Get the Truth, and Act

Which corporations and nonprofits are benefitting from unsustainable and inequitable family planning – the biggest driver of the climate and inequality crises – while pretending to further environmental and social justice? Federal Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure requirements provide an opportunity to find out and act. Support Fair Start’s Tell the Truth campaign for an executive order to require disclosure of policies and advocacy around the biggest factor of all – how we have kids – so that we can hold bad actors accountable. 

Reduce Inequality

WHY DID THE UNITED NATIONS INTERPRET THE RIGHT TO HAVE CHILDREN TO ENSURE UNSUTAINABLE GROWTH, PUTTING THE INTERESTS OF PAST GENERATIONS OVER FUTURE ONES? TAKE ACTION. 

TRULY UNITE AMERICA BY MODERNIZING BIDEN’S CHILD CARE AND TAX PROPOSAL. We should not be paying for wealthy peoples’ kids, but rather incentivizing Fair Start investing in all kids. This may be the key to ending racial and other inequities. 

EDUCATION POLICY STARTS WITH FAIR START FAMILY PLANNING REFORM. ANYTHING ELSE IS TOO LATE. TAKE ACTION. 

GUARANTEED MINIMUM INCOME:  Ask D.C. Mayor bowser to support Fair Start GMI for kids and learn more about why Fair Start family planning in D.C. matters. Also learn about how Fair Start redistribution of resources can actually change the way we plan families. 

THE BEST RESPONSE TO COVID-19 IS TO CREATE MORE RESILIENT DEMOCRACIES, NOT BLOATED AND VULNERABLE ECONOMIES: Urge leadership to reduce overcrowding. 

GREEN NEW DEAL: Urge framers to include family planning

EMPLOYMENT BENEFITS: We encourage corporations, for-profit and non-profit, to adopt more equitable discretionary benefits that would start to level the playing field for the children of employees, using the base principle that discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages. We should do this to avoid passing massive privilege – including race-based privilege – through a process that fundamentally impacts the majority: future persons and nonhumans. 

OPIOID CRISIS: Tell Congress to prevent opioid births with better family planning

CELEBS: Ask them to role model fostering and adoption over large families. 

Funding a Fair Start: Fair Start Movement is organizing a fertility delay fund to promote more sustainable and equitable families. Contact us at info@havingkids.org if you’d like to join a growing number of funders willing to change family planning systems that simply reinforce hierarchies of power. 

Do you work in microfinance? One of the most effective ways to change the way we all plan families is through family planning micro-loans, and a culture of debt forgiveness. Learn more about Fair Start as a guideline for such financing here. 

Prevent Child Abuse & Neglect

ABORTION BANS ARE WRONG, FIRSTLY, BECAUSE THE STATE HAS NO INTEREST IN CREATNG FUTURE GENERATIONS WITHOUT ENSURING EACH CHILD A FAIR START IN LIFE. TAKE ACTION 

CONTACT YOUR GOVERNORS: It’s time to prevent, rather than simply react, to child abuse. It’s time for Fair Start legislation in every state.  And read about every child’s right to a Fair Start in life here. Read more about parental readiness, including options for parental licensing and sustainable market schemes. 

CONGRESS: Amend CAPTA to include Fair Start legislation

UNICEF and UNFPA: Be more proactive than reactive.  

NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: Prioritize approval and marketing of the male pill.  And read our recent survey showing broad support for the male pill, and policies to promote its use. Effective long-acting male contraception, and a default policy that all teens should be using birth control, would have an incomparable impact on sustainable development. Kids should never have kids.

ABORTION BANS:  There is a way to avoid the endless pro-birth / pro-choice fight, and it has to do with demanding Fair Start family planning as a human right.

Support Fair Start initiatives in your state. Great efforts have already started in Colorado and Louisiana. 

  Confront Climate and Animal Impact

UNITED NATIONS: Recommend sustainable families and comply with international human rights obligations to ensure intergenerational equity when it comes to family planning. 

IS HARVARD TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES? TAKE ACTION. 

DIRECT ACTION AND RETRIBUTIVE CLIMATE JUSTICE: Stand up for your fundamental human right to nature and target the people hurting our kids 

ANIMAL & ENVIRO ORGS: Ask them to speak out for sustainable families Ask any groups you support, including child welfare and human rights organizations, to engage with these four crucial questions. Everything interrelates at family planning. 

FIGHT FOR REAL ANIMAL RIGHTS:  Animal advocacy and veganism begin with better family planning policies that leave room for nonhumans, and that build empathy in children. Make sure governments, corporations, and wealthy families are embracing and funding Fair Start family planning. 

For more info on the debate about real animal rights, see our reporting on Vox.com, and how they can improve their work for animals. 

CORPORATE CAMPAIGNS: Urge Unilever to include sustainable families in the #BrightFuture campaign.  Together we can lean on companies to ditch socially and ecologically unsustainable family planning and promote Fair Start. Companies like Huggable have stepped forward, and others will too. Here’s our letter to Google on the need to support family planning reform. 

