So why should women have more kids, according to Jeff, who criticized Meghan and Harry for declaring they would stop at two kids for environmental reasons? Jeff, who himself only has two kids, had this helpful bit of information:
The Talmud records that when the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt grew unbearable, their leaders advised couples to stop having babies — why raise more children to face a life of slavery? Eventually one of those leaders was persuaded he was wrong, and that childrearing should go on even in the teeth of murderous oppression. So he and his wife had another baby. That baby, named Moses, became the liberator who led his people to freedom.
Jeff goes on to claim that the solution to population-driven climate change is to create more people in the hopes that one of the children will have a solution to the problem. He then credits population growth for a lot of modern advancements. In reality, progress comes from investing in people, not just creating as many as possible and hoping for the best.
Not All Women Will Be Mothers
Regardless – the point is this: Jeff is ensuring a culture where women are pushed to be mothers. He’s doing it for religious reasons, while hiding behind nonsense arguments, and at a time where doing so is a manifest threat to the welfare and freedom of future generations. That goes beyond free speech to something worse than climate change denial – towards encouraging the exacerbation of a manifest threat to our species.
Parents who care about their kids should stand up to mouthpieces like Jeff. What does he tell his kids, Caleb and Micah, about climate change? Does he tell them that the destruction of our atmosphere is God’s will? Does he tell them that child abuse, vast inequality, and levels of education that bring down democracies come from above? Jeff should answer these questions. Why? Because he’s forcing his view on your kids future too. What we do now will impact the wellbeing of future generations in ways not seen before.
Ask Jeff to answer these basic questions by tweeting him at @Jeff_Jacoby or message him on FB at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeff-Jacoby/123656506578, and stand up to the men who push women to have kids, and thereby endanger our future.
Everyone at Having Kids was happy to see Wajahat Ali’s TED Talk “The case for having kids.” The presentation breaks the taboo that surrounds talking about the need for better family planning policies and closes with a plea to invest in current and future generations. It is clear to us that Mr. Ali loves children and wants the best for them. We do, too, so we reached out to urge him to build upon his important work and consider the details of what it means to truly invest in children.
Read our letter to Mr. Ali about investing in future generations.
Urging people to simply “have babies” plays into the pyramid Ponzi scheme mentality of using future generations as tools for economic growth. Mr. Ali’s talk, however well intentioned, could do more harm than good. Only truly human rights-based family planning policies will set our children free from a system based on greed. Poor family planning is the norm, and it causes real harm every day. Children are born into starvation and horrific abuse, the gap between rich and poor is widening, and climate change is only beginning to wreak havok.
Our Fair Start family planning model is designed to invest in future generations. We can shift the world’s thinking from isolationist family planning focused on what parents want, toward an approach that helps everyone. We need a more comprehensive and cooperative focus that considers what children and the community need. The Fair Start model creates a system that maximizes child welfare, equity, and sustainability.
We are asking Mr. Ali to use his status as an influential public figure to keep breaking taboos around discussing family planning. We are also urging him to be clear that helping future generations doesn’t mean just “having babies.” It means planning a Fair Start.
Sincerely,
Erika and Willow, and Carter
The Phelps-Mathews Family
Join Erika and Willow by tweeting @WajahatAli and politely asking him to consider the Fair Start model.
Do you work with a social justice organization, like an environmental, child welfare, animal protection, or human rights group? If so, one of the best ways to further your organization’s mission in by promoting Fair Start family planning.
For example – many animal protection advocates focus on changing diets as a way to protect animals from the horrors of factory farming and wildlife from the horrors of climate change that is partially driven by factory farming. The impact of this approach has been completely overridden by recent population growth, which is set to continue.
Isn’t it time to work upstream?
Fair Start family planning is not just effective. It is comprehensively effective, or intersectional. It aligns environmentalism, animal protection, and human rights in one unifying campaign to reform the way we plan families. This isn’t just a matter of using words like intersectional to appear thoughtful. The creation of future generations is something that connects us all.
Social justice organizations could magnify their impact exponentially by including family planning reform in their programming. For some organizations, there is the option of including Fair Start advocacy in their lawful civil disobedience programs. How could they do this specifically?
It’s time to create fundamental change, and be effective and intersectional at the same time. Social justice work starts with people, and in the long run, people start with family planning. It’s time for to ensure a fair start for all kids. Learn more at HavingKids.org.
TAKE ACTION: Join us in urging the U.N. Secretary-General to issue a statement recommending sustainable family planning for World Population Day. RSVP to our event, help us share the event, and send him a message here.
Are Stossel and Fox News ok with the 41% of U.S. kids living in or near poverty and the life long harm caused by disadvantages early in life?
