The UN has been obligated to interpret the promise of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that of a right “to found a family,” in a way that would protect the right for all generations equally. This includes those in the middle of the Twentieth Century, and those in 2050 for example, equally. It should have also interpreted Article 16 consistent with other human rights obligations, like the Children’s Rights Convention, and well as the Sustainable Development Goals.
Mountains of evidence show young persons are not able to exercise their right equally because of many population-driven threats to the children they would have, including significant birth impacts. In other words, the UN failed to interpret and administer Article 16 correctly.
In fact it caved to member state pressures to maintain large and unsustainable families and population growth rates in the Twentieth century, and violated future generations’ rights to safely and sustainably found their families under Article 16. Because men – under enabling from the UN – pushed women to have large families in the past, younger generations today have to worry about having even one child, given the ecological future that child faces. Moreover, women who were pushed to have children under the growth paradigm enabled by the UN’s modeling – and have children despite the risks of Covid-19 – are dying in massively disproportionate numbers. We need to hold those who enabled this accountable.
Activists should start by engaging the relatively wealthy children of UN officials, in this special form of lawful and peaceful constitutional dialogue and social change, geared around our just desert to family planning incentives/entitlements. There is nothing more just than targeting an extant minority for the benefit of the countless future majority. This process will build, targeting the concentrations of wealth and power – both public and private – most responsible for the climate and other crises we face today, including those that most benefited from past, inequitable and unsustainable interpretations of Article 16.
Take action: Urge United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres @antonioguterres to speak out and act to protect all generations’ right to found a family.
The climate and nature crises that our planet faces are rooted in both population and consumption. We cannot waste precious time by pointing fingers between consumption and population – we need to talk about both in tandem, as our survival and quality of life, and those of our children, depend on it.
On the heels of Independence Day demands from people like Cassie King for the resources all kids deserve to ensure their eco-social Fair Start in life, and others who see their future child’s entitlement to birth equity as a sustainable family planning incentive, dozens of young women have come forward to speak out for more sustainable families. It’s a message for every young person’s future on planet earth.
On World Population Day, July 11, 2021, GirlPlanet.Earth will launch as an informal forum for global dialogue by women and teenage girls from around the world on population, consumption, planetary boundaries, and personal choices. Featuring the voices of women from Africa, Europe, North America, Central America, and Asia, GirlPlanet.Earth will enable honest, authentic, lively conversations between women and girls about our future.
Courtesy of the Urban Institute.
Join the conversation.
In addition to young voices pushing back on unsustainable population growth, this Sunday – World Population Day – key experts will make clear the pathway to an optimal world population, at this special event.
Having one fewer child actually reduces your carbon footprint more than any other single move you can make. We owe it to future generations to ignore advertiser-bound media pushing women to have kids to grow their economies. Instead, those intending to have small and sustainable families should approach concentrations of power for the wealth – and birth equity – their child has a fundamental right to under the Children’s Rights Convention and other human rights instruments.
This is the time to restart the conversation about family sizes, resources, population, personal choice, climate change and the future of our planet. The science is clear – we get the best outcomes, for everyone, when families plan for and invest more love, time, and attention in each child.
Stabilizing our human population, even through the most fundamental educational and economic advancement of women, has been taboo for too long. Humanity has made terrible mistakes through coercive practices and policies, and stabilizing our population needs to be instead profoundly rooted in improved justice, education, and economic opportunity, especially for women and girls.
World Environment Day 2021 provided a crucial opportunity for the United Nations to make good on its promise to reset humanity’s relationship with nature. But by continuing to adhere to a family planning model that allows unfettered growth, despite every opportunity to simply issue statements that would initiate reform, it has failed to honor its pledge at the most fundamental and impactful level.
Our relationship with nature is fundamentally defined by the laws that shape family planning and drive population size, and whether – in those laws – nature or the nonhuman world is seen as a resource for population growth, or instead a check on it.
