Today, Having Kids is urging 100 key world environmental influencers to move from our current and failing and unsustainable approach to family planning to a cooperative system based on what all children objectively need. This new system is based upon a variety of peer-reviewed research papers, and has been featured in Newsweek, Salon, Hello Magazine, and many other popular outlets. That change has never been more vital, given recent reactions to vast racial and economic inequity, the ongoing threat of pandemics, and massive volatility in world population prospects.
Our current family planning system does not guarantee children any minimum level of welfare or equity, and does not take into account impacts on our ecologies, or the relationship between family planning and the building of human rights-based democracies. As our ecological and social conditions continue to deteriorate, it is becoming increasingly clear that the current system failed to account for a variety of factors. It was a mistake, and one that enables policies that Nobel laureate Steven Chu likened to a pyramid or Ponzi scheme.
The alternative we propose, called Fair Start, is simple: communities help parents to plan and wait to be ready before having kids, and ensure resources to give all kids a fair start in life, and smaller and more regenerative families make it all possible. We believe it is the best interpretation of the fundamental right to have children. The Fair Start Model is ten to twenty times more effective at protecting children and our environment, and building human rights and democracy, than other policies that address these issues. For many reasons, it is an overriding human right which can be furthered by all means effective.
According to Executive Director Erika Mathews: “Because our current system of family planning oppresses future generations and puts us all at existential risk, it is illegitimate, and an impediment to the constituting of true democracies.”
