November is National Adoption Awareness month, and an opportunity to change the world. How? Public figures play a large role in many peoples’ family planning decisions – including timing, size, and whether we adopt or have biological children. We follow their lead.
What celebrities do, in terms of family planning decisions, will help define our and our kids’ future.This month Having Kids will be urging celebrities to model responsible family planning, and adopt, over choosing a large family. While good hearted everyday people are going out of their way to save children in need, many celebs are modeling totally irresponsible behavior. Shouldn’t we be helping kids in need, and building an ecologically sustainable world?
TAKE ACTION: Politely urge Joanna Gaines to choose adoption @joannagaines
Despite the continued unsustainable growth, which is the underlying driver of climate change, poverty, and social instability, many media outlets are reporting that women are not having enough kids. This example, from Fortune magazine, is telling. The headline literally misstates a government report’s findings on the subject. Things can be more subtle – like a list of solutions to climate change that omit the most effective one – sustainable families.
What gives? Modern systems of economic growth were built on population growth – which meant a constant supply of cheap labor, voracious consumers, and compliant taxpayers. Be clear what this means. People pushing arbitrary population growth are pushing for the exacerbation of climate change and other environmental crises, children being born into poverty and unimaginable conditions, and revolution ready-sized gap between rich and poor – because those kids are vital fuel for their growth-backed investments, job security, low tax rates, etc. in an unsustainable pyramid Ponzi scheme. See these people for who they are.
Our Unsustainable Reality
That system of constant growth was never sustainable. That is why we are now faced with the incomparable threat of climate change, crowded cities with unaffordable housing, extreme poverty and inequality. But the people that designed that system left it for future generations to find a better way. Can we?
The Green New Deal
The Green New Deal presents an opportunity. It represents an attempt to address the intersecting issues of environmental crisis and inequality with an ambitious, centralized plan for massive public infrastructure investments and new jobs, all themed around sustainability. Here’s the problem. It does not address family planning.
What’s Missing
How can we address things like climate change and inequality without addressing their underlying driver, and most effective solutions? The Green New Deal also needs to reform our family planning system, and change the focus to ensure sustainable families that work together – yes, transfer significant resources – in order to give every child a fair start in life. The Green New Deal needs to include a transition from parent-focused to child-focused family planning, using something like the Fair Start model. That will mean more effective outcomes, avoiding the inefficiency of centralization and big government, and address a variety of other problems we face today.
We can find a better way, but not without change at the most fundamental level.
Is there a way to make the deal nonpartisan?
Can we use it to eliminate the big businesses that liberals oppose, and big government that conservatives oppose, at the same time? A healthy, safe and natural environment, and an economic system free of big government and big business, one that is comprised of relatively equal players, starts at the same place: With a family planning system that creates a population of highly prepared people, people who got a fair start, and a shot at equal opportunities, in life. Specifically, that means targeting big businesses with an antitrust reform to distribute their market share to future generations, and big government with tax reform to reduce its size, with both reforms designed to fund a cooperative family planning system that maximizes investments in future children, through a variety of mechanisms like delay and relocation incentives, early childhood development programming, and heavy investments in international family planning systems.
Unless the Green New Deal integrates and addresses the source of the problem, it is neither Green nor New. Including family planning reform would integrate the Deal with the overarching and universal human rights regime from which it should derive, a regime that itself derives from the fundamental human right – the right to a fair start in life.
TAKE ACTION: Tweet Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement, urging them to include sustainable family planning in the Green New Deal. Copy/paste below into a Tweet.
.@aoc @sunrisemvmt the #GreenNewDeal won’t succeed without a plan to reform #familyplanning to encourage more equitable, sustainable families. It’s the most effective way to reduce inequality AND climate impact. https://fairstartmovement.org/whats-missing-green-new-deal/
Could taking resources from the wealthy and using those resources to fund delayed parenthood, and a fair start in life for every child, solve many of our ecological and social crises? An article due to be published this winter in the Loyola Chicago Law Reviewargues that it is.
