Deep gratitude to Vaness Brown Calder at Cato for a truly reasoned analysis of declining fertility rates. If public health in an objective good then this fall is the intended result of family planning interventions decades in process.

But that process was designed before the climate crisis, surely a threat to human freedom as it represents the imposition of others influence upon the natural (or nonhuman) background world that buffered us from one another for millennia.

Can we do more than family planning interventions designed decades ago? Yes – we can use this crisis as a chance to become – existentially – free.

Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle influences like climate emissions, the slow dilution of democracy, the concentration of wealth, power and control in a few, and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them. How? Fair Start family reforms, like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance using an inversion test, ensure that people are actually empowered – in places like town halls – to make the ultimate rules under which all must live.

These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development do and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based. 

Who we are might be different mixes of nurture, or nature, or influential power relations like climate policies, but all flow (and among self-determining peoples should flow) from our creation. How do we correct the fallacy: Taking wealth from the top and giving it to young women to ensure parental readiness that avoids things like parents torturing their children to death, #birthequity redistribution of that wealth to ensure true equality of opportunity, and a universal ethic and default of sustainable families that ensure participatory democracy and the freedom of nature in the long-run.

Family reparations override because being just in who we are precedes being just in what we do. And we cannot assign things like property rights that derogate from our being (or constituting the fundamental power relations so that we are) free and equal people.

Without these things people will try to wrongly empower themselves, and against the wrong targets rather than the people responsible for or who benefitted from the family policies that externalized the costs of wealth by crowding people out of town halls and into shopping malls, through acts of violence.

TAKE ACTION: URGE CALDER, @vanessabcalder, AND CATO TO TAKE FREEDOM TO THE EXISTENTIAL LEVEL, APPLYING THE INVERSION TEST TO MAKE FAMILY POLICY FAIR AND LIBERATING.