The Trump administration is trying to amend our family planning policies in ways that hurt women and children, including imposition of a domestic “gag rule.” They are proposing changes to Title X – the only federal program dedicated to increasing access to contraceptive care for low-income women. It would take away funding to providers who simply mention abortion as an option.
The Title X changes are an obvious effort to defund Planned Parenthood, who is the only healthcare service for many. The proposed rules are intended to mislead women about their health care options and would encourage the use of ineffective birth control methods. Women deserve facts. The proposed Title X changes will affect people for their entire lives.
TAKE ACTION – Comments are due 07/31/2018 at 11:59 PM EDT.
Draft key points are below – feel free to copy, modify and/or otherwise use:
This radical proposal has never been implemented in the United States and it would jeopardize the trusting relationship between women and their providers and put the health of the 4 million women nationwide who use Title X clinics at risk.
The proposed rule could increase the rate of unintended pregnancy by eliminating the requirement that Title X clinics provide access to the full range of FDA-approved contraceptive methods,
Methods encouraged in this rule such as “natural family planning” and “fertility awareness-based” methods are significantly less effective with typical use than long-acting methods, leading to a higher number of unintended pregnancies.
Reducing unintended pregnancy helps families get off to the best possible start. It empowers women to attain their education goals, helping create financially secure and strong families, lowers the abortion rate and reduces the number of people who need to use Medicaid and other public assistance programs.
Denene Millner sketches out the lines of a blueprint for a new and better American Dream, born of the persistence of racism, and need for success to mean more than wealth. It’s a beautiful sketch. But she ends suggesting some form of voluntary economic segregation. “Segregation made the black community self-reliant.” Is there an alternative?
Perhaps it lies in her focus on children, and the family. Could racism begin at home? Could home begin with family planning? Martin Luther King recognized the dangers of poor family planning and the growth of our population. What if we couple the solution, smaller families, to a public family planning ethic that treated the decision to bring every child into the world as an act of deliberate inclusivity, with everything that means for economic positioning, racial equality, and equity of opportunities in life.
Racism persists in part because we tolerate a cavemanish family planning model that treats the act of parents creating and raising children as somehow personal and private, as if it did not create the social world we all share. Doesn’t that treat future children, and the nonhuman world we colonize, as if they were our property, and ours alone to control? Rather than resegregate as Millner might be suggesting, shall we go to the source of our deepest social insufficiencies? Racists don’t fall from the sky – they are born and raised in the shadows and illusion of isolation. We “come together” as future generations enter. Do we want to come together in the way Dr. King envisioned? Better family planning is the key.
Best of all, Donald Trump is doing everything he can to prevent women from not having kids, by pushing back years of progress on access to family planning, and role modeling an unsustainably large and consumptive family.
Our species has, for most of its history, accepted the cultural push for larger families and higher birthrates because it benefited us, as a species. The caveman and patriarchal systems approach to family planning, “just have more,” had some merit. That all changed in roughly the Twentieth Century, when world leaders realized that population growth itself posed a grave threat to our species, and launched family planning interventions that cut worldwide fertility rates in half. Yes, that happened.
There was just one problem – these efforts were based on incomplete information. World leaders in the Twentieth Century did not account for climate change, and a dozen other unforeseen impacts on our social and natural environment, from the acidification of oceans to the massive extinction of other species. They did not account for advancements in the science of childhood development, which today show how family planning impacts the prospects a child has in life, for their entire life. They did not account for how, consistent with those impacts, family planning policies could exacerbate the massive gulf between rich and poor.
In short, the interventions did not go far enough, and certainly did not account for linkages between the issues above, like how better child development policies could have offset humans’ innate cognitive dissonance around slow-moving threats – like climate change.
What does all of this mean? Today, as an already unsustainable world population skyrockets towards eleven billion, the men who are pushing women to have more kids are a manifest threat to all of us, and the wellbeing of our children. Their caveman approach to family planning is not just wrong. It’s dangerous. Instead, we should embrace the clear trend towards lower fertility rates as a form of human evolution, the move towards a sustainable population, families that can invest more resources in each child, and the creation of smaller – and hence more democratic – communities where each person has more of a voice and role in creating the rules under which they live.
Take action: If you belong to civil society organization, one that protects the environment, children and their futures, democracy and human rights, equality for women, etc. please politely encourage them to consider taking a public stance on the need for better family planning, and encouraging a model that promotes smaller and sustainable families where every child is guaranteed a fair start in life.
We all know that celebrities influence our purchasing habits, but as role models they also influence other choices, like how we plan our families. They help create culture – the images in our heads about what a family should look like, and how many children ideal families have. Celebrities have the potential to not just sell products, but push women to create more consumers and demand for those products – and businesses know this. That has massive consequences for society and our environment, with small changes in average family size today causing enormous differences in total world population in the future.
And that’s why the controversy and backlash surrounding reality television stars Chip and Joanna Gaines decision to have a fifth child matters. The decision they are modeling will help determine what our future holds, and the science is crystal clear: Family planning has the greatest long–term impact on climate change, economic inequality, and other things that define the quality of our and children’s lives. Some groups are promoting the Gaines family as effective role models for accelerating population growth, and urging other women to follow their lead. Conservative media sources are publishing fake news claiming the U.S. population is falling, when in fact it will grow by almost 100 million in the next 50 or so years.
Proponents of large families are willing to make a trade-off many of us may not be willing to make.
