Understanding The Right To Have Children

Legal scholar and ethicist Carter Dillard elegantly argues why the act of having children is interpersonal rather than personal, and shares his vision for a just and sustainable society in which each child is brought into this world in a manner that ensures they have an ecologically and socially fair start in life. His model seeks to replace the dysfunctional parent-focused model created by governments to ensure population growth and evade collective responsibility to invest in kids. He discusses why the rights to have children must be balanced with the obligations towards these children, as well as to the rest of the living world - both current and future.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

  • Alan Ware 02:59

    Yes, let's get right into it with Carter Dillard. He's the author of Justice As a Fair Start in Life. He began his career as an honors program appointee to the US Department of Justice. He later served as a legal adviser to the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Law Division. He wrote his thesis reformulating the right to have children under Jeremy Waldron, his extensive academic work on family planning has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern universities as well as in peer-reviewed pieces. And he has served on the steering committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project and was a visiting scholar at the Uehiro Centre, both at the University of Oxford.

    Nandita Bajaj 03:39

    So Carter, welcome to our podcast. We're excited to have you here. Alan and I have been longtime fans of your work and are enthralled by the deep time philosophical approach that you bring to this issue. Liberation, self-determination, and justice are some of our favorite words, and they dominate most of your work. So we are thrilled to be able to dig into that with you today. Why don't we start with your personal journey and motivations that have led you down this path? What inspired you to get involved in animal rights law? And how did that work evolve into children's rights and subsequently child-centric family planning?

    Carter Dillard 04:24

    Thanks, Nandita. And thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me. I'm honored to be with you all. I was always interested in animal rights and human rights. And I saw them really as part of the same movement to eliminate injustice and suffering, whether it was the torture of humans or the torture of nonhumans. The two are in some ways the same. And as part of that, wanting to work in rights, I took a position with the US Department of Justice, and after a few years I was involved in it case that dealt with a family seeking asylum from the People's Republic of China and the family resisted removal back to the PRC, because they had had three children in violation of the provincial family planning policy. And as I read the law, they didn't qualify because China's policies simply applied, were a form of prosecution, not a form of persecution, because they were motivated by a legitimate end - the People Republic of China's interest in avoiding the sort of population growth that had killed millions in famines in the twentieth century. And during my litigation of that case, Congress changed the law and said that any resistance to the family planning policy in China constituted grounds to claim political persecution. And what drove me into wanting to focus on child-centric family planning as the best way to eliminate injustice, suffering, was the recognition that Congress had done something that was wrong. They had made a purely political move and said that the right to have children is unlimited. There's no need to anticipate and protect future generations, there's no need to anticipate the needs of and protect vulnerable entities like gender disparity in families, women that might be vulnerable from patriarchal population growth mentality. And so what I was witnessing was Congress essentially lying about what human rights meant in this context and forcing an outcome in the case that didn't make any sense. And so I thought about, well, what's the real source of of injustice and suffering, and of course, the source is - the source of us. It's the way that we are created. It's a system that does not anticipate needs of the most vulnerable. And what I realized in the end was that Congress was doing that because of outdated religious views. Because the people in Congress didn't want to be obligated to pay to give kids fair starts in life. So they said having children is a matter of privacy, it's personal, something that is clearly interpersonal. And I think that I'll just end this part by saying, you know, I was interested in protecting animals, protecting children, protecting humans - animal rights, children's rights, and human rights. And it all came down to defeating that lie that the act of having children is a personal and private matter. That lie is meant to protect the wealthy from paying what they ought to pay, to give kids a level playing field. And that lie is the reason that we are facing a climate crisis, a economic inequity crisis, and quite frankly, the degradation of democracy, because we've done nothing to fill our democracies with people capable of self-rule. Instead, they're more like consumers in a marketplace.

    Alan Ware 08:03

    Well, that segues well into something you've said in your new book titled Justice As a Fairer Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children. You make a simple but powerful claim that justice depends on how we first create or procreate the power relations. So if you could share with us why you believe that having that fair start in life is a first primary human right, overriding all others? That seems a definite bedrock of Fair Start.

    Carter Dillard 08:33

    It is, as a matter of fact. I think, in chatting with a great mentor, Bill Ryerson, when I said I was thinking about working on a new approach, you know, I think his point was well put, which is, "Well, we don't really need more nonprofits." But what we thought we added to the mix was something novel. And that was when we deal with the policies around population, we're actually dealing with what could be the overriding human right. And the reason that I think, when we deal with population or what I like to think of as family policies, why those become overriding as a matter of human rights is because really, we are before we do, and we derive from our creation. So just as a matter of the construction of our language, it's impossible to talk about our obligations without first having determined the obligations that created us. So if we talk about let's redistribute wealth among adults because of injustice, you have to ask yourself why you let children be born into abject poverty and other kids with million dollar trust funds? Why didn't you go back upstream? If you're looking at ecological injustice, let's try to restore a watershed, you have to ask why didn't you connect the fact that you are allowing children to be born into poverty with the degradation of that watershed? Why didn't you go upstream and connect the two? That applies to all forms of justice: political, economic, procedural, retributive. And so I think it's simple to say that if we were going to think of a list of human rights, the first right on that list has to be the right that accounts for our creation. And I don't think that's something that the population movement has understood. I think they haven't understood it because human rights advocates and rights advocates and lawyers and judges and politicians have buried that fact. Because if we think about it that way, the obligations to children are immense. And that would create a problem for people, CEOs and politicians, that sit on top of this pyramid of power. They'd rather spend the money on military budgets, space exploration. They'd rather use people than invest in them. And the truth about the overriding nature of the right to have children properly constructed is that it overrides their ability to use people in that way.

