsible for the crises to pay what they owe. Making that one change in our family planning systems, and quickly employing policies that give all kids a fair start in life, is the way to be most effective and to unify family planning and equity. And we can do that by starting at home, as Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have done by choosing a smaller family and speaking out.

    TAKE ACTION: Urge the key U.N. agencies to ditch their isolationist family planning models and adopt the human rights-based Fair Start model instead. And urge the Guardian’s head offices to discuss the real solutions — like better family planning policies — to our biggest problems.

  • Survey Shows Broad Support for Male Pill and Policies to Encourage Its Use

    Survey Shows Broad Support for Male Pill and Policies to Encourage Its Use

    In 2019, Having Kids launched a campaign for policies that would encourage funding for the approval, marketing, and subsidization of the male birth control pill. From a powerful way to deal with Covid-19 and future pandemics to a means of addressing fundamental gender inequity, the male pill could be the magic pill for many of the crises we face today.

    Now, Having Kids is releasing a survey showing just how much people want the male pill and policies that would promote its use.

    The results are below.

    Bar chart showing responses to How supportive are you of a birth control pill for men? Most answered Very supportive (54.99%), followed by Supportive (29.20%), with fewer selecting Neutral, Unsupportive, or Very unsupportive.
    A bar chart shows survey responses about support for the CDC promoting a male birth control pill to male teenagers. Most chose Very Supportive (180), followed by Supportive (140) and fewer chose Unsupportive or Very Unsupportive.
    A bar chart shows survey responses on support for CDC promoting a male birth control pill to combat climate change. Most chose Very supportive, followed by Supportive, Neutral, Unsupportive, and Very unsupportive.
    A word cloud displaying responses to What benefits do you associate with a birth control pill for men? Prominent words include: women, unwanted pregnancies, population, responsibility, control, less, health, benefits, and sperm.
    A word cloud showing responses to concerns about a birth control pill for men. Prominent words include side effects, concerned, none, birth control pill, men, effect, and weight gain.
    Bar chart showing survey responses to organizational support for encouraging cooperation between prospective parents and equitable families. Most respondents are Supportive (166) or Very supportive (140) out of 411 total responses.

    TAKE ACTION: Urge the federal government to prioritize funding for the approval, marketing, and subsidization of the male pill.

  • Fair Start Family Planning: The Frontier of Social Justice?

    Fair Start Family Planning: The Frontier of Social Justice?

    The idea that every kid deserves a fair start in life — and that ensuring this fair start is the most effective way to protect our environment, animals, and democracy — is gaining traction. From Salon to Newsweek, media are starting to realize how treating family planning as a private matter has created the social and ecological crises that threaten our future. That realization is supported by a raft of peer-reviewed publications, which also light a pathway for policies that can get us and our kids out of the nightmare we are creating for them:

    ·         We know kids all need a fair start in life to succeed, and Fair Start judicial orders are a simple way to legislate and constitutionalize family planning reform.

    ·         Those orders can be part of comprehensive state and federal legislation recognizing the incomparable impact of better family planning. It’s the most effective way to help kids, animals, and the environment — in many cases, 10 to 20 times more effectively than downstream approaches.

    ·         What’s a practical way to ensure fair starts? Recent studies suggest that redistributing resources from the wealthy to incentivize parents to work together to level the playing field at birth, and to improve initial conditions for all kids, will work.

    ·         Reforming our policies to give every kid a fair start in life is the only way to build democracy from the ground up and comprise the future of people truly capable of self-rule.

    Learn more about the only truly fundamental social justice reform at HavingKids.org.

  • Why Conservatives Should Support Family Planning Reform

    Why Conservatives Should Support Family Planning Reform

    David Brooks recently made an argument in The New York Times that should resonate with conservatives: Inequity, and many other related crises, stem from the family and the way we raise our kids. His argument speaks to the sense among most conservatives that deep changes in our culture, and the decline of the family as a preparative institution, is the root of many evils from debilitating loneliness to widespread drug addiction.

    But Brooks stopped short of offering a truly effective solution to the problem. Why? Any solution would have to start with an obvious but controversial truism: If we want to ensure families prepare children to succeed, we need to start before those children are born and actually ensure that parents are ready to raise and develop children responsibly. That process does not happen magically.

    How Family Planning Should Be Reformed

    It requires reforming the way we plan families. How, exactly? As a recent Having Kids research paper published in the Loyola Chicago Law Review pointed out, one step forward would be to successfully incentivize prospective parents to wait to have kids until those would-be parents have met certain milestones. The cost savings of taking these steps to ensure responsible parenting are unparalleled, especially when we factor in the huge impact on pressing crises like climate change and extreme child poverty.

    In other words, it’s good to make sure the state will not have to pay the costs of parents failing to actually raise the kids they have, rather than our paying taxes to make sure the state continues to do a horrible job of post-hoc parenting. Moreover, this process can reduce population growth and the big government, centralization of power, and mind-numbing bureaucracy that comes with it. All this moves us toward governance that’s actually representative of the people themselves. That vision of freedom is the opposite of Mao’s policy of pushing women to have more kids, which made China, now with well over 1 billion people, the greatest threat to freedom in the world today.

    In short, ensuring every kid a fair start in life, in part by paying would-be parents to prepare, is a policy that works. Conservatives should support family planning reform because it embodies these fundamental conservative values:
    • Promoting responsible parenting and families
    • Ensuring our promotion of responsible parenting is efficient by acting before problems arise, and
    • Guaranteeing the American idea of freedom, or personal autonomy, that is possible only in a democracy of well-prepared citizens capable of self-rule and with true access to equal opportunities in life.

