Want to Promote Freedom, Protect Children and Animals, and Reverse the Climate Crisis, All at the Same Time? Change Family Policy.

The Fair Start Movement is the most just and effective work one can do. Our work began at Yale and Oxford Universities, is frequently promoted by Stanford University, has been subject to multiple peer-reviews, and has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, and the Washington Times, etc., and many other publications. There is no legitimate form of ethics that does not first ensure children minimum levels of wellbeing. Fair Start gets us there.

The Mistake

In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders made a terrible mistake, choosing to base the right to have children on parental autonomy, or personal ethics, rather than interpersonal ethics designed to ensure children birth and development conditions that comply with the Children’s Convention. This was done so that wealthy families would not have to pay to ensure those good conditions for poor children, and per one Nobel laureate, to ensure profit-producing but unsustainable population growth.

That move caused ecological overshoot and fundamentally created the climate crisis, and the massive inequity, that is literally killing children today. Growth has literally undone attempts to mitigate the crisis, and the birth inequity it causes is the most prominent and impactful form of colonization at work in the world today.

It externalized the costs of the extreme wealth we see today, against the most fundamental baseline for true cost / benefit analysis. Many have tried to hide that baseline, because its use in assessing the climate reparations described below would mean wealthy families and nations would have to pay substantial amounts.

When confronted with this reality, some concentrations of wealth and power have tried to hide what was done, and who is at fault. They have also engaged in concerted counter-measure media campaigns to convince audiences that the world is underpopulated. In fact many nonprofits have exacerbated this process, lying about their progress and creating a false sense of security by omitting the impacts of growth, and thereby putting millions at risk.

The Fix.

Climate reparations are a chance to reverse this mistake and ensure Convention compliance through climate restoration and birth-equity family planning entitlements, which pay that specific percentage wealth made – through growth and otherwise – by externalizing costs against a baseline of ecosocial child development consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention.

Also, because a fair start in life is the first and overriding human right, we can override the property rights that protect wealth at the top to fund this process. In the race of life a fair start always comes first. It is the first form of justice. The process of getting there is more about power than population (and actually creating just power relations rather than just theorizing them), and will avoid much of the mass violence we see today – which flows from the mistake, or what some see as a massive power grab, using bad family planning to enrich some at cost to others.

We cannot be inclusive without this change. We are otherwise not empathetic enough, giving kids what they need under the Convention, to constitute legitimate communities. And as such, we are never actually limiting the power others have over us. We should not be forced to live in a world impacted by children who did not get what they needed growing up just because wealthy investors want to use them as cheap labor and hungry consumers. That is oppression on all levels, and free people will target those behind this process to end the it, and to limit the power others – those with whom we share the world – have over us. They power up, bottom up.

TAKE ACTION:

Donate to FairStartMovement.org – the most just and effective work one can do.

• Engage in the #WholeTruth campaign to urge leaders, nonprofits and businesses to tell the truth about their approach to families, and the impact it has and will have on whatever they claimed to do, or will do.
• Call in (rather than out) those who refused to invest enough in family planning that complies with the Children’s Convention, including the climate restoration and birth equity in envisions. That refusal signifies not being sufficiently other-regarding to constitute just communities that actually empower, and thereby liberate, us all.
• Test people and institutions to see whether they are fundamentally unjust and a threat to freedom: Will they sign a letter to the the Climate Conference of the Parties urging them to support fair starts in life over growth-based profits?
• Or choose from dozens of other actions listed here to ensure fundamental fairness.