    Alan Ware 10:53

    It's been a welcome addition to the population community that taking this fair start in life is a primary goal. You have stated that the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights needs to have this fundamental reorientation of turning it from a private family matter to a public societal matter of creating that fair start. What's been the reaction among un groups and the broader international family planning community?

    Carter Dillard 11:22

    It's a great question, Alan. And I think, honestly, it's hard to separate genuine reaction from some reaction that is prompted by the sort of concentrations of power that we've talked about. I think in terms of genuine reaction, many people have said that's true, as a matter of philosophy. But we don't know how to implement it as a matter of policy. Because we've really built everything on Cairo and the Cairo Consensus, which adopted the privacy paradigm. As we begin to show them policy solutions, they adopt those solutions bit by bit. And this is the group of people who I think have a genuine reaction. And Nandita has had the greatest success by getting dozens of major organizations to sign on a letter that starts to edge away from that paradigm. That's the genuine reaction. I believe a lot of the reaction on the other side is disingenuous. That reaction can say if you nudge away from privacy, you're going to endanger vulnerable people who might be subjected to coercive population control. They will say that there's something inherently racist or classist in moving away from the privacy paradigm, or they will often say, actually, this is probably the best argument - that maybe it's too late. That if we'd done this in 1948, it could have made the difference. But at this point, we're dealing with a crisis. And all of our efforts should be on immediate solutions like carbon sequestration, or immigration reorganization to deal with vulnerable populations. What you're proposing is moving too slowly. When I say that those last three reactions are disingenuous, it's because I've seen the companies that promote growth, because all of their economic forecasting models for their own growth is based on population growth. They've been pushing those narratives to try to defeat fairness. And I think a lot of the reactions, even from the environmental community, and from groups that hold themselves out as feminist in nature, and from groups that purport to protect children's rights. I believe a lot of the reactions that have been negative are quite frankly disingenuous, because they're coming from funders who rely on growth. And if they don't rely on growth anymore because of forecasts fertility changes, they don't want to admit that the things they say they were doing for women, children, and the environment, they were undoing with their growth policies the whole time. They don't want to admit that. So I sort of divide into the genuine reaction and the disingenuous reaction, and Nandita has got the unwelcome task of shepherding people from the latter into the former.

    Nandita Bajaj 13:59

    Thanks for that, Carter. It's been very refreshing looking and digging deeper into the first start model. Because as you say, a lot of the different movements, whether they are environmental, feminist movements, family planning, animal rights - tend to be working in kind of a piecemeal approach to solving what's right in front of them. And what's really neat about what you're doing is you're going right to the root of the problem, you're going to the most sacred of all, which is procreation. And it's not surprising that you've had the kinds of reactions you have. I mean, most people in the population movement are quite unwelcome. But even the fact that the population movement has not gone as far upstream as you are in your approach is, like Alan said, it's quite a welcome approach because it gets to the root of injustice. And the other point point that I wanted to make is often the sexual and reproductive health and rights community sees much of our work as oppositional because there is this idea, as you said, that we are somehow getting in the way of rights, people's individual rights. But I think what we are aspiring towards is to absolutely uphold individual rights, but also to transcend those rights, and understand that that in order to guarantee rights for all, which includes prospective children, which includes future people, which includes democracy - we have to exercise our rights responsibly. And so that's really a fantastic perspective.

    Carter Dillard 15:43

    I thought I was upstream until I met you all, because what's more upstream than focusing on prospective children, under the assumption that we're going to have them. It's the motivation to have them. And as you all point out, a lot of what is perceived as genuine, organic motivation is, in fact, just the cultural construct that women are just mothers in waiting. And so that's upstream. Kudos to you all for that. And I do think the responsibility perspective is pretty important. If we think, "Oh, I have a right to have as many children as I want, I have a right to speak freely, I have a right to vote, I have a right to an education." Every time we're saying those things, we're saying them from the perspective of an organization, a social organization that was first determined by the creation norm by the norm that creates the people in it. So it is normal that we should think of having children from a position of responsibility, because it creates the the just society that we want. To think of it as privacy is honestly like thinking that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the Earth. And that sort of archaic thinking created the climate crisis, and the people responsible for that have a lot to account for.

    Alan Ware 16:55

    Right. And I think Fair Start brings in that critical future orientation. That those rights are impinging on the rights of future humans, billions, maybe trillions to be born. If we can do well as a species, not to mention all the animals and other species that should have their rights, and the way that our explosion of numbers and consumption impinges on those rights. So you have a great future orientation embodied in that that's so missing from global industrial capitalism for several hundred years. We've very much created a culture that lives in the present. And at the same time, I love how Fair Start does care very much about the present, and that it's willing to commit to each of those children in creating a better start for them in life right here and right now. So you don't need to believe in all that, the future orientation element, to be behind Fair Start. That's the beauty of it.

