We believe that the Fair Start model may provide a pathway to creating a safe and healthy world that offers equal opportunities to everyone. For parents to get what they want, they will have to work together to ensure that every child born will pass through the vital array of resources necessary for their own personal development and so that they can have a positive impact on others. A model or suggested best practice, like the Fair Start model, is one way for parents to work together. The model helps parents ensure that their children have a fair shot at a great life by connecting the desire to provide for what kids need, with a cooperative model for when and how we plan to bring kids into the world.

We cannot seriously claim to love kids without investing in them, and we do that best by starting that process as the earliest stage possible with better, and truly human rights-based, family planning. Human rights are really about speaking truth to power, and the model acts by speaking the truth of shared values to the otherwise unfettered power parents would have over their future children. 

Yes. The Fair Start model replaces outdated parenting models that focus exclusively on the interests of parents, and do not consider the interests of future children and society. Each side of the model reflects fundamental values and rights, like parents’ interests in the continuity and improvement of life for humans, future children’s interest in minimum levels of well-being and equal opportunities in life, and society’s interest in both the organization of human thinking into functional democracies, as well as the absence of human power, or nature. These values and rights are more political than ethical, and all derive from the more ultimate value of freedom, conceived of as consensual political association. They are also constitutional, in the sense that they should guide the constant reconstituting of social organizations through the act of having children, and as such override other rights, interests, desires, etc. These five universal, objective, compatible, and interlocking values trump competing interests and guide how the model is applied.

A Minimum Level of Well-Being
What minimum of things like love, nutrition, attention, health, safety, etc., does every child deserve, from the moment they are born? What minimum would you have wanted at birth? If children deserve certain things, why not assure them before the children enter the world? How can we use birth and early childhood development conditions to offset genetic disparities and give every kid a fair start in life? These questions frame the idea of a minimum level of well-being to be assured before children are born, and the fact that it is impossible to care about children without caring and controlling the conditions into which they are born. Specific and concrete examples of conditions below the minimum level would be people who do not want to have children but lack the means to avoid having them, minor parents, households adjudged unfit by a court of law, as well as conditions that fall far below the minimum required by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. How can we achieve bringing children into the world above the minimum levels? We use other values, like Improved Continuity, Fairness and Democracy, to create family planning regimes based on redistribution of resources. Why not target reforms, where possible, before children actually arrive in the world? Why would we very continue to push kids through systems we know are failing?

Fairness
How do families achieve minimum levels of well-being? Society and parents must work together to achieve them (they are mutually obligated) using the idea of improved continuity, and also work together to revise the levels of well-being relative to the conditions into which other children are born. Do children in the poorest families deserve the same opportunities in life as children born into the richest? Are all children really born free and equal? Should wealthy families have a third child who will have all the privileges in life, while the first child of a poor family has none? Why tolerate a system that produces unearned benefits at all? A child’s opportunities in life should not be luck of the draw, and every child deserves a fair start, with the same opportunities in life in as other children. Our current family planning systems treat society like a massive building with many floors, and with staircases going from the outside directly to each of the floors. Our policies are driving many kids down the stairs and into the lower levels because it supports the lifestyle of those of us living in the upper levels. That’s contrary to democracy and simply wrong. Elites, who live at the top of the tower, thrive on these policies, with more and more people who will work against their and their children’s own interests in the face of obvious threats like climate change. The longer we allow these policies to stand, the harder it is getting to solve the problems. The Fair Start model moves us toward that concrete and specific level of fairness, and relies on parents’ desire to do what it takes to protect their child’s rights to drive the changes necessary to achieve it.

How do the values of a Minimum Level of Well-Being and Fairness relate? The two act as the ends of a spectrum, between which parents will choose to have children, assuring the former and cooperating with other families and their community to assure the latter.

