We present reflections on the current normative model of family planning and provide a novel alternative model centred on children’s rights. Over the last half-century, environmentalists, ecological economists, and child psychologists have raised key issues facing child rights: the threat of climate change and environmental degradation, the critical importance of childhood development, and growing economic inequality. As these challenges have become more widely recognised, organisations and governments have responded by investing in renewable energy, preschools, and availability of birth control. However, human population is expected to reach an alarming 11 billion or more in 2100, endangering nearly all life on Earth. Family planning interventions are the most effective way to reduce population growth and improve human well-being while simultaneously preventing ecological collapse. However, comprehensive attempts at articulating a human rights approach to family planning are lacking: here is our attempt.

Fakenomics For decades, neoclassical economists have doggedly encouraged high fertility rates, all with the single-minded goal of increasing GDP. In the age of Donald Trump, their efforts have taken on an overt and reactionary dimension, with a massive public persuasion campaign working around the concept of fertility rate decline as under population, and multiple efforts to increase fertility rates and undo the victories those declines represent (Dillard, 2017). But their calculations are incomplete and short-sighted, founded on an illusion of growth unlimited by the physical world, callous to the destruction of nature and suffering of nonhuman animals, blind to our sheer dependency on the Earth’s systems and compounded by a lack of concern for inequities in the distribution of short-term growth and long-term burdens (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2016).

The Order Error Economic systems are unjustified unless they occur within human rights compliant and truly democratic political systems. The former must follow and be subservient to the latter. Population growth and the related problems of failure to ensure children’s well-being and the development of functional systems of human rights and democracies flow in large part from growth economics. Instead of producing objective value, growth economics, as enabled by the isolation model, simply adds more people to inflate economic systems and the undemocratic governments that benefit from that growth. The truth is that human rights compliant and truly democratic political systems begin with the people in them and require free and equal citizens who have time to participate, rather than the growth economics model of pushing women to have more children; children, who, if they’re lucky, will someday join an already glutted labour market and be perpetually overworked and underpaid.

The Growth Fetish as Ponzi Scheme The dangers of increased population growth have long been obvious, discounted as mere externalities in order to preserve the growth model, where profits are privatised and costs socialised. That is, ‘costs and benefits of overpopulation under globalization are now distributed by class more than by nation, with labor bear[ing] the cost of reduced wage income [and] capital enjoy[ing] the benefit of reduced wage costs’ (Daly, 2007, p. 210). Conversely, smaller populations provide workers with more leverage, allowing them to bid up wages, which has been acknowledged by none other than the notoriously conservative Heritage Foundation (Moore, 2015). Indeed, the only group worse off under the current growth model than today’s poor are the poor of tomorrow, who are poised to face not only greater income inequality, but paralysing environmental injustice, having fewer safeguards to cope with more frequent natural disasters and increased pollution (Dennig, Budolfson, Fleurbaey, Siebert, & Socolow, 2015).

Hidden Costs of Population Growth Environmental degradation associated with economists’ growth obsession is only now receiving attention because those costs are now directly affecting human quality of life (Daly, 2007). As the leading ecological economist Herman Daly writes, ‘While the world was still relatively empty, growth displaced mainly nature. Now the world is so full that growth displaces human beings and their activities to an ever-greater extent’ (Daly, 2007, p. 151). In particular, the emphasis on GDP and the associated encouragement of high fertility has exacerbated the unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of population growth (both as to rich versus poor and present versus future generations). Most models that seek to predict the costs and benefits associated with population growth mask the adverse effects on the current poor by averaging economic outcomes rather than looking at income per capita (Ashraf, Weil, & Wilde, 2013; Turner, 2009). Contrary to popular belief, incomes tend to be lower in faster growing areas, and unemployment rates tend to be higher. Between 2000 and 2009, of the 100 largest metro areas in the USA, those that fared the best had the lowest growth rates. Residents of the slowest-growing metro areas averaged $8,455 more per capita in personal income than those of the fastest-growing area (Fodor, 2012). Fertility reduction, while not a sufficient condition for economic health, may be a necessary one (Sindig, 2009). Worse yet, population growth increases the burden on public infrastructure and government resources, reducing standards of living. Conversely, reducing fertility allows population a greater quality of life. Take Japan, where even pro-growth propaganda acknowledges that ‘Japanese people remain rich, live very long lives—contributing to the large proportion of elderly—and Japan is safe, clean, comfortable and modern’ (Armstrong, 2016, para. 9), despite having experienced anaemic economic growth since the early 1990s. Thus, while the demographic dividend of reducing age dependency is widely recognised, less well known but more important is the dividend from reducing fertility, thereby alleviating the need to expand infrastructure capacity (O’Sullivan, 2013). Unlike the demographic dividend, the infrastructure dividend does not reverse as population’s age.