By adhering to the isolation modeling the UN is enabling a false idea of autonomy and is perpetuating inequity that benefits white colonizing nations. (That colonialism is reflected in the current 1/10 wealth gap between black and white children in the U.S.) Instead the UN should promote birth equity to achieve true autonomy and as a reparations to future generations.
The UN has not taken action. It has failed to link its outdated modeling to the overcrowding and poor public health that helped drive the COVID-19 pandemic. It has failed to condemn China’s new pronatal family planning regime, which is intended to create a baby boom among a population that – because of its size – already poses the greatest threat to the world’s ecologies. Instead the UN has focused on downstream efforts while at the same time profiting, politically, from population-based GDP growth.
Inaction threatens the UN’s credibility. Pronatal policies being rolled out in response to a perceived economic “baby bust” show that our current systems of governance are fundamentally illegitimate. If we are willing to create lots of people in whom we invest relatively little in order to satisfy markets and economies, instead of fewer people in whom we invest more in order to build the democracies that must precede, justify and regulate those markets and economies, we are admitting fundamental illegitimacy, or as the peer-reviewed work shows, the preconstitutionality, of our political systems. This is especially true when doing so exacerbates the climate crisis. In that case, all effective measures to correct this inversion are just.
The costs of ignoring reproductive justice legal reforms are mounting. These include the costs of the relevant climate emissions that could have been avoided since at least 2007, and the role the failure to require equitable family planning has played in driving the massive and growing gap between rich and poor across the globe. The Fair Start Movement is calculating those costs as harms, and believes world leadership must – and one day will – be held fully accountable for them.
Will you join that call? Nothing would have a greater long-run impact on restoring our environment than simultaneously compensating future generations, while helping them become parts of legitimate democracies, via Fair Start investments in their empowerment and resilience.
Zero Baseline (or “Fair Start”) Modeling (ZBM) corrects critical errors in all theories of social organization (from states, to corporations, to families etc.) that center around how we derive legitimacy, and political obligation, in the process of organizing. These errors retard personal sovereignty, or relative states of self-determination, and hence freedom. While there are several errors that drove the development of the ZBM, they can be summed up as the “constitutive fallacy,” or the belief that legitimacy and obligation can be fundamentally derived from anything other than the norms that determine our creation, and hence determine our initial relations and forms of organization.
The ZBM is a proposed creation norm to correct the fallacy and to legitimate forms of social organization. It operates primarily by 1) treating social contract theories of political obligation as inherently intergenerational (such that we are constituting states rather than having been constituted in the past), 2) prioritizing relative self-determination (relative to zero, or the absence of human influence, including 300ppm and lower climate crises baselines required to meet restorative/ecocentric/rewilding standards of environmental protection) as a value, but one that should diminish as members are added to the contract and the sovereigns displace one another, and 3) expanding our conception of power to include any form human influence or affect, like climate emission and bad parenting. The ZBM thus serves 1) as an interpretation of the moral and legal right to have children – one focused on collectively giving all children an ecosocial fair start in life as a means of limiting and decentralizing human power so that it can be subjected to norms, and 2) a formula by which to assess optimal world population.
The following discussion will situate the ZBM in the relevant literature, detail some of the costs of the constitutive fallacy, and finally present the ZBM in more detail as a basis to move social organization from top-down relations based on coercion, or incentive, towards bottom-up relations based on inclusive systems of relative self-determination derived from child development.
Situating the ZBM in the Literature
The ZBM combines work from several theorists and overlapping subjects, most obviously:
Hans Kelsen’s work on the basic norm,
deontological population ethics,
social contract, natural law, and Rousseau’s democratic theory,
the intergenerational justice work of Lukas Meyer, Axel Gosseries and David Archard,
theories of political obligation, constitutional identity, baselining, as well as personal and political autonomy,
the work of Joel Feinberg on children’s right to an open future,
related work from Sarah Conly, Christine Overall, Onora O’Neill on the right to have children,
And the practical realm of family law and reproductive rights.