    Where Personal Freedom Really Begins

    There is, of course, a push among conservatives to ignore values like responsible parenting, fair starts in life, and participatory democracy in favor of policies that create kids as consumers, future workers, and compliant taxpayers because promoting a high birth rate will inflate the economy. That is simply selling out our values and foisting on our kids the costs of bad parenting in what Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called a pyramid Ponzi scheme. We are a democracy before we are an economy, and there is no reasonable conception of personal freedom that does not start with accounting for and developing the people who actually constitute our political systems and, as such, have power over us. And accounting for future citizens of our democracy means ensuring responsible parenting.

    The many who gave their lives to protect what they perceived to be a unique form of freedom did not die so that the United States could become a threat to itself, ecologically through the climate and other environmental crises, and socially through the decline of the family as an institution that prepares kids for functional society. Better family planning is our best solution to both the environmental and social problems we face.

    Learn more here.

  • Why Good Family Planning Is the First Human Right and Responsibility

    Why Good Family Planning Is the First Human Right and Responsibility

    Do the family planning policies in your country ensure all children receive what they need to succeed and a fair start in life relative to other kids? Do they ensure that the child will have a meaningful democratic role in making the rules under which they live, and the freedom and security of the natural world around them? If not, then those policies and the governments that push them are fundamentally illegitimate, or “preconstitutional,” and the people may reverse the violations by all means effective.

    This is the claim Having Kids researchers recently published the Willamette Law Review, and the article is now suggested reading on the influential Legal Theory Blog administered by Georgetown law professor Larry Solum. In short? For people to be free, their governments have to be legitimate; to be legitimate, governments have to be inclusive of the people they claim to represent; and to be inclusive, they first have to comprehensively account (from a logical baseline) for each child, as well as the conditions in which that child is born, develops, and becomes able to meaningfully participate in democracy. In other words, family planning policies have to limit and intergenerationally decentralize the power each of us exerts over one another. Those policies have to free us from one another.

    TAKE ACTION: The United Nations was designed to protect international peace and security, in part by protecting human rights. Instead, leadership there has promoted the interests of illegitimate governments that exploit, rather than invest in, future generations. Urge them to reverse course and do the right thing: https://fairstartmovement.org/uncandobetter/

  • Kate Middleton: Can We Improve Our Kids’ Future?

    Kate Middleton: Can We Improve Our Kids’ Future?

    Having Kids has quite a history urging the royal family to take the lead on helping the world transition from a parent-focused family planning model to a child-focused model. It started with our famous open letter to Kate Middleton and Prince William. It later included our celebrating Meghan Markle’s and Prince Harry’s public announcement that they were choosing a smaller family for environmental reasons.

    A slew of recent articles in Marie Claire, Express UK, and the International Business Times now question whether we are giving good advice. The truth is, Having Kids wants the best future for all children. And the facts don’t lie: The most effective way to fight the biggest crises facing our world — including the climate crisis, child poverty, and growing inequity — is through family planning that promotes smaller and more equitable families. By having smaller families, we can invest more time, love, energy, and resources in every child. Better family planning will also ensure a smaller and more resilient population more capable of thriving in the degraded ecology of the future.

    If we truly love children, including Prince Louis of Cambridge, we will actually do that which protects their collective future. And the only way to do that, given the self-exacerbating collective action problem at the heart of our family planning system, is to start to work together to plan the best families we can.

    Take action: Urge the editors of Marie Claire, Express UK, and the International Business Times, via these links or the contact information available on their websites, to tell the whole story of why Having Kids spoke out to the royals and why we will keep doing so.

  • Covid-19 and Family Planning: Get the Facts

    Covid-19 and Family Planning: Get the Facts

    As the pandemic kills millions, governments and public health officials rarely want to talk about family planning and the factors that fundamentally drive pandemics. Why? Because these officials are intentionally relying on unsustainable family planning models designed to promote economic growth, but which also exacerbate the threat and impact of pandemics.

    The decision to stick with these old models cost lives, and will cost more.

    Here are the facts.

    • Civic qualities that are largely contingent on the conditions of our birth and early development, like our overall health and risk of comorbidities, as well as empathy deficits which are reflected in the refusal of many to engage in easy and life-saving public health measures like practicing social distancing and wearing masks, substantially contribute to the impact of pandemics like Covid-19.
    • The economic disparities we inherit at birth lead to massive disparities in how pandemics impact different communities, and hence determine the average impact of things like Covid-19.
    • Our growing population is degrading our natural ecologies, which sets the stage for future and worse pandemics.

    These factors are currently moving in a direction that exacerbate the threat and impact of things like Covid-19. We are moving in the wrong direction. Right now the United Nations takes the position that these factors are not our collective concern.

    That makes no sense. And because of that position, countless pregnant women are now at severe risk from Covid-19. Governments and public health officials dropped the ball by not taking family planning more seriously in the past, and now we are paying the price. If we want to address the fundamental drivers of social and ecological crises like Covid-19 we will change the way we plan families, and begin to constitute legitimate and democratic communities, not bloated economies incapable of dealing with threats to public health.

    TAKE ACTION: Urge world leadership to do what they should have done long ago, and adopt universal, sustainable and equitable family planning policies.