Category: Ethics & Compassion

Smaller families are the trend as our species seems to react – in a positive way – to the ecological and social crises that plague our world. And while the developmental benefits of smaller families are proven, and well appreciated by bioethicists, many in the media have been slow to catch up.

Thanks to Michael Shank, that’s changing. Newsweek published his powerful piece last week. In it he refers to child-centric family planning – the most ethical form of family planning – and a win-win for parents, kids, and their communities. Many are hoping the message reaches world leaders at the world climate conference in Madrid next month.

It’s not just about family size. Opening a public dialogue regarding better family planning policies could enable new modeling that targets horrific inequity too (the sort that shut down Chile as a location for the climate conference recently). Starting at the source has many benefits.

Who’s really pushing for bigger and poorly planned families? The elite at the top of a population Ponzi-scheme pyramid that keeps them in power. Poor family planning is a like a bank account. Women, children, and the natural world pay into the account, and businesses and politicians withdraw money in the form of a glut of cheap future labor, hungry consumers, and compliant taxpayers. The process works by using things like tax incentives, cultural pressure, celebrity role models, and propaganda like this, to push women to have kids irrespective of the conditions in which those children will be born and the ecology they will impact.

It’s time to reverse that flow, and Fair Start family planning – which decentralizes centers of power by investing their resources into future generations – is one way to do it.

Learn more.

Some critics have gone apoplectic over recent calls to reconsider family planning models in light of the overwhelming impact large families have on climate change. The tactic these reactionaries use is old and obvious: Divide the world into Us versus Them, Left versus Right.

Tenuous and even absurd analogies try to create fear, like comparing family planning to killing extant people. For example: “Or maybe we should get down to business right away and begin by eliminating all of the ‘extra’ people currently milling about the globe, taxing the earth’s precious resources with their costly carbon dioxide emissions.”

Those opposed to even discussing changing the way we plan families often think about population from a different perspective: the impact family planning has on investments under an economic model where babies serve big business.

Instead of pushing women to have kids just to keep the investor class rich, we can and should focus on our shared values:

• You value children’s wellbeing and care about the conditions into which they are born and will grow up.
• You value democracy and you participate in the democratic process of deciding, as a community, the rules under which you will live.
• You value nature and you are concerned about your impact on the environment.

Wellbeing, democracy, and nature are things we all value enough to act on. We won’t be divided into Left and Right. We won’t be scared by boogeyman stories in a ploy to keep us from protecting and furthering those values.

These families are like you and me. They care about kids, community, and nature. Together, we are building a world that can benefit all. Join us and help make the future better than today. Please learn more at HavingKids.org.

At Having Kids:

We promote and protect every child’s right to a fair start in life by replacing unsustainable, parent-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-centered Fair Start family planning model. The model suggests a shift in family planning from a subjective focus on just the parents, to an objective focus that considers the interests of the potential child, the parents, and the community.

It’s all about this: Smaller families working together to give every child a fair start in life.

Today many families are adopting the Fair Start family planning model. First, they try to give their child a fair start in life by having a smaller family where they can invest more in their child. Often they also foster or adopt one of the many children eagerly waiting for parents rather than creating additional need. Second, they publicly role model their choices. Finally, these families join public advocacy campaigns to shift resources from extractive centers of power like governments, corporations, and wealthy families in order to democratically empower children and future citizens by incentivizing better family planning by all parents. Why? All parents know that the quality of their own child’s life will depend on how other parents decide to have and raise their kids.