    Carter Dillard 17:53

    That's correct, Alan, and I don't take credit for it. There was an amazing political philosopher Joel Feinberg, who in the 1970s, he said, "The most vulnerable entities in the world are nonhumans and future humans." And yet, if you look at intergenerational justice, I'd just point your readers towards the very simple thing, the intergenerational justice entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I used to think intergenerational justice, as you said Alan, was attenuated far into the future. I read Rawls and other people and thought we can't do things now to impact people hundreds of years from now. But the author of that entry in the encyclopedia, Lukas Meyer, who's a professor at in Switzerland. His point was simply no, intergenerational justice depends on the various thresholds we require when we bring children into the world. It was an immediate thing. We use equity, I'll point out, Fair Start is obviously using equity. Meyer gives more than equity as possible thresholds. So I would refer readers to that. But we choose equity because at bottom, the core bedrock value for Fair Start is self-determination, which is only relative, and it's relative to how many other people we share our society with and we are consenting to be determined by. We choose equity as a threshold, because in the end, we're really about freedom. Freedom comes from social contract theory, seventeenth century stuff. And the idea is, well, you're free because you consent, you choose these things, and that's how you become free. And you can't choose them if you're not choosing from a position of equity. A child born in abject poverty is subjected to a child born with a million dollar trust fund. That's a form of slavery - one child will work for the other, and that's statistically certain. So liberating that child from the other is a form of liberation.

    Alan Ware 19:42

    And that's a core democratic value - the inherent worth and dignity of every individual, the self-determination of every individual.

    Nandita Bajaj 19:49

    And Carter, since you're speaking about the most vulnerable being the nonhumans, both present and future, as well as the future humans, it ties really You're well into what we've spoken about in terms of humane education. And for our listeners, humane education is both a field of study and an approach to teaching that draws connections between human rights, animal protection, and environmental sustainability. And really, the goal is to prepare people to be compassionate, dedicated problem solvers, who are able to identify, as you are doing, unjust, inhumane, and unsustainable systems, and create solutions that enable people, animals, and nature to thrive. To me, it looks like most of your work is emerging from a place of humane education, because you're looking at the intersection of our procreation and its impacts on both future and current humans, nonhumans, and nature. How do you see the role of humane education aiding in your work? And what are the connections you draw between overpopulation, social justice, ecojustice, reproductive justice, and you know, all the different forms of equity issues you're looking at.

    Carter Dillard 21:09

    So to answer regarding the humane education portion, I would love to think of that as a frame for Fair Start. And in fact, when we're talking about Fair Start, we're trying to educate people. You know, long gone and thank goodness are the days where we got people to comply with what we wanted them to do by force. You know, with the exception of understanding that Fair Start demands on the wealthy are serious, and that much the way Black Lives Matter uses direct action to achieve some of their goals, I think probably there is something beyond pure education when it comes to ensuring children a fair start that we might look at. But most of the time, we're talking about education. And I do see it as a form of humane education because what we're talking about is trying to ensure the development of future generations. That's what education was meant to do. But it failed to date, utterly failed, because children mostly develop, and certainly their empathy, pro-social behaviors, and other things largely develop in the first three years of their life. So if you start education in the classroom, you've already completely missed the boat. You've got to link education to family planning. And that means that humane education really means humane family planning and education. So I see the two as absolutely linked. Again, that view comports with a comprehensive review of justice, because you're talking about trying to make children self-determining, they're not going to be determined by their different levels of wealth entry into the world. They're not going to be determined by fossil fuel companies re-writing the nature and the environment in which they live. They're not going to be determined by politicians who purport to represent them. But there's so many people in a particular polity, that it's not even rational to vote. So how could those people represent us, it's a joke. You want to empower people, you make them equal, you give them a voice, and you give them a natural environment. And that means simply three things, it means making sure that we redistribute resources to give birth equity, it means making sure that parents are ready to parent, so that usually means delay, and preparation. And lastly, it means a universal ethic of smaller families. And that's the application of Fair Start. In a nutshell, people ask me what is Fair Start - it's redistribute for birth equity, ensure parental readiness, and adhere to a universal ethic of smaller families. That builds a community of free people, not massive nations, where we're really just here to work, consume, and pay taxes. We're not actually here to have a role in our democracies.

    Alan Ware 23:49

    So you mentioned that the large scale, due to our massive population, has led to dilution of democracy and the weakening of democracy to the point where it's just voting. And in the US now, we have one representative for about 750,000 people. So it's enormously diluted from the founding when it was closer to thirty thousand people per representative. So what would be your vision? I know you've given some of it so far of a fully functioning democracy, what would that entail?