Achieving Prosperity without Growth Given that the consistent benefit of the growth model is that it makes the rich even richer, we agree with ecological economists who argue that the growth model should be replaced by a stable community model in which the financial resources required to support growth could be directed to beneficial investments (Fodor, 2012), also referred to as a steady-state economy (Daly, 2007). A fair model would seek to do just that, achieving genuine prosperity, where nature’s inherent as well as human-life-supporting value is recognised and respected, and the extraction of that value has a recognised corresponding cost, while investing instead in families and ensuring that children enter the world with fair opportunities. Additionally, rather than solely focussing on GDP, a fair model recognises and helps to shrink the wealth gap by contemplating household resources and level of access to public services such as health, education, transportation, air quality, and biodiversity rather than national economies. You build real value by investing in people, not just making more of them.

The Parent-centred Isolation Model and the Freedom to Harm The isolation model of family planning is one in which potential parents are seen as individual entities apart from their prospective children and the communities in which they live, whereby the rights of prospective children are not recognised and the voices of communities are not heard (Dillard, 2007). This model is as universal today as it is problematic. Among prominent entities who appear to have adopted the isolation model are the United Nations (through the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development, recognising, ‘the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children…’) (International Conference on Population Development, 1995); the 1968 UN International Conference on Human Rights (United Nations, 1968, para. 2); the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (United Nations General Assembly, 1979); and the 2012 State of World Population report (United Nations Population Fund, 2012). Additionally, major human rights nongovernmental organisations such as Amnesty International state, ‘Sexual and reproductive rights mean you should be able to make your own decisions about your body and…decide if you want to have children and how many’ (Amnesty International, n.d., para. 3). Prominent philosophers and academics continue to subscribe to the isolation model, often under the mistaken assumption that the alternative necessarily involves some level of governmental coercion (Bayles, 1976), or that children can never be harmed by being born, thereby negating the broader public interests at stake (Robertson, 2004). The isolation model is not as deeply rooted in American tradition as is often assumed but is a product of the late 20th century. In the 19th century, as awareness of the relationship between healthy childhood development and a thriving community grew, the public sphere began to participate more in family life, for example, by intervening in cases of child abandonment and neglect, by providing public education for children whose parents could not afford school, and by including the interests of both the public and the child as factors for consideration in custody disputes, whereas previously the parents’ wishes had been dispositive (Teitelbaum, 1985). Contrary to the isolation model, philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in 1859 that, in order to maximise liberty, the state had an obligation to control the liberty of those more powerful, in the case of familial relations, so children didn’t suffer in the name of parental liberty (Mill, 1978). According to Mill (1978), the state’s responsibility extended to prospective children because, ‘to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society’ (p. 239). With the mounting environmental and social threats exacerbated by the isolation model, Mill’s arguments resonate even more strongly today. Indeed, it is only through this upside-down moral framework that a 29-year-old woman was unable to find a doctor willing to sterilise her in accordance with her desire not to procreate (Brockwell, 2015), whereas a child-bride received IVF treatment at a major university hospital (Callaway, 2008). Why are we more concerned about an adult who chooses to be sterilised (thereby affecting the welfare of zero children), than the millions of unplanned pregnancies that result in childbirth each year, where another life is permanently created and more often than not, repeatedly placed in harms’ way? Human rights and democracy will remain elusive until we begin the reconstitution and replacement of massive bureaucratic nation states, where citizens play little actual role in making the rules they live by, with smaller, sustainable, and truly democratic communities. Efforts have been limited by the isolation model’s inability to reshape the social norms that form the root of the problem (Rachels, 2014). Providing access to contraceptives and reproductive health services, for example, while essential, is insufficient on its own without changing reproductive norms, thereby increasing demand and effective use (Ryerson, 2010). Decline in fertility rate can be easily reversed in the most environmentally destructive populations, notwithstanding advances in development, including increased availability of contraception (Myrskylä, Kohler, & Billari, 2009). In addition to buttressing efforts to reduce unintended pregnancies in the USA, 45 per cent of pregnancies are unintended (Finer & Zolna, 2016), a new model could actually reduce the number of overall pregnancies by leveraging the impact of role models who demonstrate the ways smaller families help provide children with a quality life, in addition to benefitting parents, the greater community, and the environment.