The impact of better family planning on sustainable, and even regenerative, development is well-known. But poor modeling in the mid-20th century created barriers between ensuring resources that all children need and coordinating the time, place, and manner in which parents would bring those children into the world. New modeling is removing those barriers, and one emerging policy involves subsidizing delayed parenthood with the aim of improving childhood equity.
Simply put: The policy shifts power from wealthy (usually white male) elites to women and children through family planning-linked forms of guaranteed minimum incomes.
These transfers go beyond incentives. They involve the entitlements that are part of every child’s right to a fair start in life. And the evidence is clear: The subsidies mean increased earnings, education, well-being for women and children, and environmentally sustainable prosperity for all.
This June, the House of Representatives voted in favor of granting statehood to Washington D.C. “The Washington, D.C. Admission Act” (H.R. 51) would admit most of the current district as the 51st state. For the first time, the District’s 702,455 residents would be represented in Congress.
Republicans, however, have been quick to paint the individuals who live in the District as unworthy of representation. Senator Tom Cotton stated, “Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing…Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state. A new state of Washington would not be.” To make matters worse, Senator Steve Dane’s of Montana implied that D.C.’s residents were not “real people” like those found outside of the beltway.
Such remarks stand in sharp contrast to the idea that every person – regardless of their career opportunities or zip code – deserves the opportunity to meaningfully participate in democracy. In fact, these comments show a disrespect for basic human rights. The United Nations recognizes that each person is born free and equal and the right to take part in government and public affairs. Yet Senators Cotton and Dane remain steadfast in their views that the District’s population should not enjoy this right.
Real Statehood
While granting D.C. statehood is certainly an important step toward bridging the gap between rights and reality, it is not a sufficient one. A driving cause of this schism remains largely overlooked: our current family planning paradigm prevents us from constituting our societies in a way that allows us to fulfill the rights that we already recognize. By exclusively focusing on the rights and obligations of the human beings that exist today, we miss a critical preceding step: that we constitute ourselves in a way that allows all future human beings to meaningfully participate in making the laws that govern them.
The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for just about every 747,000 Americans. This “representation ratio” is the highest it has ever been in our nation’s history and is significantly higher than in other industrialized countries. Research suggests that as the representation ratio climbs, our democracy becomes less effective. With fewer representatives per capita, individual citizens have to fight harder to be heard by their elected officials. Additionally, the makeup of the legislature is less likely to reflect the demographics of the people they represent – both in terms of race and income level. When faced with representatives who are largely unrepresentative, many communities feel shut out of the policy making process and avoid engaging entirely.
Despite these problems, our number of representatives has remained the same since the 1930s, even though the U.S. population has tripled since that time. While the D.C. statehood bill may grant much needed representation for residents of one city, it does not address the fact that almost all Americans are already severely underrepresented and will have painfully little say in shaping the laws that govern their lives for the foreseeable future.
Getting Intergenerational
Adding more representatives to the House may seem like the obvious solution. This strategy, however, is likely to be ineffective in the long term. According to Drew DeSilver, a Senior Writer and the Pew Research Center, we would already need to add nearly 700 members to our current 435 member House in order to achieve the representation ratio we had in the 1930s. This number will only grow as we add a projected 79 million individuals by 2060. As the number of representatives rise, the House runs the risk of becoming unsustainable and unmanageable, mimicking China’s National People’s Congress, which at 2,980 members, is harshly criticized for its inefficiency and largely symbolic existence.
Today’s policymakers can help solve this problem by considering the needs of all future children when planning their own families. By giving families access to the resources needed to plan for more sustainable families, policymakers can help parents across the country slow the rate of population growth. This would afford future generations the time and space to organize themselves in ways that are truly democratic, giving each person more time at the podium during townhalls and allowing representatives to truly represent their communities.
The District’s residents undoubtedly deserve representation. And so do all future children. We should all use this unique moment in history to ensure that our children’s right to participate in democracy becomes their reality.