That said, the ZBM is unique because it corrects the constitutive fallacy where it appears in the work above, like the common presumption that the claimant is who they should be, were created justly, and as such operate from the position of a justifiable social organization. Instead of political obligation theories like “fair play,” or relying on the harm principle for measuring liberty, the ZBM reserves legitimacy for states of affairs in which people were created fairly. Unlike many theories on the right to have children, the ZBM rejects procreative autonomy, and even places autonomy in the form of choosing not to have children subsequent to collective obligations not to have them if they would fall below minimum thresholds of civic quality necessary for a democracy.
The failure to develop and implement a just creation norm, like the ZBM, has created significant social and ecological costs. The following will discuss some of these costs, before moving onto a more detailed discussion of the model as a solution, and as a baseline to seek restorative justice.
The Underlying Errors
The errors – almost all conceptual – underlying the fallacy include, among others: 1) Treating things like national constitutions, or even rules of recognition, as the fundamental norms or grundnorms, when in fact the norms that determine our creation would have preceded these forms. 2) Using abstracted conceptions of the person focused on adulthood, and rationality, that are insufficiently dynamic to account for the key early stages and drivers of personal development, and the cumulative and collective impact of that development. And specifically for liberalism, 3) the failure from Locke to Rawls to account for how (the harm principle aside) the creation of persons controls their relative states of self-determination (e.g., vote dilution), and how this failure to account disenfranchises the majority of constituents, or future persons, who along with nonhumans are the most numerous and vulnerable category of moral entities.
The underlying errors also include using 4) limited conceptions of human power (and the borders of that power), e.g. that are focused on coercion, as opposed to using a conception that includes all human influence or affect, 5) myopic conceptions of autonomy that are self-contradicting, e.g. procreative autonomy and which presume we are whom we should be rather than the products of unjust creation norms, and in 6) in population ethics, using a concept of persons focused on quantity, when the concept of population inevitably at least five incommensurable and primarily qualitative values discussed below.
The Costs of the Errors
There are many costs that flow from the fallacy and underlying errors. Because the fallacy enabled in 20th Century a misinterpretation of the right to have children that focused on procreative autonomy and parental subjective desire rather than the objective needs of future children, population growth exploded past optimal levels, and continues to do so, backed by pronatal policies. That continued explosion drives the climate crisis and other ecocides, child poverty, massive inequity, and the degradation of systems of human rights and democracy. Because of the fallacy – which ironically seeded subjectivism, unlimited power (parental) and “might makes right,” at the fundament of human rights – neoliberal, colonial and patriarchal systems were able to use future generations and the nonhuman world as resources to fuel economic growth.
They used the misinterpretation to enable that growth (and subjectivism more generally) over systems of early childhood and civic development. This had the result of physically constituting economies, or shopping malls, rather than the antecedent systems of democracy, or town halls, that regulate economies. Often this process used religion as the driver, in violation of separation principles. The trend continues today, as falling fertility rates – a phenomena with twenty times the long-run impact reducing climate emissions – are treated by the dominant discourse an economic “baby bust.”
The Solution to the Constitutive Fallacy: ZBM
If the constitutive fallacy involves skipping the step of creation in determining the justifiability and legitimacy of relations, the solution involves a norm that literally creates normativity, or the inclusion of relatively self-determining and reasonable agents into social organizations that reflect their constituents. In other words, if we want just systems we must begin with a just creator or creation norm, one who gives all children a Fair Start in life. That will in turn allow us to maintain the constant and antecedent “we,” or group of free and equal people, necessary to constantly reconstitute participatory democracies that empower their members to actually control the rules under which they live.
The Fair Start grundnorm or ZBM (the constituting norm) is comprised of four interdependent evaluative requirements, or objective values that act as necessary conditions that enable true human subjectivity and choice: To minimize the loss of political autonomy in a human-rights-based democracy, and hence maximize consent, integration, and justified political obligation, would require, as a matter of lexical primacy, that (1) each new entrant be of a minimum constitutive quality or capable of constituting with others, (2) that there be a maximum number of members constituting the human-rights-based democracy, (3) that they enter relative to each other so that they exclude equally, and (4) that they are capable, given their quality, quantity, and relativity, of reconstituting their legalities relative to (or approaching) some level of nonpolity, or nature, that represents their capacity to convert power into law.