Population Growth and Environmental Change While there is a litany of problems with the isolation model, perhaps its most fundamental flaw is unsustainability which is proving to be our most egregious violation of human rights. Consider that the most current population projections predict a global population of 9.8 billion by mid-century (United Nations, 2017); if the average woman alive today has between two and three children, the world population will continue to skyrocket to as many as 16 billion by 2100 (United Nations, 2017). While these population projections may sound alarming, it is perhaps more alarming that these analyses do not include consideration of the damage this would cause to the Earth’s bio-geophysical systems that allow for human life, and the fact that we have already passed the safe threshold of utilisation for two of nine bio-geophysical systems, biodiversity and bio-geochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus cycles) (Steffen et al., 2015). We have also pushed the Earth’s land system use and climate system into operations that place humanity at high risk (Steffen et al., 2015). Therefore, even if humans were to reproduce to levels projected by demographers, we could not with good conscience estimate they would enjoy any quality of life—resources will be depleted, and people will suffer. In fact, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of one less child is nearly 20 times more significant than the adoption of other environmental practices, for example, driving a high mileage car, not eating meat, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances (Murtaugh & Schlax, 2009). Conversely, reducing fertility rates to the UN’s ‘low fertility’ projections rather than the ‘medium fertility’ projections, corresponding to an average difference of 0.5 children per woman, would likely result in an annual reduction in GHG emissions of 5.1 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100 (O’Neill, Dalton, Fuchs, Jiang, Pachauri, & Zigova, 2010), that is, reductions ‘as large as, or larger than, the annual emissions that could be saved from doubling fuel efficiency of cars, increasing wind energy 50 fold, or tripling nuclear energy’ (Hickey, Rieder, & Earl, 2016, p. 851). This is because effects of population decrease are exponential, that is, ‘smaller global populations in one generation lead to smaller populations in the next generation, and the next, and the emissions reductions continue to cumulate’, whereas energy efficiency improvements espoused by many political leaders and environmentalists as climate change panaceas often decrease over time (Cafaro, 2012, p. 47). Yet, environmental organisations that would laugh at a Hummer driver with a ‘Save the Polar Bears’ bumper sticker are the same ones supporting an unsustainable family planning model far more damaging to the environment. In light of this data, scholars have called for buttressing the concept of the ecological footprint with the impacts of ‘procreative consumption’ (MacIver, 2015, p. 110). For example, even the impact of adopting a plant-based diet (which halves one’s carbon footprint) pales in comparison to the impact of smaller families on the environment, given the aforementioned exponential environmental benefits that grow with each successive generation (Scarborough et al., 2014). The importance of smaller families as a key component in tackling climate change is even more apparent in industrialised countries, with the greenhouse gas (GHG) impact of a child born in the USA over 500 per cent that of a child born in China (Murtaugh & Schlax, 2009) and each UK birth responsible for 160 times more GHG emissions than one in Ethiopia (Guillebaud & Hayes, 2008). Accordingly, a fertility rate decrease in the USA ‘would have a massive impact on both near-term and long-term global GHG emission—much more even than proportionally larger fertility decreases in sub-Saharan Africa’ (Hickey, Rieder, & Earl, 2016, p. 856). Given the strong correlation between wealth and carbon footprint, as well as the history of discriminatory involvements in family planning, a new model would lead by example in the USA, with a particular focus on maximising resource allocation to ensure equality in children. By the same token, as industrialising countries continue to build infrastructure and advance technologically, consumption per person will grow, perhaps eventually converging with that of persons in the USA. Given that access to quality medical care, food, shelter, and technology increases an individuals’ carbon footprint (Fritz & Koch, 2016), a new model recognises that consumption cannot be the exclusive focus of efforts to mitigate climate change. Because this model seeks to rebuild communities, making them smaller and more connected by decreasing the number and increasing the civic capabilities of people living in them, consumption, at least that caused by relative social isolation and insecurity, should decrease. The model would promote equality, achieved in part through smaller families, precisely so that more children can attain a minimum level of well-being while consumption in the aggregate remains stable.

