The Nuclear Family Has Changed. Should Family Planning Follow?
COVID-19 STIMULUS PACKAGES COULD BEAT THE PATH FOR NEEDED REFORM
Earlier this year, The Atlantic ran an article with an article with a provocative title: “If the Nuclear Family Has Failed, What Comes Next?” The answer explored a move toward broader networks of kinship and community.
More recently, Slate covered the trend amid the COVID-19 pandemic and found that the pressures of quarantine are showing us that the concept of the independent nuclear family falls well short of what people, especially kids, need. The quarantines are showing us just how true this is, given that isolation has led to child abuse and other domestic abuse cases spiking sharply.
If it takes a village to raise a child, why not a village to help plan for one? Perhaps the world, pushed by COVID-19 and the vast inequity it is revealing, is ready for family planning reform. It would certainly fit well with the worldwide trend toward smaller families and the environmental reforms we need in order to guard against the next pandemic.
The conversation is long overdue. This moment needs to change the way governments view and treat future generations from the current system, which Nobel laureate Steven Chu likened to a Ponzi scheme. An emerging conversation about the value of child-centric family planning may show a pathway for that reform. And forthcoming COVID-19 stimulus packages present a unique opportunity, as discussed below, to begin this process.
The Way We Plan Families Today
How do people around the world currently plan families? Put simply, most parents are left to decide when, how, and with whom to have children.
There are exceptions. China’s family planning regime continues to limit total family size, while elsewhere, limitations on access to abortions force some parents to birth children they do not want to have.
Despite these exceptions, civil society continues to push toward the United Nations’ universal ideal, which has been in place for decades, of parents deciding “freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children.” The overwhelming theme here is that the family is a private realm, somehow closed off from the rest of the world.
Think about how odd that view is. The biggest stakeholder in the process, the future child, seems absent in the equation. Furthermore, this “parents-only” view ignores the impact that having kids has on others, our collective future, and what children will need to thrive in that future.
For example, a study from Oregon State University concluded that the carbon legacy and greenhouse-gas impact of an extra child in the United States is almost 20 times more consequential than some of the other environmentally friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives.
The effect on global warming isn’t the only consideration: Overcrowding, exacerbated by pro-growth family planning policies, is one of the biggest factors in the spread of pandemics such as the novel coronavirus. The virus originated in the most crowded country in the world and spread like wildfire in a district known for its population density. Pro-growth policies exacerbated the situation, preventing measures that would have created fewer and healthier people in favor of the overcrowding, worsening inequality, and increased risk of pandemics that has come with population-driven economic growth. Increased population causes encroachment on natural habitats, which correlates with the increase in zoonotic diseases since the middle of the 20th century and an increase in the risk of future pandemics.
Shouldn’t all of this be part of the broader discussion about family planning?One model that might replace older and isolating forms of family planning is called Fair Start modeling. It is inclusivity at the most fundamental level.
In short, it involves those with resources — and not just money — transferring those resources through domestic and international foreign aid in order to incentivize family planning around the goal of giving every child a fair start in life and thus leveling the playing field of life, as well as accelerating the trend toward a universal ethic of smaller families. All of this might work in ways that other family planning interventions in the past might not, because would-be parents would be offered truly substantial incentives to participate.
Building a Bridge for All Children
Imagine our current world as a river. On one side of the river stand people who will be parents. On the other side stand the children they will have. The parents are inviting the children across the river and into our world. But like most rivers, there are safe and dangerous places to cross. Some kids never make it across. Some eventually get across but with lasting damage because they crossed where the river was rushing and rocky. Others cross in ankle-deep water with everything they need and more.
Regardless of the river crossing, it’s becoming more hazardous because of increasing strain on the fragile ecosystem. Everyone is focused on only their own personal desires and incentives and therefore see the river crossing in isolation.
What if the parents and the broader community were to work together? Can we build a bridge in the middle of the river that will bring the children over in a way that protects them, gives adults what they truly need to be healthy and loving parents, ensures equal opportunities in life for all, and protects the ecology of our river? Can the bridge ensure socially and ecologically regenerative communities?
Yes, we can: There is a policy pathway. In short, it involves gearing the progressive distribution of resources around financially incentivizing all parents to a) be ready before they have children, b) work together to give each child born a fair start in life, and c) embrace smaller and more sustainable families that make all of this possible. In short, the rich would pay to level the playing field for the future children of the poor.
Why We Can’t Ignore Population Growth
Vox recently ran an article trying to debunk the claim that forgoing having children is the most effective way to reduce emissions. In doing that, the writer cited studies by an organization of businesses that have benefited and will benefit from population-driven economic growth. The perspective seemed out of character for Vox because it aligned with far-right nationalists who routinely downplay the impact of the anthropocene in order to promote nationalistic population growth.
