UPCOMING INITIATIVES

Legal efforts

Fair Start judicial orders ensure that children are not subjected to abuse by known offenders.

Learn the details in one of our recently published papers. Or read about them in detail here.

Fair Start orders prevent abusers from having, and thereby harming, additional children as a condition of probation. These child-centered judicial orders are noncoercive, progressive, constitutional and reflect all five aspects of the Fair Start model. Child abuse presents an ideal context in which to begin the remodeling of our family planning systems.

Fair Start orders do more than prevent child abuse. They allow parents to focus on rehabilitation so that they can be ready and capable of providing kids with a safe and supportive environment.

OUR WORK TO PREVENT CHILD ABUSE

Our call for federal legislation. Fair Start Movement has called upon the leaders of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to amend the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act (“CAPTA”) to require states to enact legislation that allows judges to prohibit offenders convicted of certain felonies from having children as a condition of probation. READ MORE.

Case in Indiana In mid-April 2018, the Department of Child Service, in response to multiple anonymous phone calls, removed four children from a home in Greenfield, Indiana occupied by Christopher Smith and Chantelle Oliver. READ MORE

Case in Florida  In late January 2018, the Department of Children and Family Services went to the home of Shane Samuels on a child welfare check. Inside a home with cigarette butts and trash strewn about the floor, investigators found a four-year-old boy with a large red, swollen handprint on the side of his face. READ MORE

Case in Tennessee  Sharon Helene Robinson and Bradley Dwight Hill of Tennessee have been accused of criminal child neglect after their severely autistic child was found naked, and covered in both human and dog feces, which he was eating. Excrement was also found in the child’s bed. READ MORE

Case in California  Fair Start Movement is calling on Governor Brown, as well as the California Bureau of Children’s Justice, to investigate the “house of horrors” in Perris, California where parents apparently shackled and tortured up to thirteen children over an untold number of years. READ MORE

Legislative Efforts

Humane Communities is also working with legislators and child welfare agencies to incorporate Fair Start family planning into community-level, state, and federal programs.

We recently sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions asking them to amend the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act (“CAPTA”) by requiring states to enact Fair Start legislation. The legislation would enable judges to issue Fair Start Orders in criminal abuse cases. Read more.

Girl Planet Conversations

In partnership with Stable Planet Alliance and GirlPlanet. Earth, this new podcast and video series will feature interviews with young women from the global South about population, climate change and sustainability. The series will launch with a series of four 15-20-minute interviews with young women from the Philippines, Haiti, Madagascar and India. These interview subjects, carefully chosen in collaboration with Stable Planet Alliance and Girl Planet Earth partners, will shed an audio/video spotlight on voices not often heard on population, reproductive autonomy, and climate change. Questions for these live interviews will be geared to the way these issues affect these individuals personally, the dynamic within their communities, as well as the innovative solutions they propose to spread awareness about fertility choices, population pressures, and our planet’s finite resources.

Humane Education: The Greatest Impact on the Greatest Number of Animals - Those Who Will Live in the Future

Can we reform education law to ensure the development of prosocial behavior and empathy in children, and the restoration of biodiverse nonhuman communities, the core beneficiaries of Humane Education. That was the subject of a recent panel at the University of Denver, and substantial research by attorneys working with Humane Families. The initial research points towards a Model Humane Education Law, which would empower young women through family planning education to build a more just and sustainable future through family reforms that ensure birth and developmental equity, and restore the nonhuman world. 

Knowledge to Support Family Reforms 

How many animals die from poor family planning? Humane Families has developed an Animal Mortality Calculator project to find out, and to inform younger generations of the changes they will have to make to live in a biodiverse and wild future. To support that effort, Humane Families is urging reform the well-known environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework so that it includes family policies, and by dealing with the open multiplier of growth, does what it was designed to do. We will also identify misleading claims of special and ecological sustainability, or “humane/greenwashing,” that helped exacerbate the crisis today by forestalling meaningful reforms. 

Policy Reforms  - Just and Sustainable Family Planning 

Must the human rights regime be interpreted to protect human rights for those alive today and future generations, equally. Yes, and the institutions, like the United Nations, created to ensure the regime must act accordingly. This rule applies to family planning and yet our family policies allowed massive families in the past that, due to ecological degradation, have infringed on the right of current and future generations to safely and healthily have even small families. Moreover, forthcoming research suggests that had our international systems adopted just and sustainable family policies decades ago, the brunt of the climate crisis could have been avoided. Humane Families will urge reforms that make families more just and sustainable, including reforms around access to abortion to invoke the state’s upstream obligation to ensure children birth conditions that promote high levels of development, and just child tax credit reforms that move towards true equality of opportunity, both of which effectuate change at the domestic level as well. 

PAST INITIATIVES

New Coalition of Organizations Calls for Sustainable Planning in the Face of the Climate Crisis

National organizations urge the United Nations Climate Change Conference leaders to protect most vulnerable

Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning for all. It is the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.