    Carter Dillard 24:18

    Well, I think that gets sort of back to the point about the primacy of Fair Start. To have a functional democracy, you've got to have people capable of carrying it forward. So it really just entails practicing Fair Start to bring population down, probably towards Chris Tucker's optimal of around 3.1. Ensure that that 3.1 people were born in conditions that make them relatively equal. So eliminating the disparity and ensuring that they're born and raised with sufficient levels of education to make them capable of and wanting to take part in things like direct democracy. So a good litmus test for whether you're moving in that direction, and maybe getting there, are your representative ratios sufficient so that the representatives are actually reflective of the people? You'd have a much better ratio than we do now. And to make sure that representative bodies like congresses are functional, they would have to be reflective of a smaller population. So I think honestly, we get to what we're talking about, not by restructuring the democracies themselves. We are creating people who will then be able to do that in the future, it doesn't change the family planning. But I think a hard and fast example of this would probably be the United Nations has this weird conundrum where it's trying to respect the self-determination of peoples, but it's not actually doing Fair Start, where we're promoting self-determination. If we were moving in the right direction, self-determining groups of people like First Nations would be actually the equivalent of countries. You would have fluid borders, you would have fluid groups of people, many more than we have in terms of the nation-state model today. And those different political entities would probably look a lot more like city-states than they would like lines on a globe, traditional nation-states. That vision is reflective of the idea of people who are in control of themselves. So many more countries, with fluid borders, probably mostly bordered by the nonhuman world. And those entities, those political entities, would I think be what the sort of self-determining people's vision you hear about the United Nations, that's what it would look like. I'll end by saying this, this is a weird, very strange thing. I think the modern corporation is in some way, an attempt to move in that direction, but also an aberration. People want to be self-determining, they know their representatives, their politicians are worthless. It's not going to get them what they want. So they all flock to companies where they could maybe rise up the pyramid, because in that company, they're getting what they need - health care, and getting paid, and they're getting some say. They're treating the company like a miniature country. And that's a good thing, in that they're moving towards wanting to be an inclusive entity. It's a bad thing, in that those corporations are not designed to be democracies. They're designed to be either monarchical, or tyrannical dictatorships, at best, you know, some companies have gotten to inclusive models, but you'd have to change them. But as silly as it sounds, we think of the world as these, here's a handful of countries that we look at a patchwork on a globe. In fact, if you look at groups of people, they're trying to organize themselves into corporations as much as they are into countries. And that might be a move towards the sort of truly self-determining groups of people, but an indicator that we're getting in the right direction. That is, there's a lot more of those than we have countries, but they would have to be structured very differently than they are now to be true.

    Alan Ware 28:14

    Yeah, I like your city-state idea. And if you combine it with a bioregion that is ecologically grounded, which a corporation certainly isn't, if anything, they're trying to tear themselves asunder from geographical grounding, and exploit whatever they can from wherever they can, from whoever they can, at the lowest cost. So your idea of more groups in city-state bioregionally located and then creating democratic citizens, as you mentioned, from the get-go with pro-social empathy understanding zero to three, and then they move into school and would be educated in reasoned argument and valuing other perspectives - being capable of being democratic citizens. Which we have definitely in the US, we've got civics education, history - a lot of that has been shunted to the side. So I could see a lot of these concepts working together to create more fully functioning democracies, with Fair Start being a huge part of that.

    Carter Dillard 29:11

    I think that's right. You've described it better than I did. And I want to be very clear, because a lot of people will accuse me of saying, oh, this is sort of like pie in the sky philosophy. I want to be absolutely 100% clear that we are talking about very specific policy changes. Right now, I'm not aware of any part of the United States where people who have a felony conviction for child abuse would be under any serious disincentives to have more children. Fair Start is absolutely clear, there is a legal presumption if you have a felony conviction for child abuse, that you will be having more children because those children will not be raised in conditions sufficient for democracy. That proposition we change the law as such flies in the face of every group out there, but we can honestly put them to the test and say, "If you honestly believed in democracy the way you said you did, what were you doing to actually prepare people for it?" And the answer is nothing. They waited until those kids hit insufficient schools at six or seven years of age, and they hoped for the best. And you're looking at the world that those groups created.

    Alan Ware 30:17

    Yeah. And that reminds me of the in the US, we have such a localized school district funding, that we can have these enormous differences in funding, and you've got radio reports of seniors in Florida, many of them white retirees, who will not pay for school funding for young black and brown kids. So those kinds of direct obfuscations of Fair Start just happen in localities all over this country.

    Carter Dillard 30:43

    Exactly. Yeah. Well, you don't need a fair start if you live in an economy, we can live under this myth that there's some magical presence in the sky that makes some people born rich, and some people born poor. And it's good if you're born rich, because you could just hire security guards in Florida to keep the poor people at bay. That's an economy, right? That's not a democracy.

    Alan Ware 31:03

    Yeah.

    Carter Dillard 31:03

    And the people who put that on us are in some ways an enemies of the ideals that are that at least the United States, these ideals that we've said we've held fast to. And I think the way to think about holding people to the truth is you just press them. What is it about the people in your policy? How do they fit into this ideal that you're talking about? And usually they never have an answer.