The existence of these four variables are inevitable in the act of procreating. The grundnorm thus necessitates backdating the standards, e.g., requiring conditions of entry that ensure constitutive quality and emancipation, rather than ignoring entry and subsequently excluding persons as insufficient in some way.
The values that comprise the grundnorm, which try to maximize obligation and autonomy through entry, role, and exit are the following: Treating procreation as the improved continuation of the parent’s life (“improved continuity,” or IC), a minimum level of welfare at entry, the nexus or zero-baseline point at which the values are first determined, fairly defined by the welfareof other entrants (> MW(F)). A qualitative threshold of a minimum quality of equitable individual sovereignty defined by the standard for emancipation, or reason (> E). A quantitative threshold of a maximum number of individual sovereigns defined by a minimum of individual sovereign roles, or capacities, in their democracy (< R). And finally, a quantitative threshold of a maximum number of individual sovereigns defined by nature (< N), the nexus or zero-baseline point or balance point at which the values are last determined.
To constitute is to maximize relative self-determination by approaching – given that constituting is dynamic – the zero baseline, or beginning to make people count or count, on a simple scale of 0, 1, 2 . . . 0
The thresholds above can be set using existing legal standards we claim to already adhere to, like basic parental fitness, the Children’s Rights Convention, biodiversity and wilderness restoration targets, education benchmarks, federalism and representative ratios, redistribution polices that attempt to create equality of opportunity, etc. The model will show that, by our own standards existing in law today, we are not who we should be or who we claim to be, but the products of a truly original sin.
The model above represents the implied and justified antecedent “we” in any normative claim, assuming the fundamental value of relative self-determination, or the grouping of persons from which the claimant is operating and in which they matter. At its base, democracy involves the capacity to influence, which in turn begins with the existence of the person. If we take democracy (or individual sovereignty, from the appropriate and more compelling individualized perspective) seriously, we must focus on the creation of individuals and thereby unravel the age-old legal conundrums of balancing community and autonomy, unified independence, and ordered liberty.
Taking Action
Beyond theory, the ZBM is the subject of a growing social movement demanding a shift from preconstitutional, parent-focused, and subjective family planning systems to a future child focused Fair Start system that – as grundnorm – should be treated as the fundamental and overriding human right. The vision and mission of the work involve bending the world population arc downwards, using a universal policy of families working together to plan for and equitably invest more in each child. The goal is to create a future of truly democratic communities surrounded by nature, constituted of free and equal people who each have a meaningful role in making the rules under which they live, and where each was empowered by the conditions in which they were born and raised.
The movement uses a simplified application of the ZBM, and includes dozens of legal, policy, institutional, cultural and direct action interventions supporters can use to further the change. The interventions include, among other things, international law reforms, celebrity appeals and Fair Start family modeling, tax measures, litigation, contraceptive funding, demands for climate compensation relative to the zero baseline, corporate divestment campaigns, and fact checking and reporting on claims relevant to the modeling.
Members of Congress are urging President Biden to declare a climate emergency and use his presidential powers to take immediate action to address the crisis, which is quickly accelerating. Having Kids is urging Biden to do the same. Here’s why:
Fair Start is the genesis of social justice, and the beginning of actually constituting democracies through the limitation and decentralization of human power. It was and is wrong to put population-driven economic growth over that right, or over smaller and more functional democracies where each voice is influential.
Biden acting to declare an emergency now, and to take immediate next steps for any or all the reasons given above, would start to right this wrong.
Every crisis we face, from the climate to Covid-19, is a function of family planning laws and policies that actually do nothing to ensure planning. They do nothing to give children minimum levels of welfare, or birth equity, and nothing to promote sustainable environments, or functional democracies where each voice matters. All of these problems, social and ecological, root in the people that comprise them.
