Today, in anticipation of World Population Day on July 11th, the national child-protection organization Having Kids called upon the United Nations Secretary General to abandon the UN’s outdated family planning modeling in favor of a sustainable “smaller family” model. Having Kids will be peacefully leafleting in front of the UN headquarters tomorrow, urging Sec. Gen. António Guterres to issue a statement on family planning supporting the need for smaller families worldwide. The facts are crystal clear:
- Multiple studies have shown that choosing smaller families easily has the most impact on environmental crises like climate change. From Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown, to previous studies on climate change, population size has been shown to be the primary driver of the climate crisis That’s also the case for the downstream impacts of climate change like ocean acidification, and for other forms of ecocide, like the loss of biodiversity / mass extinction of other species. Thus, sustainable family planning is the most significant act that we can take to reduce our impact.
- 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. A simple statement from the Secretary General could have a huge impact on the direction we go.
- Our current family planning systems provide no minimum standard of wellbeing for future children, allowing children to be born into failing state systems because their parents cannot care for them. That exacerbates inequity, and ensures rich kids stay rich and poor kids stay poor. The most effective way to improve child welfare and equity, at the same time, is through a cooperative family planning model pegged to the standard of a fair start in life for every child.
Having Kids Executive Director Anne Green said this: “We offer the child-first Fair Start family planning model as a sustainable alternative to the UN’s current free-for-all and isolationist model. The Fair Start model is cooperative rather than isolationist, is based upon binding sources of international law, and provides a clear human rights-based solution to the problems discussed above and a path forward.”
Having Kids is a 501(c)3 nonprofit nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing parent-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model.
