The wealth and power of those – both public and private – at the top of the wealth pyramid was created using an unsustainable and unjust system of growth that 1) violated multiple human rights, 2) foisted its costs on the majority – women and future generations – in ways that prevented self-determination, and 3) is most comprehensively and effectively redressed long term using just and sustainable Fair Start family reforms.
The system of growth rested on obvious myths – like being born rich versus poor was a matter of some magical “fortune” or hand of god, rather than a failure of nations to implement policies that would ensure birth equity. That myth was designed to prevent concentrations of wealth and power for paying what they owed – under human rights obligations – as investments in future generations.
Those promoting the system treated the act of having children, something inherently interpersonal, as instead personal in order to preserve fundamental – familial – power structures. They used a misperception of privacy and empowerment, within the home or marketplace, to rob people of those same things at the much more fundamental level – in the inclusive and reflective democracies they were entitled to and which are most determined by the first border of human power – creation .
Those preventing us from constituting ourselves as free and equal people via Fair Start reforms cannot – fundamentally – justify power relations. They prevent our becoming free by moving the flow of power from top-down to bottom-up, through a discourse of collective family planning that physically limits and decentralizes the power we have over each other.
Let’s be more specific, and less abstract:
- Current family planning models ensure horrific child abuse by not ensuring parental readiness, with hundreds of children tortured and killed by their parents each year in the United States. These children were never free.
- Current family planning models replicate wealth disparities that are inherited from colonization and slavery, including a massive gap between white and black children. These disparities put people under one another, detracting from freedom.
- Current family planning models are totally disconnected from democracy, hiding the way poor family planning dilutes the role we should play in our democracies to meaninglessness and opening the door to democratic decline. We cannot be free in democracies where our votes do not matter.
- Current family planning models are the fundamental cause of the climate and every other ecological crisis, with population growth contributing exponentially – daily – to the crises. These climate and other crises put us under the power of others, as the freedom of nature recedes.
These losses of freedom cannot be separated from one another, or from the family planning norms that create them. To make policies just, we have to make their foundation – people – just, and free.
How can we identify who is a precon, and who is moving towards freedom by helping constitute future generations – the majority of persons – in a just way via child-centric planning? Precons will remain abstract and self-contradictory when pressed on how they will promote the relative self-determination of future persons, even when they are asked to use simple metrics like wellbeing and equity. They will contravene values, like healthy ecologies, they clearly value as demonstrated through their own actions when it comes to ensuring those values for future generations – the majority. They will put existing property rights over investing equitably in the majority of persons – future generations.
Free people, on the other hand, will begin the development of any policy by 1) treating self-determination as inverse to population growth (which means democracy is functioning, fundamentally, as it should and moving toward relatively self-determining populations) and 2) promoting our constituting new democracies of free and equal persons through a discourse of collective family planning that would create functional constitutional conventions of relatively self-determining persons.*
*note that the appeal of corporations may stem from their ability to imitate such groups relative to bloated nation states, but their purpose and structure make them anathema to true democracies.
Those moving towards freedom will first act in ways that support fundamental justice. They will want to come from a just place, and they will act as though people actually matter, politically. They will act as though each person is empowered equally. This is the litmus test for democracy.
TAKE ACTION:
- Urge the United Nations to reform the universal human rights regime around Fair Start models that ensure just and sustainable families. Let’s start with UN Secretary General António Guterres, @antonioguterres, and ask him for a simple and informal statement that family planning should be just and sustainable.
- If you support companies or nonprofits claiming to do good work, urge them to actually account for the historic impact of family planning polices on their outcomes, revise their claims, and make reforms that avoid growth undoing their progress.
- Expose false animal rights advocates who treat such rights as contingent on public processes, rather than as primary, and inherent in an ecocentric and biodiverse system of natural rights. Contact Ashley@FairStartMovement.org for actions to take.
Fair Start family planning
WHEN COMMUNITIES AND GOVERNMENTS PRIOTIZE A FAIR START IN LIFE AS THE FIRST
HUMAN RIGHT
WE INVEST MORE IN FAMILIES AND HELP PARENTS BE READY, EMPOWERED, AND POSITIONED
FOR SUCCESS