The reasonable reaction to this situation would be to reform these systems to address the problems, especially given the massive impact changes in family planning systems make on things like climate emissions. Any discussion of family planning is an opportunity to do so. So why is the New York Times publishing empty pieces that celebrate thoughtlessly having children and simply hoping for the best? The most recent piece does nothing to address whether a more collective model of planning could mitigate the crises, sets up a false dichotomy of anti/pro-natalism, and spends the rest of the piece dressing the former up as nihilistic and the latter as a glorious leap of faith that even Kant would endorse. The author manages to ignore that if we followed Kant, we would in fact find a universal norm for family planning that did not simply exacerbate the problems and injustice we see today but address them as a collective action problem, a norm like Fair Start.
The New York Times can do better than push people to have kids with babies = hope messaging. It can address the problem one Nobel Laureate laid bare: Those in power like Times editor Dean Baquet sit atop a population pyramid, the growth of which they are incentivized to promote as a means of expanding their wealth and influence. Baquet and the Times benefit from the growth, but don’t pay its costs. The costs of that expansion, including the inequity that floats Baquet and his son Ari above the masses, are leveled on others, especially on future generations who will suffer in the climate crisis. Family planning is the first border of justice – address that issue, Dean and Ari, and let People Magazine publish thoughtless pieces on hopeful baby making as a solution to the crises causes by the same.
Take Action: Urge @deanbaquet, or his son Ari, to explain how they intend to promote the reform family planning laws and policies to address the crises we see today, and account for the social and ecological benefits they enjoy, but others will not.
But what makes the modeling unique is the way it frees us, ensuring – through an alignment of values – relative self-determination that is impossible without it. That, and the fact that reproductive justice precedes other forms, means we can purse Fair Start by all means effective, and use it to identify and overcome those that threaten that our and our kids’ freedom.
For example, the autonomy would-be parents gain through self-development and meeting a standard of readiness to parent aligns with objective, constitutive and naturalistic reasons for having children, parents’ procreative interest in successful relationships with their children, the diminishing interest in having additional children, and the quality–quantity tradeoff of a smaller family or more ecocentric family. These things align with the autonomy a highly loved and developed child experiences in life, and the morally valuable options and equality of opportunities in life they will have, which further aligns with the autonomy created by the gender equity such development allows, cooperativeness within groups, a level of inherent security in groups that avoids the need for top-down limitations on autonomy, as well as fluidity among groups.
The resulting smaller or more ecocentric populations and high levels of development align with one’s being empowered by having a meaningful voice – not drowned out or diluted by others – in public affairs and the rules under which one must live. This participatory agency aligns with the autonomy created by fulfilling one’s need for meaningful group membership, which in turn aligns with reduced consumption. and personal property that is oriented around nonpolity rather than things like ranking over others.
And all of these align with a healthy and safe environment and the freedom—or autonomy—from others that is only possible through interaction with the nonhuman world. That is freedom in nature. This in turn aligns with the nonhuman autonomy the animal liberation movement advocates for. Note this alignment spans many types of freedom, from communitarian to libertarian, that might be seen as conflicting, were we not temporalizing our perspective and orienting from creation, a place that could unify values in ways other approaches do not.
We can assess with a simple test, objectively, whether each of us is choosing to be part of a fundamentally just system in which the values discussed above align and in which we ensure true self-determination, or we are not.
Because intergenerational justice makes us who we should be, it is inevitably the first and overriding obligation, or that which first constitutes just communities and enables our consent to the power others would have over us.
Therefore no system, law or policy is legitimate if it does not first promote minimum levels of wellbeing and equity at birth for children, as well as their development for, and inclusion into as adults, self-determining democracies situated in biodiverse and regenerative environments where each of their voices will be politically influential. Any law, policy or system that does not first do these interconnected things – providing children an eco-social Fair Start in life – violates human rights, prevents consensual/inclusive governance, promotes preconstitutional systems of oppression, and is a threat to freedom.
