Tag: Action Alerts & Toolkits

The right to have children comes with responsibilities on parents and their communities that protect us all. The United Nations is using a decades-old pro-growth family planning model that ignores those responsibilities and hurts kids. That model is fundamentally driving ecological crises and the climate crisis, child poverty, and growing inequity across the globe. That model exacerbates the risk and impact of pandemics, and prevents our reaching the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. That non-inclusive model exploits children more than it invests in them, thereby driving political illegitimacy.

But groups and individuals from around the world are signing on to an effort to change the old model, which is focused on what parents want, toward a new model that focuses on what all kids need.

The new model is called Fair Start family planning, and it is the beginning of real social justice. The reform can begin with the United Nations secretary general simply acknowledging the need for change.

Sign on, and urge any organization you support or can influence — nonprofit or for profit — to also sign on. Sign here or contact us at info@fairstartmovement.org for more information.

Help support this effort and you support new family planning policies that can reduce poverty and inequity, and mitigate the climate and other ecological crises, on a scale of 10 to 20 times non-family planning measures.  

This video was recently shared by a supporter:

THE FACTS ARE CLEAR:

• The most effective way to address many of the impacts on our environment and other species, such as climate change, is to choose smaller families. In fact, it’s 20 times more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation.  
• By 2100, world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime.
• Child-first family planning provides a clear human rights-based solution and path forward. It’s sustainable and equitable, and it’s reflected in the worldwide trend toward smaller families that can invest more in each child and ensure a safer future.

TAKE ACTION:

Urge the United Nations to do what it was created to do: protect all of our futures by adopting Fair Start family planning policies: https://secure.everyaction.com/gZiWOydZ_0m7kxrlfD5OjQ2

Urge any charities you support to commit to better family planning policies. which are the most effective way to protect kids, animals, the environment, and democracy: https://fairstartmovement.org/organizations-joining-for-world-population-day-at-the-u-n/

Author Deanna Young (Deanna also recently called Donald Trump out for violating international law.)

In the past, women were generally expected to have kids, few thought about whether large families were actually sustainable, and almost no one considered the possibility of would-be parents cooperatively working to maximize the conditions into which their children would be born.

And though the way we plan families is evolving toward a model that’s more sustainable and equitable, what’s the next phase? How do we catalyze this transition? 

Readiness for Parenthood: Opening Up the Discussion

It’s actually pretty simple: Break the taboo around publicly discussing what it means to be ready to have kids and around what we deserve from the wealthy and from our governments to give every kid a fair start in life. Some moms, pressed by the Covid-19 crisis, are starting to do just that. 

I don’t have a child, but I may one day. And the most effective thing I can do to protect that future is to demand a human-rights based system of family planning over the oppressors in big business and big government who are blocking that collective process, join those voices, and speak out. 

I and many other young voices are willing to delay having kids until we are ready, have smaller and sustainable families, and work together to ensure a fair start for all of our kids. 

Younger generations are willing to embrace a collectivist vision around parenting, opening up the discussion around readiness for parenthood by authentically and transparently discussing our own capacities for properly parenting any children we may have. We realize that a lack of social concern and governmental provision has made parental readiness an assumption — but not a foregone conclusion — for young adults. And we know that the discussion around the decision to have kids is bigger than ourselves, which is why we’re willing to forgo some degree of personal privacy to speak out about it. Achieving collective goals — like fair starts in life for each child born in the future — requires an organized focus and intention toward the greater good.

Ross Douthat and the Push for Procreation

The people who benefited from poor family planning and the flow of consumers, cheap labor, and taxpayers it created are pushing back against the trend in delayed pregnancies and lower fertility rates. Ross Douthat, driven by his religion, is one of the best examples of those pushing women to have more kids, irrespective of how it’d affect the environment, economic inequality, and our democracy. 

His attempt to pull us backward is a manifest threat to our and our kids’ future. The question is not why women should have more kids: It’s what Ross is doing to ensure a fair start in life for all kids relative to the well-to-do start he is giving his own kids.

Action Step: Reach Out for Answers

Tweet Ross @DouthatNYT, or find and engage him peacefully and lawfully in his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, to get answers. 