The Flawed Optimism and Limited Imagination of Current Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Models A majority of scientists and policymakers have concluded that avoiding catastrophic climate change requires limiting the rise in average global temperature to a maximum of a 2°C increase over preindustrial averages, necessitating atmospheric concentrations of GHGs to be limited to 450 parts per million (ppm) while having already passed the 400 ppm milestone in 2013 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, n.d.). Setting aside whether this target is sufficient (many scientists believe the rise should be limited to a maximum of 1.5°C, with GHGs reduced more ambitiously to 350 ppm (Hansen et al., 2008; Rockström et al., 2009)), the fact remains that even the limit of 450 ppm will soon be exceeded absent decreases in fertility rates (Betts, Jones, Knight, Keeling, & Kennedy, 2016). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) already acknowledges that implementing each of its stated mitigation strategies still leaves a 33 per cent chance that temperatures will increase beyond 2°C (Pachauri & Meyer, 2014). Yet, that 33 per cent figure assumes universal compliance with environmental regulations and policy recommendations. What is already a risky proposition by the IPCC becomes an impossible one if we account for the inevitability of some noncompliant actors, a certainty in any regulatory context, but especially so in the environmental realm, where enforcement is notoriously difficult (Ostrovskaya & Leentvaar, 2011) and noncompliance hugely profitable in the short-term. Inconceivably, the decrease of fertility rates was not among the 900 or so mitigation strategies the IPCC considered, notwithstanding that, as discussed, a decrease in fertility rates of 0.5 children per woman would account for between 16 per cent and 29 per cent of required emissions reductions by 2050.

An Alternative: A Child-Centred Model The isolation model is not a human rights approach to family planning. It is unsustainable, not based on objective interests of the sort that must lie at the centre of human rights, and treats future children as enslaved objects without interests, in contravention of the most basic of human rights. A model is needed that focusses on the objective interests of future children, parents, and their communities, with the collective goal of creating smaller families that work together to give every child a fair opportunity. This model would orient the cluster of human rights involved in family planning around the core rights of every child. That means all children have the fundamental right to begin their lives in conditions that create equal resources relative to other children. This could be achieved in large part through smaller families that promote a minimum threshold of well-being whereby children enjoy opportunities that are both equal to others of their generation and sustainable for future generations, and future adults populate democratic communities bounded by, and respectful of, the more-than-human world. In exchange, the community helps parents create those conditions by shifting resources that would have gone into supporting larger families instead towards creating more equitable communities. A fair model could be applied in a variety of ways, for example: Through community gatherings and organisations: give young adults the opportunity to learn, share and subsequently plan their future with adequate information upon which to not only plan their own childbearing decisions, but also help and be helped by their peers to ensure a thriving life for their child;

through the use of sanction-free court orders to temporarily prevent abusive and neglectful parents from having children that will otherwise be relegated to state custody (Green, 2017a);

create public role modelling that shares resources instead of using those resources to create larger and isolated families (Green, 2017b);

amend climate action plans to specifically promote smaller and more cooperative families (Green, 2017c); and

Use pilot projects at the state level to develop changes in tax and state budget structures that incentivise smaller families that work together to plan healthy lives for every child.

Bridging the Disconnect With the grave threats of environmental change and inequity apparent to most, what remains is to persuade humanity that the creation of smaller families provides the most effective and most equitable vehicle for tackling these issues in the long term. The challenges of doing so are manifold, among them the pro-natal propaganda espoused by economists (Jones, 1978), and the exhortations of political leaders obsessed with growing their country’s populations for nonsensical and/or racist reasons (Wagstyl, 2014). Even as childfree families become more common, they continue to be viewed as somehow selfish or morally defective (Ashburn-Nardo, 2017). Never mind that childfree families, by helping conserve resources, make possible a better future for those who have children and should be commended rather than scorned. Yet, the persistent stigma attached to those families without children, and the failure to recognise the societal benefits of that decision not to procreate, is perhaps reflective of the most fundamental obstacle: the disconnect between the clarity of the here and now with the nebulousness of the future. Humans are hardwired to respond to short-term, rather than long-term, problems (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003), particularly where there is a degree of uncertainty (Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin, 2013; McGuire & Kable, 2013). By focussing on the specific short-term benefits of having fewer children, a new model would temporalise and concretise the issue, thereby avoiding the pitfalls that previously befell advocates who have raised the issue. This is critical since even those who recognise the causal relationship between population growth and environmental degradation may not be aware of the personal and communal benefits of smaller families (Connolly, Elmore, & Ryerson, 2008).