Myths: The right to have children, as a personal and private matter, allows parents unlimited discretion to have children. Some are born wealthy and others poor, as a matter of magical fortune, rather than human decision-making.
Truth: The idea that the right to have children is self-determining of parents more than other-determining of children is a misinterpretation of the right foisted on us by colonially-minded patriarchs designed to evade our equity-building collective obligation to children, and to maintain population growth as a means of exploiting future generations as consumers, cheap future labors, and compliant taxpayer. Like all rights the right to have children is limited, collective in nature, and base on the needs of future children whose interests are inherently greater than parental interests. Applying those limits – to level the playing field for all kids – can have ten to twenty times the mitigating impact on the crises we face today, including climate, inequity, and child poverty, and would protect the most numerous and vulnerable categories of entities: Future generations and nonhuman entities.
Myth: Social justice organizations in the fields of equality, human rights, child welfare, environmental and animal protection accounted for the impacts of family planning policies on their missions.
Fact: Most organizations ignored the impacts of poor family planning and population growth on their missions, and instead mislead supporters, donors, and the general public, something that enabled many of the crises we face today.
Myth: Intergenerational concepts are too vague to apply in law, policy and practical ethics.
Truth: Every normative claim uses implied or express pronouns (“pregnant pronouns”) that – because they refer to people – implicate Fair Start and can be modified to promote it. If a claim involves people, it involves a position on Fair Start, which can be achieved in most parts of the world through enacting specific thresholds for 1) parental readiness before having kids, 2) distributions to give all kids a fair start in life, and 3) smaller and sustainable families. Together these moves represent relative self-determination, or the limitation and decentralization of power.
Myth: The written constitutions of nations, subject to some international law constraints, are the dominant set of rules under which we must live.
Truth: The most fundamental and overriding law is that which creates us, or physically constitutes – through procreation and parenting – our communities. That law overrides things like property rights, which would interfere with Fair Start. That law is what most accounts for our lived experience, and should, if we believe that governance derives from sovereign people. Moreover, power is not simply centered in the violence of the state, but includes subtle things like bad parenting and climate emissions, and its borders are represented by actual groups of people, not artificial lines on maps. Those borders can be divided into free people, and people who refuse to further children’s rights to an eco-social Fair Start in life that would allow them to constitute just democratic communities, or precons. The fight for freedom lies at that border.
Myth: The things people value, and the market demand they create, are naturally occurring and justify free markets over democracy.
Truth: Valuation, demand and population growth were created by poor and unsustainable family planning that ensured no minimum levels of welfare for children, abysmal levels of education, extreme inequity ensuring cheap labor, and bloated nation-states where the average person had no real voice in political outcomes. Businesses today profit from a system that mass produced consumers instead of developing capable, and truly free, citizens.
What happened in Atlanta is acute, but not isolated. While many organizations, including Having Kids, condemn these acts it’s crucial to find a grounded solution beyond the fleeting reactions of politicians.
Here is one long-run fix. If racism – and most “isms” – fundamentally arise from humans’ tendency to “other” and degrade people that are not part of their in-group, we need ways to make groups of people more inclusive. Historically government has tried to do that by eliminating formal discrimination, like laws that treated certain races as inferior. This had limited effect. More recently, efforts have focused on structural racism beyond the laws, like changing the way language and other representations can reinforce beliefs about racial inferiority.
Can we go further?
Whether we are part of an in-group, how we perceive others to be related to that group, whether we are really in that group in terms of having an influential voice, etc. – all of these things fundamentally rely on our creation and the family planning norms that determine it. What if instead of ignoring how parents create future generations, we designed systems so that everyone belonged and had a voice? That might work better than simply creating lots of people, jamming them into outdated and massive nation states to maximize economic growth, and simply hoping for good social outcomes that will not happen.
We can fix this. Help Having Kids create truly inclusive communities where we all belong. Take action.
