Category: Political Equality

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[et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]We reiterate our well wishes to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the announcement of their third child.

This shouldn’t be that hard to understand: all of us at Having Kids simply want the best for all children. Not everyone will choose to switch from traditional models of family planning to the Fair Start model.

But we also need to recognize what it means when we reinforce the old model – either by our example, by our argument, or by our silence.

The Having Kids Fair Start model prioritizes children getting a fair start in life. That’s right – the children of poor families in the United Kingdom deserve the same level of nutrition, health care, and education as Prince William and Kate’s third child. This should be their birthright – and ignoring in the past it has helped create the fatal chasm between rich and poor today. 

The Independent notes: “While you celebrate the third royal baby, remember all of the women in Britain who aren’t allowed a third child: It’s an unhappy coincidence that the announcement of a third royal baby comes in the same year the Government deems third babies a luxury not every family has earned.” It is a great insight into the disparities built into our current society – the Royals set an example that the rest of us can’t afford to follow.

And for all those who try to follow the Royal example, who will pay for the third children?

If family planning stays a free-for-all, with the broader society expected to pay for every child, we will continue to have an unsolvable problem. This illustrates the problem with our current privatized family planning model: it creates a domino effect of larger families imitating one another, leading to more needy kids without the resources for their own children. This continues the cycle, and brings with it rising social and environmental costs.

It is a Sophie’s choice: Parents choose to have more kids, and society either pays the costs, or kids end up paying by not getting what they need and deserve.

Our short-sighted approach to family planning has broader implications as well.

Many of you were startled to see our discussion of William and Kate appear next to our survey regarding parents who abused their child with a stun gun and forced him/her to eat dog feces. The Royal discussion was also alongside our blog about limiting the right of members of Boko Haram to have kids after these parents offered up children to be used as child bombs.

What is the connection? All this follows from the old, subjective family planning model of personal and private choice.

Focusing only on the “rights” of parents is the argument lawyers use to make sure anyone can have more kids – no matter how the children suffer. Many of us implicitly endorse this view. After all, if the Royal family’s family planning is none of anyone’s business, then other parents’ decision making is also none of anyone’s business.

If we put parents’ rights ahead of the rights of future kids, we get horrible abuse and child bombs, and no logical way to say anything against these outcomes.

 

What else do we get? Look at this chart.

There is no doubt that if the average parent plans smaller families, where we work together to ensure every child gets a fair start in life, you and your kids’ future will be less crowded, cleaner, and safer. If we continue on our current path, we get the opposite.

Who would knowingly choose to subject their kids to a hotter, more crowded, more polluted, and more dangerous world?

How can the future of the world not be our business? Don’t we have a right and the duty to make the future better for our kids? The only way we can improve our future – and everyone else’s – is if family planning becomes a topic we can all discuss honestly.

The solution is a child-first family planning model – an approach that balances all the values at stake in family planning. Let’s switch to that, and step out of the horrible cycle we’ve created for so many children.

Please be a part of this work today at HavingKids.org[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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When Having Kids sent a letter to Prince William and Kate Middleton respectfully offering up the Fair Start model as an alternative to the free-for-all of current family planning models, we mostly received positive reactions. And that was before the most recent terrifying climate change news from the United States government!

But we also drew threats of violence, racist and eugenicist rants about why white and wealthy couples should have lots of kids, and climate change denying bloggers who seem creepily obsessed with celebrity babies (and who use news of them to sell their advertisers’ products). We also heard from Trump supporters who never questioned the possibility that replacement fertility is not a great a baseline. They think that even though family planning will define our futures and the futures of our children, it is “nobody’s business.”

It is clear that many people are simply in denial that the “nobody’s business” approach to (not) planning our families is exacerbating climate change and endangering our own children. They are also turning a blind eye to the immorality of some kids being born with everything and some kids nothing.

And they are also ignoring one simple fact: Caring and thoughtful parents are not going to stand by and ignore the fact that better family planning is quite possibly the single best way to mitigate climate change. These more responsible parents are not going to sit back and enjoy the last of nature while condemning their kids to a denuded, dangerous, crowded, and overheated world simply because people like the Duggar family get famous by having kids. 

These more responsible families are speaking out and moving us towards better family planning. They are not waiting for the government. As these families set this positive and life-affirming example, Having Kids will help their voices grow in number and strength.

Asking public figures to lead by example is one way to take action. We are moving beyond the Royals, asking other figures to speak out in favor of smaller families working together to plan a fair start in life for every child. Please be a part of this work!

The Royals: Will they be more like Trump, or Thoreau?

Recently Having Kids wrote an open letter to Prince William and Kate Middleton asking them to consider adopting the Fair Start model. Among other things, we noted a simple fact based on math and exponential growth: Large families of three or more children are not sustainable. Three kids each have three kids, each have three kids, each … you get the picture. It evoked a powerful response from some: “Mind your own business – it’s a matter of personal freedom.” Lessons learned (apart from the fact than many parents are really angry and openly racist): A lot of people think about freedom the way Trump does. For them personal freedom includes the right to harm others – to degrade our environment, to endanger our own children’s future, to exacerbate inequality, etc. Trump’s version of freedom is doing whatever he wants to do – like a petulant and greedy child.

Instead, Thoreau’s version of freedom was transcendent, like a child being emancipated into adulthood, or the becoming of someone with a deep empathy, who therefore wanted to and was able to control his behavior so as not to harm others.

Why do these different versions of freedom matter? It’s very important that we use the right version of freedom when we think about family planning.

Remember the story of the social contract, the historical basis for many modern systems of human rights and democracy? In essence, the story justifies today’s systems of government by treating them as the product of free and equal people voluntarily or consensually coming together to make the rules they will live by. The story tried to maximize human freedom. But – and this is crucial – that story relied upon people who were able to control their behavior so as not to harm others. In other words, people who were more like Thoreau than Trump, or Trump’s followers. How do we make sure future generations actually do grow up, and are more like Thoreau than Trump?

What if rather than thinking of the social contract as something that happens at a particular point in time, we instead temporalized the process to account for how we “come together” with future generations? Incoming generations might demand some minimum level of well-being at entry that would be consistent with child welfare laws and the Children’s Rights Convention, as well as a fair start relative to other incoming children. Extant members of democracies would also want to consent to incoming generations, their new fellow citizens, which would give a powerful reason for them to invest heavily in the development of those generations as democratic co-rulers. All persons would want, in the process of bringing in future generations, to preserve nature so that humans would be able to consent to coming together. In other words, so that there would be places, states of nature, or neutral political positions from which to consensually come together and to which persons could withdraw. Finally, in this process would-be parents would want to be assured a right to have children, and the help they need to give their kids a fair start, and a better life.

Our current family planning models do nothing to assure these things, and help us become emancipated or free. The Fair Start model does. Lessons learned? It’s time, more now than ever, to rethink the way we plan families.

 

[button link=”https://fairstartmovement.org/faqs/”] More about freedom in family planning [/button]