Improved continuity
Most people want their personal lives to continue and improve. The Fair Start model takes this universal value (comparable to the universal value of free speech or of bodily integrity) of improved continuity and applies it as the specific and fundamental value underlying parenting, the goal of which is transformed into having just enough children to continue parents’ lives (usually one or two), biologically or otherwise, but at levels of well-being above that of the parents’ own lives. Improved continuity (which is a qualitative and quantitative concept) replaces autonomy, which does not apply to the act of creating another person, and can in no way support a right to have children as fundamental human right that limits override by competing rights or democratic choice. Improved continuity, also conceivable as thriving, accounts for the way our interest in having kids diminishes with each child we have, and is an objective and shared value (as opposed to flimsy subjective and dubious values like wanting an infant to cuddle, a future laborer, a child of a specific gender, etc.), which is emblematic of the sort of values that would support human rights. It provides a center of gravity around which parents can cooperate, and it synergizes with the next four values. Improved Continuity also frees up the resources needed to start making values like well-being and fairness work because it recognizes that parents’ interest in having children diminishes with each child a parent has, and that as such there is an inherent or intrinsic limit to the number of children parents have an objective interest in having.

Democracy

Real democracy, as opposed to representative and other diluted forms, is the physical ideal of groups of people voluntarily coming together, and working together, to make and live by the best set of rules they can. Democracy includes everything that ideal implies about the quantities and qualities of the people in those groups, and their constant push for decentralization of power. It is self-rule, in the purest sense imaginable, and is a form of human political evolution. Democracies should satisfy our basic human need for meaningful group identity and belonging, while they are also empowering us as individuals, and should serve as the most fundamental organizing unit of societies. Given that people have the ultimate political authority in democracies, democracies begin with the question: whom would you choose or “elect” as your fellow citizens and how many would you choose, assuming you could? Would you choose people inclined to give their role to leaders, or so many people that each person was attenuated from the group rule-making process and had very little actual role in it at all? Would you invest more in each person in ways that gave everyone common ground? True democracies have lower quantities of people, who were in turn deliberately welcome in and included, and who in turn have higher levels of civic quality (in terms of things like the ability to communicate and empathize, the requisite level of trust those things engender, psychological development past the politics of identity/personification often inherent in representative democracies, etc.), and the sense of belonging that comes from these shared qualities. That moves in the opposite direction of preconstitutional  systems, like the economy we live in today, where policies openly advocate for adding more and more people, irrespective of their civic qualities, to drive greed-based growth. The Fair Start model builds real and intergenerational democratic communities (based on a rejection of representative democracy, enabled by a combination of radical federalism and application of the Fair Start model to prevent its abuses in the past) from the ground up and inside out, by helping families work together to bring people into the world that can form and maintain them: people that can empathize, objectify values and norms, come to agreements, and trust one another. It reverses the pre-democratic trend, continuing today (and consistent with the persistence of teen pregnancy, of children raising generations of children), of maximizing quantity irrespective of civic quality to empower the state and its economy. Democracy also helps inform and define the previous three values, and through its deliberated and proactive inclusivity of future generations becomes a powerful reason to collectively invest heavily in family planning.

Nature
When we refer to climate change, what is the implicit baseline from which the change is occurring? What is the opposite of anthropogenic power and influence? Nature, in the Fair Start model, is conceived of as the nonhuman world or the political ideal of nonpolity: the absence of human power and that which makes freely consenting to others’ influence and true democracy, possible. Nature is physical freedom from others, serves as a truly individuating baseline environment for human well-being and consumption, and is also the minimum baseline for liberal political systems to remain legitimate. Nature and democracy work together. For example, limiting the size of democratic communities to protect the nonhuman world also ensures that each person maintains a role in their communities, places without human power incentivize democracies to produce citizens that can be trusted in places with no sanctioning authority, etc. In other words, the nonhuman world represents the proportional empowerment of people as citizens (though perhaps not as consumers, workers, taxpayers, etc). More specifically, nature refers to all other species and their habitat, more or less at the level of diversity that existed in the 18th century. This conception of nature sets an aspirational but specific benchmark for allowing biodiversity to re-establish on Earth, and creating a physical space against which true democracies can be defined and their growth borders set. This conception of nature creates the basis for a fundamental human right to, a fundamental need for, and a correlative duty to preserve, wilderness, and also embodies the next step of progressivism: the decolonization and liberation of the biotic and abiotic world we have historically subjugated. This conception also unifies the animal, environmental, and human rights movements around widely shared values and a means of achieving common goals. Nature so conceived represents the highest aspiration of decolonization, that of the nonhuman world, and the simultaneous liberation of nonhumans and humans alike. Environmentalism in this sense becomes a fundamental political struggle between humans, rather than some collective endeavor to protect shared resources. 