Harnessing the Power of Role Models There is precedent for utilising role models and media campaigns to shape family planning and fertility preferences, beginning most famously in 1977 with Miguel Sabido’s (1981) prime-time telonovela, Accompany Me in Mexico. The family planning-themed show was hugely successful, resulting in a 33 per cent increase in attendance at family planning clinics and a 23 per cent increase in birth control sales, leading to the development of four additional family planning soap operas. During the nine-year run of the five programmes, population growth in Mexico declined by 34 per cent. Sabido’s mass media strategy for influencing reproductive behaviour has been replicated in numerous countries, with research on these interventions demonstrating significant shifts in viewers’ beliefs about family planning as well as ideal family size (Barber & Axinn, 2004; Basten, 2009). Indeed, ‘nations as culturally and politically diverse as Bangladesh and Brazil, Columbia and Cuba, Thailand and Tunisia, and regions such as Kerala in India, have halved their fertility rates in about the same time as China, without a coercive one-child policy’ (Guillebaud, 2016, p. 2). A recent event involving press around the expansion of the British royal family anecdotally illustrates the power of role modelling in the other direction. Kate Middleton’s announcement that she would be having a third child prompted other mothers to plan for the same (Green, 2017d). All of this is happening while literally millions of children around the world struggle through their days without love and security that better prepared parents can afford. In the USA alone, the foster care system is overflowing with healthy children awaiting adoption, needing homes, and loving adults. What if young parents instead said, ‘Parenting is not about making more people who look like us—it’s about leading by example to make sure that every human is raised with the things they need and deserve.’ The failure to ensure that these parentless children gain what they deserve in order to thrive is an egregious violation of human rights, made all the more so by the certainty that we will continue to create such deprived children by the thousands with each day that passes under the isolation model. With support, individuals may recognise the benefits of smaller families, where the decision to have children and how many merits rigorous thought. While parents may be obvious potential role models when it comes to family size preference, even nonparents have the power to affect fertility rates (Kolk, Cownden, & Enquist, 2014). In this way, new models may shape family size preferences without requiring any sanction or rule of law, instead creating a social pattern whereby norms may be emotionally and rationally internalised rather than coerced (Cooter, 1998). Studies show that voluntary adopters of a particular behaviour are more likely to persist in that behaviour over the long term (Cooter, 1998). Additionally, when girls and young women have sufficient access to education to pursue a future that they can better craft for themselves, as well as access to family planning education and contraceptives, they naturally delay childbearing and limit the size of their family. In this way, they can continue to contribute to society in their career while also being an additional income-earner that increases security for their own children (Basu, 2002).

Promoting Five Fundamental Values Family planning involves decision-making that in part determines the quality of human life, including our level of individual freedom, more than any other category of decision-making. We, and the people around us, are products of our past, largely influenced by the conditions of our early childhood development (Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Morris, 2013). Multiply that influence by the billions of people living on Earth, and family planning becomes that which dictates our human experience. We cannot overcome a ‘might makes right’ state of affairs in this world—one that fails to account for the interests of prospective children without a foundational human rights norm, or a grundnorm, that frees us before we enter the world. The norm would imbue future children with interests that would make them more than passive objects and move the act of having children from a matter of subjective parental choice (Ostrander, 2016) to a matter determined by objective, human rights norms guided by child need. A new model would orient the cluster of human rights involved in family planning around the core right every child has to equality. Orienting the core right in that way answers crucial questions the isolation model ignores and promotes five objective values that are the building blocks of human freedom: improved continuity, well-being, fairness, nature, and democracy, each of which is interconnected.

