Can We Move Past the Hand of God in Family Planning?
Kim Kardashian West said it well: Referring to her four children’s astronomical wealth, she said they “know they are blessed.” The familiar refrain that wealthy children are born fortunate signals the belief that fortune, God, or some other mighty and invisible hand somehow dictates children’s relative social positions at birth. That includes their wildly different opportunities in life, with some kids today born billionaires and others born slaves. There’s perhaps nothing more American than the belief that society’s a Darwinian meritocracy in which all outcomes are considered just.
But clinging to this “hand of God” belief is like persisting in the idea that the Earth is flat. The relative conditions into which children are born is the product of human decision-making and societal choice. That in some cases we send more kids to prison than college derives from policies that subtly urge people to have children but institute no safeguards to ensure those children have even a minimal shot at a good life.
The Covid-19 crisis, and the way it reveals how a person’s birth-lottery drawing means life or death for them, is sharpening this point. In reality, governmental policies — or, in this case, the deliberate decision by many governments to ignore the issue — influence children’s opportunities in life and family size, two factors that will largely determine our collective future because they determine who will inhabit the planet.
This crucial question — of who should have kids and what future these children deserve — is sometimes handled by governments, but subtly.
Congress is now grappling with one such move: U.S. Sens. Mitt Romney’s and Michael Bennet’s bipartisan child tax allowance proposal, a subtle but effective nudging system that could have a large impact in the long run, as its effects ripple through future generations. With expressive incentives, policies like these indirectly deal with the truly fundamental questions of who should be a parent, how big our families should be, and who will comprise future communities. In the case of Romney’s and Bennet’s plan, the intent is clear: to build on previous conservatives’ efforts to pay people to have more kids in order to create economic growth while dressing up the effort in the liberal garb of guaranteed minimum incomes. It’s miles away from actually ensuring kids a fair start in life (using Romney’s own kids as a benchmark, for example) or dealing with the way increased fertility rates will exacerbate our planet’s climate and ecological crises.
The United Nations isn’t helping to dispel the hand-of-God mythology or the policies that nudge us toward procreation as fuel for economic growth. The recent failure of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Madrid to deal with family planning and population growth is more of the seemingly endless continuation of world governments’ decision to punt problems like vast inequity at birth, population-driven climate and other ecological crises, and abysmal child welfare to future generations to handle.
That inaction may be connected with the cognitive dissonance that sees the act of creating a child as inherently a matter of fortune or some otherworldly force rather than a human choice that can be made both ethically and unethically. Governments may be hesitant to intervene in a matter so many see as better left to the realm of religion or as too complex and consequential to be dealt with through policy.
Our current family planning systems, both the policies and the culture they support, are antiquated: They predate the advent of many modern reproductive technologies and our knowledge about the climate crisis. And they were instituted during a time when men and the true seat of the patriarchy — the “private” dominion of the home — held more sway over politics.
When it comes to family planning, there are many problems with a hands-off approach:
• All indications are that having kids is the product (usually) of humans having sex rather than some unknown force. Failing to address the cause will perpetuate the problem.
• Given that our collective family planning policies (or the absence of policies) will largely determine the future we all share, including the path of the existential climate crisis, we need some way of collectively steering the ship. If we lack that, we are all disempowered and have simply left the future to fate.
• Control of the decision to have children is simply too big and spiritual to entrust to the state — after all, the meaning of life must be addressed when we talk about creating it. So we punt the responsibility to the parents because they’re involved in a uniquely intimate way. But a better option would be to a) realize that the act implicates objective values like child welfare, equity, nature, and democracy and b) build an ideal of family planning, using the values God gave us, to interpret God’s rule of creation.
• Government ignoring the need for serious family planning policies doesn’t equate to its staying out of matters of religion. Instead, it represents the government favoring religions that seek to flood the Earth with humans to subdue and dominate it over religions whose respect for nature presents a more realistic and sustainable view of how humans should interact with their ecology, and through that, with one another.
Nothing is more important than dealing with the climate crisis, and nothing is more comprehensively effective at doing so than better family planning policies that promote smaller and more equitable families.
If religion cannot excuse governments’ paralysis, it might be that governments’ resistance to addressing family planning is explained by the idea that this would violate human rights and freedom. But that would not be the case if the interventions were carefully crafted around the human-rights regime in order to promote human freedom by balancing the rights of parents, children, and their communities.
Why the ‘hand of God’ myth has been perpetuated
In truth, the government and nonprofit organizations have allowed the “hand of God” myth to persist in order to avoid the very difficult work of actually leveling the early childhood playing field. They’ve perpetuated this belief because it has kept the elites who sit in government and who fund nonprofits in power through the generations.
This “hand of God” approach to family planning has an insidious impact on the relationship between concentrations of wealth and the nonprofits they fund. Funders almost exclusively fund programming that reinforces that idea that inherited wealth is normal rather than funding reforms that would ensure every child a fair start in life. This concretizes the power of these funders, building up the myth that it is God-given, pushing people to internalize the idea that their birth circumstances destine them to be economically poor and powerless in the political systems that could change this state of affairs and level the playing field for future generations.
Interrupting this cycle by creating more equitable playing fields would break this world of passed-down privilege. As someone born and raised in Palm Beach, Florida, home of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Estate, I’ve witnessed a culture of rich kids who grow up to be “self-made” rich adults. They’re the primary beneficiaries of the “hand of God” remaining unexamined.
But now, the climate crisis, which affects everyone and which is further fueled by inadequate family planning policies, means we have to move past the hand of God and finally do the hard work.
A policy solution to create equitable families
The Romney-Bennet proposal could be altered to peg the funds to the truly equitable standard of a fair start in life — with a much bigger transfer of resources from rich to poor, and could become efficient at ensuring the process as well as mitigating the climate crisis by simultaneously promoting smaller families.
We could shift pronatal tax credits toward, for example, delay incentives that maximize our chances of reaching goals around sustainable development and more. Instead of gearing family planning around the subjectivity of would-be parents as we currently do, policies can be geared around the objective needs of future children, equity, and nature — objective values that perhaps come closest to objective god — in a way that does the balancing. A child-centered approach is not only feasible but becomes morally obligatory, with a peremptory claim to concentrations of wealth at the top of our economic pyramid as a means to fund fair start family planning, if we are to protect future generations from the harms that continued paralysis threaten.
And the Kardashians aside, some celebrities — like Meghan Markle and Prince Harry — seem willing to break the taboo and start the ball rolling for us and for the governments obligated to act on our behalf.
The future is ours. Let it be our ethical hand that shapes it.