HOW INEQUALITY HURTS KIDS
There’s no question – inequality is harmful to kids. Studies have documented examples of rising inequality decreasing child welfare:
Here are the facts on childhood inequality:
Inequality affects kids for life. Unequal opportunities translate into unequal lifelong outcomes by the time children reach the age of five. 3
Children who grow up poor are more likely to be poor as adults. Furthermore, the likelihood increases with each year of poverty that is experienced. – PBS Frontline
The impacts of inequality are more damaging the longer it is experienced. The longer a child is poor, the greater the risk of poverty in adulthood, and of experiencing lifelong health problems and involvement in the criminal justice system. 4
The longer you grow up in poverty, the harder it is to graduate. PBS Frontline
The growing divide between low-income children and their peers reduces opportunities for low-income children throughout their lives. 6
The child poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics is more than double the rate for whites and Asians. Higher unemployment rates and lower earnings contribute to the gap. – National Geographic
We all believe in fairness, whether liberal or conservative. But some fail to recognize that the playing field is not level. The reality is that socioeconomic status is inherited.
The rich are getting richer, and it gets passed onto their kids.
Kids born poor stay poor, and social mobility is declining.
Although overall poverty is declining, poverty is increasing among infants, especially for black and Hispanic children. Social mobility is declining and the condition of those in severe poverty is worsening. That is why a more equitable system to ensure a fair start is as important as ever.
Source: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
“The proportion of U.S. children who go on to earn more than their parents has dropped sharply since 1940, when the rate topped 90 percent.” – Equality of Opportunity Project
The bottom line? Inequality harms kids and it’s getting worse.
As 2020 candidates propose solutions to inequality, will the response from the right be to deny that inequality is a problem? Inequality must be addressed to give kids a fair start. Fair Start family planning offers a real social contract that brings reasonable people on left and right together.
This can be accomplished with a cooperative family planning framework. Fair Start family planning brings us together to invest in all kids, to improve equity and create a better society.
TAKE ACTION We can do something about inequality. Help get a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) for kids in Washington D.C., where inequality is higher than any other state in the U.S. GMI that is tied to family planning is even more effective. Ask D.C. Mayor Bowser, @MayorBowser to pursue GMI tied to family planning to give kids a fair start.
Most of the world’s legal systems, and the cultures they shape, treat family planning like this: It is each individual’s personal or private right to decide how many children they want to have, the conditions in which those children will be born, and the opportunities in life those children will have. It’s a model focused exclusively on what would-be parents want in the here and now. That approach to planning our families derives from acognitive dissonance called temporal myopia that leads us to ignore the long-term consequences of our actions. There is also nothing inclusive about that system. Nothing about it deliberately includes future children in their community, in any meaningful way that would ensure their voice is heard. It is less than ideal, for lots of reasons.
It isolates parents from their communities, creating a wall between the two.
It prevents both communities and parents from working together to ensure that when children are born they get what every child needs. That includes even basic things like basic nutrition, health care, and a loving home. These basic needs are expressly or implicitlyguaranteed by the Children’s Rights Convention. But because of the way we plan families, where the community is alleviated of its obligations in the planning process – many children never get them. Downstream solutions, like state protective interventions, are an insufficient band-aid.The Turpin family – and the long-term torture of the thirteen children – provides a jarring example. They abused over a dozen kids under the nose of their community, for years. That is isolation parenting. The Turpins not alone. Roughly 700,000 children are abused in the U.S. annually.
The isolating way we plan our families also ensures (and was designed to ensure) massive inequality.Poor kids become poor adults, and rich kids become rich adults, with the latter inheriting both obvious and subtle benefits they never earned. Racial and ethnic disparities that have persisted are a consequence of that. Elites, in turn, create policies that ensure larger families and population growth, bringing more and more children into the world to fuel a system of workers, consumers, and taxpayers that benefit a small percentage of people at the top in what many have recognized as aPonzi scheme pyramid. The United States was founded on opposition to birth-based hierarchies, like the British monarchy. How is it then thatwe are controlled by someone like Donald Trump, who was born in a such dominant positioning to others? Isn’t that odd? It’s not if you begin to examine and question the way we plan families, and how it perpetuates inequality and injustice.
The isolation model of family planning did something else, something at the most fundamental levels of society. It ensured that our societies, and the legal constitutions upon which they are based, would be positioned to treat both future children and non-humans – the most vulnerable entities in the world – as property.In the almost universally-accepted isolation model, would-be parents would have total control over future children (think the Turpins again here), and over the nonhuman world, which is treated as a human resource to be colonized and used. The nexus, between the human and nonhuman world, is property to be taken and controlled. If we don’t reform family planning systems, we never address that fundamental problem. In contrast, more ethical systems, replace the contradiction of procreative autonomy with more accurate values. With a better family planning model we can liberate both future children, as well as animals and their habitat, at the same time, and stop the former from being used to colonize the latter.
It’s time to change the isolating parent-focused model to one that includes the needs of future children and the community, and integrates the two together.
What’s that? It’s simple: Smaller families sharing resources to give every child a fair start in life. This child-centered model fixes several mistakes in the parent-focused model, and centers family planning around inclusivity and equity. It is nonpartisan at the most fundamental level, derived from fundamental and widely shared values, and it is designed to capitalize on falling fertility rates, steering them into better qualitative outcomes. Fair start family planning is fairness and inclusivity, on caffeine.