What was the gist of Vox’s argument? That the studies on the environmental impact of more children ignored “likely changes in government policy” in the future.
In other words, the rebuttal admits that the studies are accurate about how current behavior impacts the world and that creating new people has an overwhelming impact relative to altering the behavior of existing people. Instead, it asks us simply to trust that governments will succeed in developing a solution to the climate crisis so that don’t have to worry about the consequences of our actions.
In short, Vox argues that we should have children under the assumption that governments will surely choose to do the right thing at some later time.
Given governments’ current performance against the Paris Agreement standards, many might not choose to place their faith — and their kids’ futures — in the Trump administration or the many other governments openly flouting the Paris climate accords. That’s dealing only with the impact that family planning has on the climate crisis. Unsurprisingly, family size is the biggest determinant of dozens of other ecological and social impacts. Wishful thinking about future governments doesn’t change this fact.
Perhaps more important, Vox’s argument presents a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t just whether to have children in the face of the climate crisis. There is a middle ground, which is urging policies that promote smaller and more equitable families.
What we’ve historically seen are economic and nationalist pronatal policies treat children as economic inputs useful in creating economic growth. That pronatalist argument has been the rationale behind many abortion bans. A recent report by the Institute for Family Studies on how the U.S. might emulate the pronatalist policies of more authoritarian regimes such as Poland and Hungary summarized the thinking well: “Pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies.” Such policies include recent legislation sponsored by U.S. Sens. Mitt Romney and Michael Bennet, which would use the child-tax credit system, in a more subtle version of the “babies equal cash” approach, as a means of paying women to have kids.
A Better Way to Plan Our Families: People as Ends, Not Means
All of these issues matter: how many of us share the planet, our relative equity when entering the world, and whether our childhood needs are met. The way we currently plan families holds fundamental problems and leaves many facing immense injustice.
Is there a way out?
The answer may actually lie in the Vox article’s last argument, which goes like this: Focusing on population is actually a way of targeting the poor and people of color, rather than targeting the rich white men driving the fossil-fuel industries.
A lot of history — around eugenics, foreign aid, welfare reform, etc. — supports that argument. Just to talk today of objective family planning standards re-raises that history. But can we do better and actually protect the vulnerable classes at issue. Could we use family planning to assure economic equality, a tactic Martin Luther King embraced? We address economic equality—and avoid being divided and conquered by economic elites—not by ignoring family planning but by constructing child-focused family planning systems that are based on equity. Nothing is as fundamentally inclusive as a family planning model built around equity.
Past attempts at taking a human-rights approach to family planning were riddled with mistakes. Those systems have now proven a failure, given the abysmal child welfare outcomes, the climate crises, massive and growing inequity, and more. That’s because all these past approaches focused on what parents subjectively wanted (to have eight children, to create farm labor, to please a husband, etc.) rather than what children objectively need.
The value of human rights lies in protecting the most vulnerable entities. In the family planning equation, future children are the most vulnerable. This doesn’t mean we can’t try to maximize welfare and create economic growth, which are often the driving forces behind effective altruism and many other social movements. To protect the most vulnerable means doing so within the confines of a specific set of rules — human rights — that protect freedom, dignity, and equity for the future child. For example, from this perspective, it would be wrong to ignore the threat of the coronavirus in favor of protecting economic growth just because that threat is largely limited to the sick and elderly. Of course, some will argue that people can waive their rights and choose inequality in situations where a rising tide has “lifted all boats higher” and improved overall welfare. This does not apply to family planning: We cannot inflict that choice on future children.
A truly human rights-based approach to family planning would protect the most vulnerable and the biggest stakeholder: the future child. It would protect them from being brought into the world beneath a particular threshold of well-being, e.g., in conditions no reasonable parent would allow their child to be. That is what we do by using children to create economic growth — pushing them into failing child welfare systems, abusive and neglectful homes, degraded and dangerous ecologies, positions in life where they cannot self-determine, etc.
Why inflict conditions on future children that are insufficient for existing children? This is key. When we set that threshold, it must account for the interconnection between welfare and freedom, or political autonomy, and the ability of future children to become self-determining agents in democracies where their voices are heard and they matter.
Instead of focusing on economic growth, a human rights-based approach would have to track the fundamental commitment to maximizing human self-determination from an equitable baseline. In short, it would require that everyone receive a fair start in life. This would involve collectively focusing family planning decisions on what future children need, with the central point being to constitute inclusive and democratic communities composed of people considered “free and equal.”
What does a truly human-rights approach to family planning look like in practice? In short, it means:
● Communities ensure that parents have the resources to plan families and guarantee that all kids have the resources they need for a fair start in life. A hard metric like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child could be a starting point here.
● Each of us delays having kids until we are truly ready to parent, and each of us has small and sustainable families that put less demand on parents, our shared resources, and our world.