Let’s Strengthen Biden’s Child Care Policy to Unite America
Helping families generally finds bipartisan support. And President Joe Biden has put forth a massive child care and tax proposal to keep child care centers open, help low-income families with child care, and offer tax relief on the cost of having kids. These are great moves.
But like far too many efforts, this proposal is morereactivethan proactive.
Without sustainable and equitable early childhood investments, the rest of us pay to prop up a losing proposition for American families. Continuing with business as usual pushes our current problems, from inequality to the climate crisis, onto future generations. How could Biden’s proposal be better? It could:
1) Cut all benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding.
2) Use those savings as cash incentives to power up family planning and early childhood investment systems in the United States to
c) promote environmentally just families for all regardless of income, ensuring resource availability for all, including future generations. Those changes – made as part of recognizing our sacred constitutional right to nature – would create massive long-run savings and catalyze sustainable development.We could start to give all kids a Fair Start in life.
Opponents to these changes will want to use Joe’s plan to incentivize unsustainable population growth, and use babies to grow the economy. Names like Ivanka Trump, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and growth-minded people at Vox like Matthew Yglesias want to use child care, and especially child tax credits, as incentives for women to have kids to reverse falling birth rates. That’s short-sighted, and ignores every child’s right to a socially and ecologically #fairstart in life.
In this way we can proceed from fundamental values, and achieve the personal autonomy the political right values, by applying the equity the political left values – but specifically prioritizing children. We can take power away from big business and big government, the entities the left and right respectively oppose, and invest it in future generations. Learn more here.
In response to a recent article on the struggle for creating meaningful animal rights through family reforms, one anonymous mother is choosing to speak out
The issue of population ethics is very fraught, and for good reason. Things can go badly when government interferes with the bond between parents and children, especially when the government is placed in the role of controlling whether people have children or keep their children–even worse when it’s some government entity that’s deciding what makes “good” or “deserving” parenting. No parent or child – or even hypothetical child – wants the parent-child bond threatened in any way, even as much as we all agree that it’s a necessary pseudo-parental role the state must take on when a child must be protected from abuse or neglect.
One thing that is uncontroversial to say is that regardless of whether we have or plan to have children, all of us want a world where all life is able to thrive, and an environment that will sustain that. Life, especially new life and vulnerable life, represents hope. We are all rooting for new and future life to succeed.
The problem is that we are facing a reality where the value of life and the hope for any given new life is rapidly diminishing. And for some new life, there is no hope at all – for example, male chicks born into the egg industry struggle to emerge from their eggs and live barely long enough for their feathers to dry before they are ground up alive. For most of us, the picture is not that dark, but we operate in a society where hope is an increasingly rare commodity and distributed in a dramatically unequal way. We are all only different from those chicks as a matter of degree, not kind.
The root cause of this is devaluation of life. We have not done enough to protect life or enable an environment to support it. Fair Start’s core thesis seems to be that this is because we are unable to see or rationally reckon with the creation of life as the starting point in our thinking about justice and fairness, and because of this, our – in fact all life’s – existential value and hope for survival is threatened. To me the essence is this: there is a point at which population – especially high-resource-consuming human population – becomes so large that it lessens the value of life. It lessens the value of the individual as well as the family, and increases conflicts over the right to life between and within species.
I can’t say where that line is or whether we have yet crossed it, but I think it would go against the laws of basic ecology and physics to say that line does not exist. What that means is that we have to find a way to responsibly bring this issue into the conversation, preserving the value of life and the protective bond between parents and children. This includes our role as parents in the metaphorical sense that all of us are guardians of society and protectors of future life, and our metaphorical role as children in the sense that we are all vulnerable and trading in the increasingly scarce resource of hope.
There are a number of routes to addressing this, some of which would be counterproductive or come with an untenable cost to the very values this relies upon – autonomy, valuation of life, the parent-child bond and protection, and hope. But this is exactly why we have to reckon with the issue, responsibly and thoughtfully, since leaving it out of the important conversations of how to repair and build the world we need to support life comes with an even bigger cost. It’s not just badly conceived and destructive remedies to this issue that we risk when we marginalize this topic, but a threat to the ability for any species to survive, including our own.