    Nandita Bajaj 31:24

    And I think the question about limiting reproductive rights, when it comes to children's minimum welfare standards not being able to be met, it starts going very quickly into controversial territory. And people usually don't want to engage in a discussion like that, because it's very uncomfortable. Because immediately what comes to mind is coercion and forceful sterilization and who's in control and who's deciding who gets to have children and not. And unfortunately, the conversation just stops there. Because most people just say it's a slippery slope, we don't want to go there. And it reminds people of past policies that, you know, rightfully have made us suspicious about coercion and oppression of the most marginalized communities. But just like the work we're doing in the population arena, these are not comfortable discussions to be had. But the point that you're so clearly bringing up is, the more we shy away from these conversations, the more we're allowing those who are the most vulnerable, which are these prospective children to continue to be violated. And, you know, that's why the discussion about rights and responsibilities is so important, because the right to unlimited reproduction does not take into account the rights of the new humans or the prospective humans. It is so limited to the person. And you know, just because it's an uncomfortable discussion doesn't mean that we don't go into that area and then we don't start looking at empowering positive ways of enacting these policies. What kind of policy work have you thought about or looked at, you know, that would enact something like this?

    Carter Dillard 33:15

    Yeah. And to answer what I think your question also implied is, I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward. If you're not accounting for children's entry conditions, you don't care about them. So these arguments about, "Oh, your policies might be punching down on vulnerable entities." If you don't have an answer for how you're going to protect children as they come into the world, you're the one punching down on vulnerable entities and on the women who were forced, to be blunt, under Nandita's analysis of coercive pronatalism. We shouldn't put up with the nonsense that people care about children if they don't account for their conditions, or account for ensuring women an equal say. With regard to specific policies, there's an area of legal theory called expressive law, and a lot of people think of law as let's come up with a rule and then we'll coerce people to follow it, punish them if they don't, or incentivize them to follow it. But there's a great body of law that shows that if when the state says this is the law, a lot of people, sometimes most people, immediately change their behavior. It can be like a halo effect, because people presume that the state is representative of them, that the state must know something -like a crowdsourcing kind of thinking. But the state could say people who have a felony conviction should not have more children, and to ensure that, if you were to have more in violation of what we've asked, we will extend your probation in order to monitor the situation. That's not coercive, it doesn't involve incentives. It's simply the state saying we don't want you to do this. And if you do do it, we're going to keep an eye on the situation, which makes sense, given the children. Although to be honest with you, that in those conditions, most of the time, the parents would not have custody, the children would be in state custody. But you're monitoring the parents because if they think it's a good idea to create children in the state custody, they may I need the assistance of the state at that point. So that is a law that we could enact in every one of the fifty states and fully fund through assistance by the federal government. I would imagine you could do it in Canada and any other country, as a simple way for the state to say we are moving away from a model focused on what parents want to a model focused on what children need. And we're going to exemplify that move in the case of child abuse by saying there was a presumption if you have a felony conviction for child abuse, you should not have more. And if you do have more, we're going to extend your probation. And it's just an expressive move by the state that shouldn't trigger any of the concerns by the people that are worried about coercive state interference. And if it does trigger those concerns, I don't think you're looking at a genuine reaction. I think you're looking at a disingenuous reaction by people who were prompted by growth economics. You're looking at people who are worried about the loss of growth, quite frankly, like Elon Musk, in the past two days has been outspoken in the media that falling fertility rates are a threat to the species. The reality is, we face the climate crisis because of the unsustainable growth model that created the need for all of his cars. And his cars are not going to solve the problem. That growth model did damage that he can't undo. But he's still adheres to it. It also created him. Born a wealthy white person in South Africa. There was a story of him showing up at a bank with emeralds in his pockets. Amid abject poverty, left that country in the middle of apartheid with that wealth, and then exploited the system of unequal birth and growth to take on a position of supremacy over other people. It's nonsense. It's the best thing in the world that he admits that he's sort of supporting this growth model, because it shows just how fallacious the system is, he didn't do anything other than ride a wave of unsustainable growth that put costs on other people. And I segue into him, because I think when you talk to some people who you think care about children or the environment, and they're telegraphing to you that they're worried about the state getting involved in reproductive rights, just realize that there's a person behind them, usually growth economics, who's telling them to say that because they don't want to question the fundamental system of growth that created the wealth, and a handful of people on top.

    Nandita Bajaj 37:22

    And we don't even have to worry about projecting what it would look like for the state to get involved in people's reproductive rights because the state is already very involved in people's reproductive rights. You know, as you brought up, that's where we talk about coercive pronatalism, or, you know, subtle or overt forms of pronatalism that are pushing people to have children to fulfill some kind of a growth model that is happening on the backs of those who are often most vulnerable. And that's where pronatalism and Fair Start jive so well together. To your point, a lot of people have not really examined to what degree they actually want children or they're ready for children. For many people, it's just an automatic, especially if you're being incentivized to have children. So the state is already quite involved in people's reproductive arena. It's just when you get so used to the norm being pronatalism, anything that's opposing pronatalism is seen as an attack on our rights. But what we're not seeing is our rights are already under attack. Our autonomy, our liberation, our self-determination is already under attack. And so what I see you bringing to the fore with your philosophies that you're not just trying to fix the surface problems of wealth redistribution separately, climate crisis, the nonhuman exploitation crisis, the human rights crisis, you really are looking at the root cause of all the issues which is - it starts at birth. I can see why it comes across as so complex and pie in the sky thinking because it is difficult for people to delve that deeply into so many different issues all at once. And of course, you know, the thing we're talking about here, reproduction, is considered to be the most personal, the most sacred. And to your point, also seen as the most isolated decision that people make rather than an interpersonal, other regarding decision that impacts not just us, not just our prospective children, but everyone around us, including the planet and future generations.