One will often hear environmentalists speak of nature as an antiquated concept and as a roadblock to seeing the human and other than human world as an interrelated whole. Fair Start Movement rejects these arguments as based on a naturalistic fallacy that ignores norms governing the exercise of human power, and because they promote the continued colonization and eradication of the nonhuman world, to the detriment of democracy and human freedom.

The balance point
The values, which are the most objective values that can be coherently articulated, can then contextualized and applied to create a balance point for every family planning decision, and serve as a basis for the Fair Start family planning model. Given the current the state of affairs in the world, that balance in generally achieved with this simple formulation:

Smaller families working together to plan a fair start in life for every child.

The model and these values can then be applied, for example, by restructuring state child tax credits, reducing or eliminating them for wealthy families after the first or second child in favor of family planning, early childhood development, affirmative action, and wilderness restoration programs. The model and these values can be similarly applied through trusts between families, changes in corporate benefit programs, and a variety of other ways.

It’s really not that complex. Truly valuing human life means planning for it in the best possible way.

The Isolation family planning model focuses on what parents want in the short term rather than on what children and society need in the long term. It thereby breaks the link between vital needs and available resources. The isolation model developed into its current form in the middle of the 20th century with the emergence of a reproductive autonomy right that simplistically treated having kids and not having kids as equally private matters.

That right, and the isolation model it promoted, ignored the fact that having children is the most public thing most people will ever do and precluded collective action where it is needed most. It also disregarded the fact that children are born vulnerable to the people and conditions around them rather than being ensured a minimum level of well-being and a fair start in life. By treating having children as a private matter, it also eliminated the opportunity for parents to cooperate in their decision making to achieve the best outcomes for every child. This also ensured that often the most caring and thoughtful people would forgo having children in a largely vain (because of the lack of collective action) attempt to do things like protect the environment, other animals, and other people’s children.

The one-sided model first evolved from patriarchal systems that treated children as the property of their parents, at a time before reliable methods of contraception and terminating pregnancies were widely available, and before scientists understood the lasting implications of one’s early childhood. This context set the stage for world leaders and human rights theorists, in the middle of the 20th century, to fuse the acts of having and not having children under the protection of one fundamental human right, frame that right as based on autonomous subjective choice rather than mutual obligations and objective interests, and ignore the impacts of that fusion and framing. This would include impacts on the interests of future children, the interests of women in patriarchal societies where that version of reproductive freedom would become a license to men, and the communities that would absorb all the costs. That in turn led to the disastrous situation, environmentally, socially, and politically, in which we find ourselves today, which is driven by the root cause of the way be plan (and don’t plan) to bring children into the world and provide for them. The Fair Start model works to correct these mistakes, rather than focus on downstream, less effective, and after-the-fact solutions. Yes, family planning is a powerful way to impact lives. But that is why we have to get it right, empowering from birth each child as a democratic co-ruler, rather than ignore family planning and hope for the best. 

 

Claims about overpopulation and underpopulation depend on a normative baseline, or a point of comparison for whether something is over or under what it should be. In the 20th century world fertility rates were cut in half in order to avoid environmental and other catastrophes. As the inevitable demographic shift occurs as a result of that change (see below),

 

 

 

 

 

many growth economists and businesses that rely on an ever growing supply of cheap labor, taxpayers, and consumers began a propaganda campaign about the dangers of “underpopulation” and low fertility rates. Using their normative baselines of growth, or even replacement fertility, ignores human rights and the widely shared values the Fair Start model is based upon, and puts valuing profit over valuing child welfare, nature, democracy, and fairness. Growth economics calls for creating high quantities of relatively servile and imitative people in order to produce wealth for elites, rather than the connected communities of free and equal people that democracies require, and reduces human development to gross domestic product rather than maximizing the actual development of persons from birth into adulthood. Read more here. Regardless, human rights and democracy precede and override growth economics. The Fair Start model reverses our current family planning models’ subservience to economic concerns.