Mwesigye Robert and the youth he works with at Rejoice Africa Foundation, an organization fully certified by the Government of Uganda, are on a mission. They understand that change happens bottom up, by maximizing ecosocial investment in each child. And unlike many organizations that ignore the role of family planning reforms, they support the idea that family planning should be just and sustainable, with redistribution of wealth to ensure every child an ecosocial fair start in life.
Mwesigye Robert had this to say about some of their work:
I and my organization managed to do a sanitation and hygiene project plot in our local communities in Uganda . We aimed to end plastic pollution, and supplement scarce drinking water supplies, and provide reproductive hygiene for girls in schools . We constructed one rain water reservoir tank using plastic bottles collected by school children from the communities. Improving girls’ reproductive hygiene can help girls to grow well without reproductive health diseases, while ending plastic pollution ensures a healthy environment for girls while also helping to heal land degradation and reducing breeding areas for malaria-bearing mosquitos. These can be important in the fight for children to get an ecosocial fair start in life.
Here are a few photos of the project:
At Fair Start we envision a world of truly democratic communities surrounded by nature. They are constituted of free and equal people, each person has a meaningful role in making the rules under which they live, and each was empowered by the conditions in which they were born and raised.
That is what true freedom and legitimate governance – for all – looks like. That vision reflects our most fundamental and objective values: Wellbeing, Equity, Nature, Democracy, and Improving Continuity. That vision can only be achieved by changing the way we plan families, and by constituting future generations around a Fair Start first principle, or grundnorm, of relative self-determination. We may liberate those in this vision, the free entities of the future, from the tyranny of prior generations by all means effective.
Take action:
Urge Natalia Kanem, head of the UNFPA, @Atayeshe as well as the Partners in Population and Development (PPD) to embrace Fair Start as the first and overriding human right, and the basis for all family planning policy. Contact PPD at: CONTACT SECRETARIAT | PPD (partners-popdev.org)
Fair Start supports Rejoice’s efforts, part of which will include pilot Fair Start programming:
To give:
Fundraising for Reforesting and Upping children’s voices in Uganda
Funds needed: $25000USD
Rejoice Africa is a youth led organization , community based organization operating in the republic of Uganda . It was founded in 2017 by 25 compassionate Youths with the spirit to save the next generations .
What we do ;
Climate adaptation and mitigation through Reforestation , Afforestation , Agroforestry , ecosystem and climate awareness in schools .
Poverty alleviation through supporting bee keeping and Rabbit keeping.
Sanitation and hygiene through reproductive health , domestic hygiene and community hygiene.
Why Reforesting and Upping children’s voices in
South western Uganda is affected by harsh climate changes ( long term droughts in the year ) caused by human environmental destructive activities (cutting down trees for firewood , clearing land for Agriculture , charcoal burning ) which has affected food security and increased malnutrition cases in the region . People in south western Uganda are not well versed with skills of climate mitigation and adaptation .
Activities.
1; planting 1000000 tree seedlings of eucalyptus , pines , mangoes and avocados on the bare lands of the registered smallholders farmers .
2; climate education in schools to collect voiceses of school children and communities about climate changes and ways of restoration of climate changes . This will be achieved through climate songs, poems , storytelling and skits .
Need for donations of $25000USD
We want to purchase 1000000 seedlings .
We want to purchase garden tools (hoes, watering cans , scissors )
Fact check your charities to see if growth is undoing their progress. Nonprofits that claim to help children, animals, the environment, as well as human rights and democracy, are obligated to account for the impact of poor family planning and unsustainable population growth on their missions and strategic progress.
Many organizations are moving in the right direction of family reform. Why? Because the impact of family planning determines all progress. If charitable outcomes depend on people, they depend on family planning policies.