    Carter Dillard 39:45

    And to your point about pronatalism. And I think two good examples are Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, nobody questions that in the middle of the climate crisis opted to double or in some cases triple The Child Tax Credit as a means specifically of responding to falling fertility rates. The government is using taxpayer money to pay people to have children with no regard to the minimum levels of welfare that those children will enter, no attempt to give them birth equity, no attempt to account for the impact of the climate crisis. Government's using taxpayer dollars to undo any progress it might be making on the climate crisis by encouraging growth. And if we look at it that way, I think you understand, as Nandita put it, just how important the growth imperative is, and that's using women in order to basically create consumers, workers, and taxpayers for the state. It's a form of slavery. Again, and another example of just how, in my opinion, pervasive pronatalism is, and the growth imperative, are the historic teen pregnancy campaigns. Every demographer, every modeler, knew that if you had extended the campaign against teen pregnancy to a campaign that had discouraged pregnancy, not just in teens, but in your early twenties, you would have actually gotten much better outcomes in terms of economic equity, personal development, educational goals, social development goals - basically the SDGs, the sustainable development goals. But they were not willing to say we're going to extend it into say twenty-five or so, we're gonna try to discourage pregnancy before age twenty-five. But they knew that that all of the indicators suggested we would have gotten a lot closer to the SDGs had they done that. That's just shows you that they require growth. They didn't want to do it because they were going to intentionally evade improving outcomes towards the Sustainable Development Goals, because the growth models were necessary for corporations and for governments to hit their targets. And I'll end that with an anecdote to say, and I don't like relying on anecdotes, there's plenty of science behind what I just claimed. But there's also the anecdote that, in my experience, it was the twenties where people really figured out what they wanted to do in life where they had, through college or otherwise, began to question things that they had been taught, where they experimented with different careers, where they experimented with resisting the familial models that they'd been raised under. And that's very hard to do if you are immediately saddled with parenthood. In some ways, we robbed people of that opportunity by not nudging them through child tax credit policy, for example, nudging them in the direction of maybe holding off on having children until they were past twenty-five. Because the difference between an eighteen-year-old and a twenty-three-year-old, I think the fact that we ignore the science was telling us to extend teen pregnancy analyses into the mid-twenties was indicative of just how little we cared about people.

    Alan Ware 42:46

    That's interesting. Yeah, I wasn't aware of that. But it makes perfect sense. Yeah, having children in your early twenties makes life hard in so many ways, too.

    Nandita Bajaj 42:54

    And it reinforces this point that you keep making, Carter, that people are often seen as numbers within this growth model. And whether children are being born to an eighteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old, they are additional consumers, taxpayers, you know, that are being added to the population.

    Carter Dillard 43:15

    100%. Yeah, and that's intentional. We can think economists like Julian Simon, for this sort of thinking. But I think the value of that thinking and people just say, oh, people are just numbers. And the what how Julian Simon put it was that people are the ultimate resource - that we can use people. The value of that is if we really believe in freedom, and this idea of a social contract, you could never go into that social contract thinking of people as a resource. You would have to think of them as equals in a cooperative project for mutual benefit. That's the whole nature of the social contract theory. And thinkers like Rawls and others, I think, prove that to the extent that economists are trying to use this idea of freedom, human freedom, free to be a shopper in a grocery store is what they mean, they don't really mean free. And that view of exploiting people, seeing people as numbers, is so reflected in our policies. But once we realize that we can't have a legitimate society of cooperation as long as we're trying to use everyone around us, we get out of that myth that there's anything free about growth irrespective of child welfare, irrespective of equity, and irrespective of maintaining people having a voice in their democracy, that's actually influential.

    Alan Ware 44:31

    Right, and that's caring about the whole of the group, the Democratic value, whereas the market value is yeah, what good are you as the resource? And markets become inherently less and less equal over time, as we've seen, and then the laws are made to reinforce that unequalness. So the market power, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, we've kind of had this one global industrial capitalism model that has tried to marketize virtually everything, including personal brands on Instagram. And what used to be considered selling out - I'm not even sure there's a concept of what that means anymore. When I was a child in the seventies, there was still a concept of selling out. But now everything can be branded and marketed, including human beings. And so self-determination in your sense is a much more grounded, organic care and compassion for each of us. And then equality that the market just doesn't recognize, each dollars has rights, not each person in that model.