Improved Continuity An objective of parenting is that a person’s life continues through their children, such that those children enjoy a level of emotional and social fulfilment equal to or above that of the parents’ own lives (as fostered by a safer, supportive environment, and a fairer, more democratic community). The universality of the value of continuity—as achieved by concerted attention to the health and development of offspring—serves as an anchor and baseline objective value that may serve to guide all parenting decisions, regardless of more idiosyncratic and subjective reasons some parents may wish to have children, such as having children to work on one’s farm, of having a third in the hopes of having a boy, of having something adorable to dote upon, or demonstrating ones virility (Dillard, 2010b). A new model recognises procreation as a human right, but one balanced against just as weighty and legitimate competing rights, chief among them, a child’s right to a healthy life. As family size increases, so do life’s disruptions in the form of strain on familial finances and time, as well as personal and marital stress (Cáceres-Delpiano & Simonsen, 2012), making it more difficult for parents to continue to maintain their and their children’s lives. Specifically, smaller families reduce the likelihood of divorce, welfare participation, high blood pressure, smoking, and obesity. The strain on finances is substantial, given that, on average, it costs $233,610 to raise a child in the USA from birth to age of 17 years, including only major budgetary components (Lino, Kuczynski, Rodriguez, & Schap, 2017). As expenses increase, many parents must work longer hours to make ends meet, whereas smaller families decrease that potential pressure. The time stress of a larger family is particularly acute for mothers, with the effects lasting several years (Buddelmeyer, Hamermesh, & Wooden, 2015). Moreover, mothers who delay having their first child until age of 30 years tend to have fewer children and greater economic and professional success (Trillingsgaard & Sommer, 2016).

Fairness It is similarly uncontroversial that a child born into a less wealthy family is just as deserving of opportunities to thrive as a child born into a wealthier family. Yet life in the USA continues to be tragically unfair, with persistent economic inequality (Saez, 2016) and a corresponding sharp decline in economic mobility (Carr & Wiemers, 2016; Chetty, Grusky, Hell, Hendren, Manduca, & Narang, 2017). Fairness is necessarily comparative and breaks the isolation model by asking families to work together to create the conditions every child deserves. Recognising that it is objectively unfair that a less resourced child’s future has been substantially limited before he or she is even born begs the question, would it be fairer if a wealthy family directed the funds they would have spent on an additional child to a child who is already here? While large families of wealth have the resources to invest in more children, they also consume more, which in turn translates into greater environmental degradation that is then felt most acutely by the poor (Rachels, 2014). Worse yet, wealthy and middle-class families in the USA are currently incentivised to have more children via the earned income tax credit and dependency exemptions (Zelenak, 2003). A new model would encourage wealthy and middle-class parents to invest in protecting future options for all. Additionally, in light of the millions of orphaned children worldwide, some have called upon families to adopt in lieu of procreation (Friedrich, 2013; Rulli, 2014).

Nature Every week an extra 1.5 million people need food and a home, which amounts to a huge new city each week and increases consumption and destroys nature (Guillebaud & Hayes, 2008). As Jane Goodall notes, it is human population growth and the resulting deforestation that pose the greatest threat to our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees (Garcia, 2016). Indeed, 7 per cent of the Earth’s forests have been destroyed since 2000 (Harvey, 2017). While some may counter that extinction is a natural phenomenon, the frequency of extinctions is now over 100 times the natural rate and human population growth and environmental manipulation have set in motion the current global mass extinction (McKee & Chambers, 2011; McKee, Chambers, & Guseman, 2013). Environmental protection organisations have shied from the very issue that most threatens the fulfilment of their own missions. Instead of being forthright with their supporters about the human population crisis and resulting impacts on nature and wildlife, environmental organisations take what they feel to be less off-putting routes and deal with other main drivers of environmental destruction and species loss, such as consumption and faulty economic models. We do not pretend these are easy topics for organisations to take on in a highly competitive philanthropic atmosphere, but a recent meta-analysis of environmental literature provides guidance (Engelman, Mastny, & Terefe, 2016). Organisations can help their supporters see that through protecting the environment, their support also helps to protect humans and other animals. As environments are degraded, the poorest and least responsible for the damage are impacted most because they only have access to the fringes of resource use and often live in the most politically unstable regions (Engelman, Mastny, & Terefe, 2016). In terms of other animals, they are relegated to collateral damage in human pursuits for access to resources and short-term gain. It is critical to maintain that species preservation is not just the purview of environmentalists, but should be of utmost concern for all humans as species’ activities within our abiotic world provide the services we need to survive such as pollination, water purification, storm buffering, seed dispersal, insect suppression, and disease moderation. In this way, access to family planning and reproductive health services are basic human rights that simultaneously protect the environment and other species.