But not all charities are being truthful. Some ignore growth impacts because their funders rely on population-based economic systems, though that growth fundamentally created the climate crisis and is setting back success in moving towards sustainable development goals. Or funders often want to avoid paying to change family systems to give all kids a fair start in life, and instead choose to give their own children a massive head start in life. By evading the key or fundamental issue of growth, and forestalling policy reforms, many nonprofits helped exacerbate the climate crisis.
Many charities that make claims regarding helping children, animals, the environment, as well as furthering human rights and democracy, are seeing their progress undone by growth. More children are being born into horrible conditions than are being saved from them. More animals are dying from increased demand than are being liberated. And both our environment and our democracies are degrading because of that same growth.
Downstream measures do not offset this.
Work upstream
Fair Start family reforms are the most just and effective way to protect children, animals and the environment. Join our Tell the Truth campaign urging corporations and charities to disclose their family policies, past and present, and the impact of those policies on things like inequity and the climate crisis.
This is the scam that created the crises: That the act of having children, the base “we” from which all our language proceeds, should be determined by top-down parental autonomy rather than bottom up, and future child-centric, justice. No other form of justice, or freedom, precedes this. That kind of justice – and the emancipatory freedom that comes with it – is existential, requiring minimum levels of welfare approaching birth equality (eliminating the black/white birth wealth gap), an effective voice in democracies where each voice matters, understanding efficiency as starting with maximizing each person’s capacity to flourish, and the restoration of the nonhuman world or nature.
It’s a lie that we are politically obligated to follow laws and to play fair – without having been created fairly. We can’t be created in that way until we de-appropriate the most vulnerable and numerous groups of entities: future generations and the nonhuman world. And that depends on how we plan families and have kids.
Act effectively
It’s time to apologize to younger generations and act effectively. How do we actually ensure an ecosocial fair start in life for every child? The science is clear: Equitable family entitlements that encourage delayed parenthood work. But instead of going forward into future generations – into women and children – wealth has historically gone into the hands of a few at the top, though there was easily enough wealth available to prevent the crises we are experiencing today.
If power derives from the people how we are created matters most of all. Let’s look at Putin and population policy.
Обратитесь к дочери Путина, Катерине Тихоновой (Контакты — «Иннопрактика» (innopraktika.ru)) с просьбой осудить вторжение и поддержать реформы «Справедливого Старта», которые имеют фундаментальное значение для демократии.
What’s unfolding in Ukraine is fundamentally the fault of the United Nations, and a system that – through unsustainable and inequitable family policies – allows top-down power over bottom-up democracy. And while using economic sanctions to respond to military action is a step in the right direction of ending violence, it’s time to go to the next level and empower people over despots from the ground up. The ultimate mistake lies in allowing nations to use future generations to grow their power, rather than empowering future generations as democratic citizens with a voice.
Imagine if the wealth being spent by Russia on the war in Ukraine were used to improve birth conditions for all children. The impact would be incomparable.
Fair Start is urging Putin’s daughtersKaterina Tikhonova and Maria Vorontsova (who can be engaged publicly) wherever they appear to denounce the invasion, use their influence to support democracy in Ukraine, and to support Fair Start reforms that put democracy at the base of who we should be. They had more than a fair start and should want a better beginning for future children in Russia.
Take action:
1. For now we are personally urging our Russian-speaking supporters to politely ask Putin’s daughterKaterina Tikhonova (reachable at Контакты – “Иннопрактика” (innopraktika.ru)) to denounce the invasion, and support the Fair Start reforms that are fundamental to democracy.
2. We suggest asking International Criminal Court leadership,@IntlCrimCourt and @KarimKhanQC to open an investigation into the commission of war crimes in Ukraine.
2. Urge your representatives in Congress to support removing Russia from SWIFT, and to support imposing a NATO no-fly zone. Also, please sign this petition to support the SWIFT action.
![Despots Use Population to Undermine Democracy. Target Their Base. [w/ Russian Translation]](https://fairstartmovement.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Vladimir_Putin_-_2012.jpg)