    Carter Dillard 45:36

    That's exactly right. And I think it's just nonsense for growth economists to say that we're self-determining if we don't have effective voices and democracy, if we are born in massive disparity to other people, the whole idea of self-determination falls apart. So in some ways, we no longer and I agree with you, Alan, I think selling out to me always meant putting yourself well above others. And in some ways, free riding on a system where a lot of other people were trying to achieve a common good, and here you were self-serving. That's a form of free riding that we don't even have to use asking people to care anymore. I think we can simply use freedom, and say that if you are opposed to Fair Start, you're opposed to freedom. And now that means something very serious, because those children are going to be subjected to a climate crisis created by very specific groups of people. How do we compensate them for that? How do we hold the people who created the climate crisis accountable? How do we get justice and freedom for future generations from that crisis? The battle for Fair Start, in some ways, looks like a battle for freedom. And if we really mean that, I don't envy the people on the other side of that battle, because they will be held accountable for what they've done.

    Nandita Bajaj 46:49

    Yeah, what you're bringing to the picture, Carter, is honestly a level of brilliant complexity that you're drawing together. And I can see practically just why Fair Start Movement comes across as a threat to so many people whom we might see as allies in the movement, because there are parts of Fair Start that a lot of people will agree with. The animal rights community will agree with the ecological justice piece, the family planning community will agree with the children's rights piece. But as soon as you start tying it all together, you see there are a lot of the folks in the different movements have stakes in the ground. In some of the other areas that you're challenging.

    Carter Dillard 47:31

    100%. I agree with you. I think the one thing I'd say is, it's impossible to create a person without having some impact on all of these threads, like a spider and a web, moving her leg against the web, all threads are impacted. You cannot create a child without determining their relative position to some other child. Cannot create a child without determining their relative position to their ecology. And you cannot create a child without determining something about their welfare. And/or you cannot create a child without creating something determining their relative position to the political structure in which they're living. So to the extent that groups have tried to separate the threads, they are not succeeding. They're just having impacts they're not accounting for.

    Nandita Bajaj 48:12

    Yeah.

    Carter Dillard 48:13

    So to your point, I think you're right about the stakes in the ground. I don't think they need to maintain those stakes, I think they just need to start accounting.

    Nandita Bajaj 48:19

    I mean, I get it, Alan gets it. How do we frame this new kind of a model in the biggest possible way so that we can actually have some traction with making real change?

    Carter Dillard 48:31

    I think that while social movements probably ought to have particular ideals and goals, the tactics for achieving those goals are endlessly complex. I think the tactics are much more complex than the model. In that sense, I'm ecumenical, I think that you need dozens of tactics deployed simultaneously. So rather than talking about the dozen, and I'll say, at fairstartmovement.org, you'll look at the Take Action page or actions page. You'll see over a dozen specific moves we could make. So I think there are lots of tactics, but I'll focus on one in particular, and it's modeling. Population Media Center and others have really succeeded in by using Sabido Bandura Social Cognitive Theory to show that role modeling has a huge impact on how people choose to have children. And we have featured families on the fairstart.org webpage that are modeling Fair Start. They've had small families. They've taken their resources and said, "I'm going to make these, whether it's time or money, make these available to try to ensure birth equity." And they usually had children in their early thirties or so because they felt like they were ready, financially or otherwise. They are living an example of the model that they recognize the interpersonal nature of having children, sometimes a little post-hoc rationalization to be honest with you, because we're somewhat new, we're only six years old. Some of these folks had kids before we existed, but they were able to sort of explain how they're thinking mapped onto the model. They did the interpersonal work and they're living it. Does that mean they don't have a personal/private life? No, the state is not coming in their house telling them what to do. They live a free, insulated life in that sense. Because the point is that you get to that place of not having to worry about the state by doing it on the front end. They weren't not subjected to coercion, necessarily incentive or other things. And they are living examples of sustainable, just families, in some ways, that prove it's doable and they're not subjected to the state. Now, there are examples of people that didn't do that whose children have been removed, they don't even recognize that they're so economically disadvantaged, their life will be a life of toil for other people. They're not even in a position to recognize how that stems from their creation. They live in a world beset by the climate crisis, where they make no connection between the act of them having children and the degradation of the atmosphere. So there are living models of people who are subjected to the forces of other people, and in some ways, because of the family modeling that they were goaded into having families under. So I think one thing we can point to is, if you're what you're worried about is being influenced by other people, or determined by other people, you should choose a model that maximizes self-determination for most people. For women, for children, for the environment. And live it. And then you won't be subjected to the state. People whose children have been removed, because they fell for the model that says just have them because we need more workers, they're not very free. So I point to those examples when people ask me, "Oh well, is this an interference of personal privacy?" And I asked people, you know, "I'll show you two families, you tell me which one is more free?"

    Nandita Bajaj 51:48

    Yeah, that's wonderful. And I agree, I think so much of what we do is influenced by our society and by the norms. To the degree that we're trying to create a free society, modeling what a free society would look like through your own actions, and influencing other people within your sphere of influence definitely has been my way of doing things. And I know it has impacts, having these real conversations with people, more than, you know, waiting for some kind of a policy change to happen because policy change relies on people's willingness for that policy change to happen. And to the degree that we can create a critical mass of people who believe in true freedom and liberation in the way you're describing it, we're not going to see top down policy changes, because most of us don't believe in them yet.