Religious, racial, and other motivations aside, the mainstream reason for today’s push for larger families is economic. Despite a world population headed for almost 10 billion people by 2050, many economists are pushing to accelerate that growth as a way to fuel economic growth, higher gross domestic product, greater returns on investments, etc., and evade specific demographic impacts like an older populace reliant on fewer younger workers to support them. The economic impacts of reduced fertility are highly controversial – with lots of debate between economists about what smaller families will actually do to economies, and what economic growth that actually benefits the average person would look like and take to create.
But even assuming smaller families reduce economic growth, are we really willing to exacerbate climate change, accelerate the extinction of other species, and further destroy our degraded environment just to make more money? An entire population of sea turtles is being now being turned female because of the climate change that human population is driving. Do we really want to worsen the environment children will inherit? If we care about nature, should we be pushing back against those promoting larger families? If we think about our daily lives, the overcrowded cities, endless traffic, stories of environmental collapse, and growing social divides, does it make any sense to say we just aren’t adding people quickly enough?
A recent survey by Having Kids suggests that people are ready, and it might be time, to push back against celebrities modeling poor family planning.
By Bdm25 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Solution
The push for larger families, from taxes to celebrities, relies on an underlying and outdated family planning model, developed decades ago, that is all about what parents want. Under that model, parents should decide to have kids based on whatever makes the parents happy in the short-term, rather than planning their families around what kids need in the long-term. And as such, parents are left easy targets for politicians and businesses that profit from urging them to have more kids. The parent-first model does more than just destroy our and our kids’ environment – it is widening the gap between rich and poor, degrading our democracies, and bringing kids into abusive and neglectful homes.
Having Kids instead promotes a child-first Fair Start family planning model is that designed around what all kids need in the long-term. The model urges parents to wait to have their first child, urges them to work with the community to get the resources they and their child need for a fair start in life, and promotes smaller and more equitable families.
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[et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]On Universal Children’s Day, Having Kids called on President Trump and Congress to comply with their obligations under international law, and dump their two-pronged population growth policies that limit women’s access to things like contraception while increasing tax incentives to urge them to have more kids. As noted in our press release, the organization sent its open letter to Trump on behalf of Deanna Young, a concerned citizen whose rights Trump is violating.
Deanna Young, whose rights are at issue, had this to say: “The right to have children can’t be interpreted to hurt kids, or destroy our environment. This isn’t rocket science.”
Larger and thoughtlessly-planned families are the fastest way to exacerbate climate change and other environmental and social crises. Yet Trump and many in Congress are openly pushing for bigger families. Intentionally endangering our kids and future generations just to meet his shortsighted “more people equal more money” agenda is a violation international law.
Instead of a cutting off access to reproductive health services and a cash-for-babies scheme, Having Kids is calling for a child-first and truly human-rights basedFair Start family planning system. Recently, Republicans moved to modify tax-advantaged “529” educational savings accounts – used almost exclusively by the well-off – to allow fetuses to become beneficiaries. Instead, Having Kids is urging Trump and Congress to work with states to fully fund those accounts for all prospective parents and children through progressively-scaled contributions. These accounts would also require some cooperative contribution from parents (again, progressively scaled) before they have kids.
Tweet @RealDonaldTrump, and tell him that pro-natalist policies exacerbate climate change.
A recent article in TheNew York Times bemoans the fact that as a reaction to the economic downturn, Greek women are not having “enough” children. But isn’t financial insecurity a good reason to forgo having children? Doesn’t every child deserve to be born into a financially secure situation so they can have a fair start? The article raises those questions — and more.
Why is a nation’s current population size the baseline to judge what its population should be? Most developed countries are already well over their carrying capacity.Why are all of the personal stories in the article about women? Sure, sales may be down at fertility clinics. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just one symptom of the inevitable hangover of the Ponzi scheme of growth economics.
Fundamentally, isn’t having smaller families an easier and fairer solution?
Greece could solve its demographic problems by relaxing immigration restrictions and accommodating the elderly back into the economy. That might be preferable to arguing that all women must be mothers and encouraging larger families in periods of economic instability.
It is time to start thinking in terms of everyone’s well-being — including a fair start for all children — rather than mindlessly pursuing economic growth regardless of the consequences.
On January 21st, people and organizations from across the country will participate in the Women’s March on Washington to stand for women’s rights and reproductive rights and to protect our families and communities. Having Kids staff members and supporters will participate in both the core march in Washington, D.C., and in satellite marches in New York City and Trenton, New Jersey.
Having Kids is marching for the future of our families, our communities, our children, and our planet. We believe that we all need to be intentional about the future that we want to create for future generations, and we need to make sure they have the resources they need and a healthy environment to have a better life than we did. However, this needs to be true for every child. We cannot be satisfied with the fact that most children born into this world will not have a high quality of life or even have their basic needs met. We need to create a community that cares about one another and sincerely wants to make life better for all.
We also recognize that if we give people the tools to have smaller families—such as sex education, birth control, and access to reproductive health services—then they can ensure that more resources are available for each of their children to create this future. In fact, they might have more resources leftover to help other families that might be struggling.
Having Kids believes that we need to look at things more holistically, and that we need to make sure that we have the ability to provide a healthy planet, safe communities, and the things children need to have a high quality of life. Next Saturday, we will march for these values and to protect the programs that help us move toward that future. Will you march with us?
Mention child brides and most people will assume they exist only outside of the United States. But the reality is that thousands of children in the United States have recently taken marital vows. Most are girls married to adult men thanks to “parental consent” and other legal loopholes in minimum marriage age laws. These loopholes stem from a view of the family as isolated from the rest of society and a culture of parenting that lets parents control and limit their children’s future, including marrying them off to be wives – and mothers – before they are even adults.