That form of family planning would balance the freedom of subjective personal choice with objective values like minimum thresholds of child welfare, equity, nature, and democracy. It is the antithesis of using children as a means to an end. It involves wanting a world that looks a lot more like democratic communities revolving around town halls, and surrounded by nature, than a crowded and global economy composed of a patchwork of nation-states in which everything is a commodity.
There is a very concrete policy vehicle for moving the world from parent-focused to child-focused: the emergence and growing acceptance of the need for a guaranteed minimum income for children, or what some call “baby bonds.” Under a transition to child-focused family planning, the amount of money transferred would go up substantially, but the transfers would also be pegged to the collective family planning ideals described above. The bonds would be treated as a human-rights entitlement of the future child, a means of ensuring that all kids get fair starts in life, and an incentive for parents to ensure they are ready before they have kids. By linking planning to resources, this proposal improves outcomes substantially and, by improving the efficiency of the programming, becomes more appealing to both conservatives and liberals. This policy vehicle could be scaled universally and catalyzed by a simple statement from the United Nations secretary general supporting the initiative.
Stimulus funding in response to COVID-19 presents a unique opportunity to further the change in the way we plan families. Congress could:
Guarantee a Sustainable Child Income Through Baby Bonds: U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s proposals on baby bonds provide a key vehicle to link guaranteed minimum incomes for children to better family planning. Recent legislation sponsored by Romney and Bennet, by contrast, largely uses the child-tax credit system as a means of simply paying women to have kids. Given that this pandemic has exacerbated inequality, Congress could consider substantially increasing the sum of the proposed bonds. In tandem, in light of the numerous economic, health, and social benefits of waiting to have kids, it could structure the bonds in a way that incentivizes delaying pregnancy until at least age 25. A proposed model policy for the District of Columbia could serve as a blueprint for this approach.
Expressly Protect Family Planning Services in Stimulus Legislation: Crisis loans and telehealth measures included in the CARES Act could go a long way toward supporting family planning service providers. Distressingly, however, the act grants the Small Business Authority and Health and Human Services the discretion to block family planning providers from accessing this support. Congress could include language in stimulus packages that expressly protects support for family planning services.
Expand Access to Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives: As women face increased challenges in traveling to healthcare providers and pharmacies, barriers to accessing contraception are more daunting than ever. Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), such as intrauterine devices and hormonal implants, can help solve this problem.
Between 2009 and 2015, the Colorado Family Planning Initiative worked to expand access to LARCs. The initiative cut teen births and abortions nearly in half, reduced the birth rate by 20% among young women ages 20 to 24, and saved the state nearly 70 million dollars. As the COVID-19 crisis continues, LARCs can reduce the frequency with which women need to leave home for birth control, resulting in more effective family planning and reduced risks to public health.
However, for many women, the cost of obtaining a LARC remains prohibitively expensive. While the Affordable Care Act guarantees that insured women can access LARCs at no cost to them, the number of uninsured Americans has been rising since 2016. In order to support states in providing LARCs to uninsured women, Congress could increase funding for Title X family planning services, Title V Maternal Child Health block grants, and the 340b Drug Pricing Program in future stimulus packages. By giving women who choose to have smaller families the tools they need to do so, policymakers will not only meet women’s immediate healthcare needs, but also help to protect the future of our planet and the generations that share it.
Consider Measures to Prevent Child Abuse: Child welfare experts warn that the current COVID-19 pandemic will create a spike in child abuse cases. As parents face increased stress and must spend more time caring for children who are no longer in school, many families find themselves cut off from the critical support services on which they usually rely. While the CARES Act provided critical funding for mental health and substance abuse services, which are powerful tools to prevent child abuse, the act does not go far enough. Congress should include increased support for child abuse prevention measures in future stimulus legislation. It could also consider other policy solutions that address child abuse, such as amending the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to incentivize Fair Start order legislation.
Preventing future pandemics begins by creating a future populace that is much more resilient than we are, and that begins with better family planning.
Beyond federal stimulus funding, a key way of changing the way we plan families would be through model amendments to state constitutions to guarantee the duality of a fair start in life and a fundamental right to nature. Such a change would end our simultaneous exploitation of future generations and the nonhuman world, a form of exploitation that — from the climate crisis to COVID-19 — has come back to haunt us.
Perhaps the best argument against transitioning from a parent-focused to a future child-focused universal family planning model is that it would be politically infeasible. That argument would misapprehend the nature of human rights. These rights precede, legitimate, and thereby override the processes of governments. Instead, the transition to a universal family planning model relies on a populace willing to fight for their childrens’ futures and to correctly identify the distinct and tangible centers of power to direct our ire against and from whom we will obtain the resources needed to level the field of entry for future generations.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my current or any previous employers or affiliated organizations.