    Carter Dillard 52:42

    100%. I think you hit it on the head. And that's why, you know, I love PMC in terms of the Sabido Bandura Social Cognitive Theory. But I agree with you, I think modeling is a key tactic, and there are probably twenty tactics. People have asked us what the overarching framework for Fair Start is. And we are unabashedly based in human rights, which is a modernistic worldview that believes in objective values and a particular list of rights that constrain things like democracy, so that we don't have tyranny of the majority. We just simply believe that that list of rights was written incorrectly. It should have started with the right to have children and that right should have been child-centric, and based on every child's right to a fair start. So it should have started with what is currently Article 16, and it should have mapped out what Article 16 meant as a means of maximizing self-determination. And had it done that, the UDHR would look very different. Why is the UDHR so key in that? Well, UDHR happened in the wake of World War II in 1948. The reason we think that's important is because we thought it was unrealistic that groups of people, nations, or whatever group of people, would have been so willing to care about children that they would choose, on their own, to adopt child-centric policies. In fact, we felt they were more likely to just compete against their neighbors by growing their military strength, their economic strength - basically acting like China and the United States right now with pronatalism. China has its own, United States has its own. We thought they would do that against a collective interest. But after World War II, the world took a special interest in collective action to avoid self-interested countries from doing things that were contrary to the collective and that's what the UDHR provided a framework for collective action. So we felt like it was unlikely that we would get Fair Start before the UDHR, but given the importance of countries not outcompeting each other to the detriment of the whole that we saw in the wake of World War II, we felt like that's a good place to start. So the answer is for the policy wonks out there, we are absolutely based in human rights because we think that Fair Start is the best interpretation of the right to have children, and properly interpreted, that right takes on pre-eminence and an overriding aspect that overrides things like property rights, it overrides state interest in the growth of his military. If human rights derived from people and people derive from their creation, then the first human right is that which creates us. Could be that simple.

    Nandita Bajaj 55:15

    Well said.

    Alan Ware 55:17

    What keeps you inspired to do this work? As we all know, all of this can be an uphill battle. And to keep going, what keeps you going?

    Carter Dillard 55:24

    I think it's seeing people recognize the lie that they were told, especially young people who are facing the brunt of the climate crisis in massive economic inequity. When I see that light bulb go off in their head, "Oh, having children is interpersonal, not personal." That is fuel for me to keep going because they see what I see, and they start to ask, "Who is responsible for this? Who benefited from this?" And to me, that's like watching justice perform on a stage. And I love that.

    Alan Ware 55:59

    Well, I think you've created a beautiful framework that when I was first exposed to it with havingkids.org, it struck me as beautifully simple and powerful. And having a future orientation too was inherently understandable to me in a deep way. So thank you for bringing this into the world. Hopefully, that's more inspiration for you.

    Carter Dillard 56:20

    It is inspirational. Thank you, Alan. And we wouldn't be able to do this work without a framework to build it upon. And Population Balance is that framework, as are other groups. And my dream one day is to move the name back to Having Kids. Once the act of having kids in paradigm Fair Start, I'd rather go back to just thinking about it in less political terms. So thank you for remembering our initial name. We hope to get back there one day.

    Alan Ware 56:44

    If people would like to find out more about Fair Start or yourself what can they do? And where can they go to do that?

    Carter Dillard 56:50

    We have a website, fairstartmovement.org, and there are a lot of resources there. We're hoping to pare that down to make it a little more understandable. But we're never above noting that there's a big red donate button near the top. And we'd love people to consider giving. We have a mostly volunteer staff. Because the work does fly in the face of accepted paradigms. We're slowly growing. So people are welcome to learn more there. They're absolutely welcome to help us model through featured families, they're welcome to take any number of the twenty or so Take Actions that we list. And they're welcome to volunteer. So we welcome people who want to help us have the biggest impact, and we believe Fair Start does have the biggest impact.

    Alan Ware 57:34

    Wow, that was a really thought provoking interview. Carter's given us a lot to think about. And he's done such deep thinking on what justice means to the present and the future generations of us humans and nonhumans alike. And I think his work is foundational - thinking on fairness is essential if we hope to create a more just future for all living beings.

    Nandita Bajaj 57:56

    Yeah, I truly love how he's aspiring to take on the microcosm of all the systems that define our lives: democracy, education, economy, etc. And what fairness really means for all of them, and how none of that can be achieved without ensuring that we're born more free and equal.

    Alan Ware 58:19

    And he mentioned that he learned about pronatalism from you Nandita, that he hadn't considered how strong the social forces are that pressure so many people into having children when they're really not prepared to or may not want to have.

    Nandita Bajaj 58:33

    Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that, Alan. I mean, as you know, my work over the years has primarily focused on enabling people to make liberated and responsible procreative decisions by piercing through pronatalist forces. But what I hadn't fully considered until meeting Carter was the fundamental obligation that we have to provide all children a fair start in life. So this has been a truly synergistic partnership between Population Balance and the Fair Start Movement., and we hope to engage in more initiatives together.

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