Having Kids is a nonprofit organization dedicated to replacing current subjective and parent-focused family planning models with the objective, human rights-based and child-focused Fair Start model​. Sensible family planning is among the best ways to promote quality of life for present and future generations, protect the environment, and reduce overcrowding as a hedge against coming pandemics. We are encouraging Congress and the key federal agency to act.

We are writing the two key members of the House and Senate, as well as the head of the National Institutes of Health, to make this happen.

Take Action: Add Your Name Here.

Given the current pressures the COVID-19 virus pandemic is placing upon our environment, our institutions, and on families everywhere, particularly the most marginalized among us, and given the previously unsustainable pressures these systems and groups were already facing, we are urging Congress and the urge the Subcommittee on Health to prioritize, reallocate, and increase funding towards more sensible family planning tools like long-acting reversible contraceptives (“LARCs”) for men, as well as use its power to facilitate expedited clinical trials of these products. As no such widespread male contraception is currently available for couples, this product represents an opportunity for a remarkable return on investment in the form of more equitably sized family units and all the benefits that flow from them.  

There are multiple reasons to pursue this strategy:

• US Environmental Policy Requires Sensible Family Planning: The grandfather of US environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) declared that the US government has a “continuing responsibility” to act as trustee over the environment for future generations and it outlines a federal environmental policy to “use all practicable means and measures… to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony…” To that end, it requires government bodies to take a hard look at “population growth” and its effects on environmental health. Facilitating the production of LARCs is consistent with this policy.
• Current Population Trends Require Male Contraception: The world’s current population is increasing at the rate of 80 million persons a year and global population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Choosing smaller families is the most effective way to reduce human impact on the planet and animals. For example, having one less child is nearly 20 times more significant than the adoption of other environmental practices, like driving a hybrid or changing one’s diet.  Accordingly, the long term environmental benefits achieved by even only a few couples employing LARCs can be enormous. 
• Institutions Implicitly Recognize The Need To Manage Family Sizes and Population: The ​CDC acknowledges​ that “unintended pregnancy carries significant health and economic consequences and disproportionately affects poor women and women of color.” Moreover, the WHO has recognized that ​overcrowding exacerbates epidemics​ and is perhaps the most ​fundamental threat to public health​. Human overpopulation is a ​key factor in the spread of a variety of diseases​, and this now ​includes novel coronavirus​. The WHO has further stated that supporting family planning services is a “life-saving” strategy that policymakers should undertake during the current crisis.  LARCs help manage these risks.  
• Gender Equality Requires More Focus On Male Contraception: To date, unfounded ideology has been the primary inhibition to male contraception. In the few instances when pharmaceutical companies have tried to create products for men similar to “the pill,” progress has often been halted by side effects that women have experienced for decades, such as depression, acne, increased libido, and shrinking testicles or ovaries. Society apparently will not tolerate these effects in men, but for women they are expected. Moreover, rather than create reliable hormone-driven male contraceptives akin to what’s available to women, the market seemingly focuses on the opposite – pouring its resources into products such as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra. It is Congress’s duty to help correct these market imbalances by facilitating the production of LARCs, not only because it makes pragmatic sense given the environmental and quality of life costs, but also for gender equality. 

Having Kids previously raised these concerns to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Spring 2019, when it requested additional funding for LARCs.  Since that letter there has been no meaningful movement despite the fact that the need for such family planning tools has only been exacerbated over that time. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is but a symptom of the fact that we have too many unmanaged families living in too close proximity to one another.  

For these reasons, we are encouraging Congress and the NIH to prioritize funding for research and development of male LARCs to offset the market’s failure to produce these drugs, as well as to expedite their clinical trials.  For example, NIH currently only spends $20 to $24 million on contraceptive research, which is a pittance compared to its current $41.7 billion annual budget for medical research. ​Taking action to create widely available and easily accessible male LARCs would ensure a higher quality of life for future families, it would protect the environment, and it would safeguard future generations from overcrowding, thus substantially reducing the threat, transmission and impact of pandemics like COVID-19.