DIVEST FROM POOR FAMILY PLANNING: Want to help Fair Start Movement identify and engage with major investors who should be investing in companies like Huggable that promote sustainable family planning, instead of those threatening our future? Contact us at Info@HavingKids.org. Our campaign to urge Google to embrace Fair Start in emblematic of the work you could do. 

Promote Real Human Rights and Democracy

TRULY LIBERATING WOMEN: Efforts to ensure women can truly choose – themselves – to have a child or not has helped save the world from disaster. But those efforts – which really just threw the word autonomy at women and gave them access to family planning resources – fell well short of actual liberation or the changing of power dynamics. Urge the UN to take the next step to make relative autonomy real.

INDIA MUST ENSURE REGENERATIVE AND EQUITABLE FAMILY PLANNING: India is on the cusp of family policy reforms. But it should lead other nations by looking to international law, and adopting Fair Start as the standard that best ensures human rights. Urge it’s leadership to do so. 

MODELING CHANGE: Some of the biggest progress in family planning and liberating women involves role modeling good planning, with groups like the Population Media Center bending the arc of growth and mitigating the climate and other crises through story telling. What if in addition to more sustainably sized families intending parents and their communities modeled equitable redistribution that leveled the playing field, socially and ecologically, for all kids? Read here for how we can do that. 

JUSTICE BETWEEN FAMILIES: Why are smaller and child-free families subsidizing larger and less sustainable families? Learn more and take action.

YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN HAVE A RIGHT TO NATURE: And one way to secure it is by urging Congress and you state legislatures to issue resolutions recognizing it, as a step towards actual legislation and constitutional change. Contact us at Ashley@FairStartMovement.org to help us recruit sponsors from your state and congressional districts. Also, contact us to help urge the American Bar Association to adopt rewilding as a human right. 

CHINA’S FAMILY PLANNING POLICIES: Debates about the future of family planning policy in China set up the perfect divide between those truly committed to human rights and democracy, and those who sacrifice our political freedom to economic growth. The former will work to expedite reduced fertility rates in China as a vehicle of democratize it from the inside out, while opponents will push for growth in contravention of freedom at the most fundamental level.  Help us out and target the latter as threats to the United States and its values.

UNDERSTAND MASS VIOLENCE AND WHO IS RESPONSIBLE: Often, especially in the United States, acts of mass violence stem from people feeling disempowered – slowly pushed out of town halls and into shopping malls through growth-based family policies. Help publicly explain, via op-eds and otherwise, this fact and who at the top of our economic and political systems is responsible for that disempowerment, and benefitting from it. 

FIRST GENERATION REFORMS: Past reformers successfully bent the world’s population growth curve, albeit without some of the qualitative changes Fair Start proposes. Nonetheless, their success is striking and there are at least nine ways to extend their approach. 

VIOLENCE AND DISEMPOWERMENT: Acts of mass violence can be related to a sense of disempowerment that flows fundamentally from family policy.  Urge The Violence Project to explore and report on this, and the solutions to reduce or eliminate such acts. 

Help Enlist Organizations and Media

Do you support another nonprofit?

Ask them to sign onto our letter to the U.N.

Including better family planning modeling into their programming could also make them much more effective. Start a conversation with them around a few basic questions:

Do they address family planning in their programming, and why or why not? Have they accounted for how power relations between people impact their mission, and communicated that to supporters? Have they told young supporters the truth about the impacts of poor family planning? If they do address family planning, do they promote a fair start in life for every child? Do they promote the restoration of the natural world, through sustainable families? Contact us at info@havingkids.org for tailored advice on how to help your nonprofit of choice be more effective, and how we can all accelerate efforts to protect the future.

Should media be more comprehensive in their reporting? Journalists and media outlets have a fundamental obligation to report on stories that impact people, and report those stories in a comprehensive way. Nothing has a greater impact on lives than family planning. Learn more about ways to urge journalists to cover what matters. 

Featured Families

Read about our featured families. One of the best ways to promote better family planning is through role modeling. For example, one mom is speaking out about her choice to have one child. Read about our campaigns to urge the Royal family to role model better family planning. You can speak out, like the Brenn and the Bhotiwihok families.

Email us with your own story: info@havingkids.org

Speak Truth to Power

Policies that do not include family planning reform are inherently misleading regarding their efficacy, inclusivity, and relation to human rights requirements, and can misdirect funders, policymakers, and the public from making the right decisions.

For example, have proponents of particular policies disclosed the impact of population volatility on long-term outcomes? Confront policy claims and ask how they account for levels of child welfare and equity at birth, and the impacts of power relations on our natural and social environments. Target those individuals and institutions – whether they are officials, funders, celebs, or academics, regarding misleading audiences about the most important problems and solutions of our time. People in positions of power created the problems we face today – do not defer to them.