After five years of research and evolution, we are excited to announce that HavingKids is becoming the Fair Start Movement. This comes from the input of many voices from diverse and intersectional areas in advocacy, as the organization pivots to more of a collective structure increasingly led by identities with more at stake. 

The Fair Start Movement is a collective of parents and young people, child advocates, activists, health practitioners, social scientists, ethicists, and institutions from a range of causes who come together to advance Fair Start efforts at the state, federal, and global level. 

We advocate for informed, inclusive policies rather than ones focused on short-term and unsustainable economic growth with damaging ecological consequences. We call on those with a platform to speak out, from celebrities to those in governance. We also build our movement through a growing coalition of organizations. But most importantly, we empower young people and parents to share their stories and force accountability from those who oppose giving kids a fair start and threaten our and our children’s future.

Child-first collective family planning, beyond the isolation of “nobody else’s business” is happening. Most people maintain a taboo against talking about collective family planning because they fear the top-down power of the state. The reality is that we perceive the state as a threat, which in a democracy makes no sense, because of our failure to implement Fair Start or comparably inclusive family planning models.

Our focus remains on work with the greatest long-run impact on the crises we face today: Rights-based Fair Start reproductive justice reforms that override all competing interests. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one. Our interventions are built around three pillars: 1) fertility delay and parental readiness, 2) distribution of resources geared around birth equity, and 3) a universal ethic of sustainable families.

We remain committed to our 2021 plans of action, including: 

Plans for our first peaceful demonstration as the Fair Start Movement demanding that Exxon officials, past and present, publicly acknowledge their obligations to compensate future generations against a zero baseline, given the climatological harm they have caused. They are obligated to right that wrong by funding climate restorative projects to ensure all kids an ecosocial fair start in life, a moral fact we are also urging the UN to institutionalize through correct interpretation of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s time for both governments and big business to stop working together to exploit future generations. Fair Start is the first and overriding human right, superseding the property rights of those who have harmed future generations, and who must compensate them through Fair Start and other effective mechanisms.

Join the coalition as an organization or sign up to follow the latest opportunities to take action.