Democracy Democracy requires that persons should be able to meaningfully participate in shaping the shared values and agreed upon rules of their community. A democracy requires an engaged populace which has a stake in the outcomes of elections and the development of institutions. However, as a matter of basic arithmetic, as the population grows, each person’s role in their political system is diluted, citizens are linearly excluded from their own sovereignty (Dillard, 2012), and correspondingly, the person’s motivation to contribute to the broader community may diminish. Thus, while Democrats and Republicans in the USA argue about small versus big government, the more important issue may actually be small versus big populace. Consider, for example, that ‘the U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for every 747,000 or so Americans’, which is ‘by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among a peer group of industrialised democracies, and the highest it’s been in U.S. history’ (DeSilver, 2018, n.p.). Moreover, to bring the ratio in line with that which existed at the country’s founding, the House of Representatives would need to balloon to a whopping 5,697 members, or nearly double that of the largest national legislature in the world: China’s National People’s Congress, with 2,980 members (DeSilver, 2018). As a practical matter then, the nation’s incredible loss of democracy cannot be remedied by expanding the House; the solution lies in reducing population. The increased role of money in political campaigns can also be explained as a function of population, with the vacuum left by the lack of meaningful voter participation easily filled by the dollars of a few wealthy individuals (Bartlett, 2000). It is no wonder that voter ignorance persists at such high levels: ‘The insignificance of any one vote to electoral outcomes makes it rational for most citizens to devote little effort to acquiring political knowledge. They also have little incentive to engage in unbiased evaluation of the information they do know’ (Somin, 2013, p. 4).

Applying a New Model The goal of a new model would be to maximise human equality and flourishing by balancing the five core values discussed above by shifting resources that incentivise larger families to instead incentivise smaller families who cooperate to give every child a fair start in life. Family planning agencies currently determine a minimum threshold of well-being for children by using the legal concept of parental fitness as a floor, below which the state would normally seize children. However, rather than focussing efforts largely on interventions after a child has already suffered neglect or abuse, under a child-centred model, the first directive for state agencies would be to create the greatest non-coercive and cooperative incentives possible to ensure that all children begin life at a minimum level of well-being. For example, agencies could offer cooperative funding for family planning services in conjunction with things like state/private funded child healthcare and educational programmes. These incentives could be publicly funded through progressive scaling redistributions, much like progressive tax systems, but with family size included as a factor, so that funds are initially redirected from subsidies that support and/or incentivise the largest and wealthiest families, and then through other sources as needed. Subsequent application of the model would repeat the process, moving away from the margins of fitness towards more aspirational targets, like the Children’s Rights Convention, and moving down the scale in terms of funding sources, towards parity. How to advocate for a new model in the face of political resistance? The model could be realised using justice programmes that target the isolation model through local, state, federal, and international law reforms, especially in the area of tax, family, environmental law, and a radical form of federalism that gradually subdivides polities and emancipates truly democratic-sized communities as they develop; corporate programmes that encourage for-profit companies to adopt the model in their benefit programmes and non-profit companies to adopt the model as part of their advocacy; and grassroots programmes where families voluntarily adopt the model working in conjunction with other families. It’s vital to keep in mind that this model would be the re-imagination, articulation, and balancing of the values at the core of a valid human rights system, sharing them in a way to eliminate conflicts and ensure a functional system. It would be a political evolution towards a unified right that creates the human in human rights systems. Because the Fair Start model comprehensively accounts for how humans exercise power over each other, from the entry of future generations to the edge of the nonhuman world, and because we are before we do, it is likely the grundnorm- a prior norm that, as such, theoretically overrides all conflicting norms. (Dillard, 2015, p. 10398)

Conclusion Stated most simply, rather than disconnecting the process of deciding to bring children into this world and the process of actually caring for those children, the model would connect the two. Doing so will allow for cooperation between parents who will plan with their communities to bring children into this world so as to ensure that all receive the vital array of resources they need to develop into full democratic citizens living in a healthy, sustainable, and fair world.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.