There is resistance, of course. Those at the top of the pyramid, and the politicians that represent them, are leaning on women to have more and more kids in order to create consumer demand, a class of cheap future labor, and a larger tax base. That is exactly whyTrump and his family were behind barely-noticed reforms to theChild Tax Credit in 2018 that were expressly designed tourge women to have more kids. Let’s be clear what this means. Congress will pay you for each kid you have, regardless of whether you neglect and abuse those kids, or simply have them in to totally failing state systems out of which charities are struggling to pull kids every day. Why? Kids equal economic growth, and that equals money for elites. People who oppose family planning reform are godsends for companieslike Unilever that will profit from the growth to come.
What is one way elites, who benefit from the constant flow of consumers, cheap future labor, and compliant taxpayers produced by poor family planning, keep the system in place? They fear-monger by intentionally conflating better family planning with many of the horrible reproductive rights violations of the past, like eugenics. They elide thecomplex intersectionality at the heart of family planning. But do you really think Fox News cares about equity? They and manyother reactionary entitiescreate endless propaganda to keep discussions of family planning taboo, and this lever for real social change hidden.
Doing effective social justice work means considering where people come from, the conditions in which they are born and raised, and whether the process that brought them into the world and provided for them is just. That is step one. If you don’t work on reforming family planning systems you are missing what could be the most influential factor in your work, others will be busy controlling that process, and what they do will have nothing to do with justice.
What can you do to respond and stop mass extinction?
First: Understand that you and your children have a fundamental human right to nature. Human freedom begins with the absence of human power, or nature. That right to nature overrides the right others may mistakenly feel they have to harm nature. Take action to defend your rights, and protect you and the ones you love.
This is true whether in the case of measles, the yearly flu epidemic, or others cases like the Zika virus and Ebola. As we become a more crowded planet – with 11 billion of us projected by the end of the century, the risk of disease outbreaks intensifies. “Increased population densities and unhealthy living conditions in urban slums can ease the transmission of infections,” as Population Action International stated.
Add to that, the connectedness of our world which allows for a near-instant global spread of infectious diseases. As author and professor, Lewis Dartnell from the University of Westminster warned, “…the modern world of densely-packed cities and intercontinental airplanes provide the perfect conditions for new diseases to spread to huge numbers of people before any sort of effective quarantine could be implemented. Even if perhaps only 20% of the global population became sick at the same time, enough vital services and infrastructure could grind to a halt that our whole technological, deeply-interlinked, civilisation could collapse.”
Here’s a challenge: Scan the dozens of news stories each day about the new measles epidemic and look for any reporters who connect the issue to crowding or need for family planning. It’s as if there is no connection between the growth of population and spread of disease.
Ignoring the role of crowding in the things that happen around you is threat to you, your kids, and your future. Family planning defines the world around us. We can do better. Start at the source. Learn more here.
In the new release, The Ethics of Vaccination, Alberto Giubilini argues, “Vaccination raises ethical issues about the responsibilities of individuals, communities, and states in preventing serious and potentially life-threatening infectious diseases.”
Vaccination is about the collective responsibility to protect the herd through the choices we make ourselves. Can the same be said in regards to family planning?
The Wall Street Journal’s Mark Oppenheimer said last fall, “…People should do what they want to do…And those of us who want five children should have them.” Father Rennier, who urges parents to have as many as God will allow, is another example of short-sighted thinking that ignores the needs of kids and the community.
Like the anti-vax movement, it is isolationist thinking. The days of seeing family as the building of our own little kingdoms is over. Such a view ignores the attention and resources that every child deserves. Seeing kids as personal property is also a disaster for the world. Parents who choose to have large families do so without consideration for their impact on animals, the environment, or rising inequality.
As with vaccinating, don’t we all have a responsibility do our part for the good of the whole? In this case, to plan our families in a way that is conscientious of the needs of both our kids and the world around us?
Thoughtful family planning means delaying parenthood and having no more than two kids. Communities who do so make for increased stability, less crowding, a smaller impact on the planet, greater investment in each child, and more shared resources for everyone to get a fair start in life. Cooperating means better outcomes for all.
When we think of it in terms of the best interest of kids, it’s a no brainer.
Having Kids is calling on United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to issue a new U.N. family planning statement, recommending a focus on children’s well-being and their need for a sustainable future.
Simply stated, the current family planning model used by the United Nations is the fundamental source of the problem, ensuring unsustainable population growth in a way that degrades equality, democracy, and our environment. This archaic model was developed before we learned what we know today about climate change, the disproportionate impact of early childhood development on human wellbeing, the way birth conditions and early childhood can exacerbate inequality, etc.
“This is an opportunity for the United Nations to do what it was founded to do, and protect the world from dire threats through the promotion of human rights,” said Anne Green, the Executive Director of Having Kids. “There is no time left to dawdle with less effective downstream solutions. Our leaders will be held accountable for failing in this crisis – they must act now.”