Falling fertility rates could be seen as a form of political evolution, in which humans alter their behavior to effectively protect their own ecosystems, and improve evolved forms of social organization like democracy. This beneficial trend – which the Fair Start model can accelerate – would in turn set the stage for an intergenerational secession from the patriarchal and economic nation-state model, into smaller, sustainable and truly democratic communities where each child is born free and equal, and each person has a meaningful role in forming and altering the rules under which they live.

No. There is nothing personal or private about the act of creating another person. Do the interests of every future child matter? Does that make the act of having a child more interpersonal? As a parent, does one not care about how other parents are raising the children with whom you, and especially your child, will eventually share this world? Do we want to create human societies comprised of mutual respect for each other and the natural world? The best way to protect and ensure the fundamental human right of all people to have kids is to see it as part of a holistic system of human rights that interlocks continuity with other values like child welfare and nature, rather than treating the act of creating another person as something we do autonomously. We need to base the right on something other than autonomy.

Neither. It transcends popular political labels and is designed to fix specific mistakes, like not treating the social contract, human rights, and democracy as intergenerational processes, that have prevented the realization of these three and other political ideals, ideals that almost everyone in the world today shares.

For example, we use family planning as a vehicle to redistribute resources rather than government, because we value the efficiency of early intervention as well as the equity of a fair start in life. Instead of the New Deal we call it the Real Deal.

Population is a negatively framed subject focused on one consequence of family planning modeling. But having kids goes way beyond the issue of numbers, modeling can be more qualitative than quantitative, and we want to focus on the solution to many problems rather than focus on one of the problems.

When we talk about population we are talking about who we are, collectively, and who we will be. It’s never just a simple matter of numbers, and is better thought of as a value-laden process, and the intentional reconstitution of our basic forms of social organization.

Access to contraceptives is of no use without a populace intent on using them and having the knowledge to do so in a safe, effective and desirable manner. That, in turn, depends on a family planning model, or how we decide to plan families.

Levels of consumption are likewise always dependent on the number of people consuming and their disposition to consume at particular levels which, like their number, often derives from family planning models and what they teach us about our relation to the nonhuman world and how we should be reared.

Finally, Fair Start Movement does promote education of young girls, and part of any curriculum must include ethical family planning models, like the Fair Start model.

Systems of human rights inherently override conflicting norms, but those systems have to first comprehensively account for the full spectrum of human power or influence. Given that two obvious borders of human influence are preexistence and the nonhuman world or wilderness, the particular human rights norm that accounts for those borders, that though family planning determines the “human” in human rights, precedes and determines other norms. The Fair Start model is a strong candidate for being that norm because it takes the liberating value of individual empowerment (or emancipation, as in the emancipation of children) that is fundamental to human rights (and properly understood, can unify seemingly conflicting generations of human rights), and applies it to empower children entering the world, both in terms of their relative wellbeing, their equitable positioning relative to others, their eventual role as democratic citizens in smaller and politically autonomous communities where they play a significant role, and their ability to exit those communities, thanks to the alternative of the nonhuman world. In other words, it accounts for our coming together as free and equal people to collectively make the rules under which we will live. The model can create real democracies constituted of free and equal people, and replace the restrictive pre-constitutional economies and other forms of social organization in which we live today.

No. While governments may not discriminate among religions nor prevent forms of worship and assembly, they may regulate conduct, like having kids, that impacts others in the community. In other words, legitimate human rights-based democracies provide the supreme law. Moreover, the Fair Start model may align better with the best interpretations of many religions by replacing the human subjectivity at the heart of the Isolation Model with objective values that many people view as the true reflection of god – like nature, or the continuity of life.

No. The act of having a child is different from the act of preventing or terminating a pregnancy. While often conflated (because of a series of policy mistakes in the twentieth century), the two different behaviors are protected by distinct moral and legal rights.

Yes. It makes little sense to talk about inclusivity without a values-based family planning model that deliberately and collectively includes future generations, and provides them a fair start in life, rather than our current model which fails to account for equality and allows prior generations to exploit future ones and the nonhuman world. Intergenerational intersectionality is fundamental.