Fair Start Movement

Author: Carter Dillard

A Simple Discourse: Who Is Fundamentally Just, and Who Is Not
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.

Wealth is largely inherited, and the product of past injustice.

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

KIDS GET A FAIR START AND OUR FUTURE IS PROTECTED
December 20, 2021
Existential Justice and Freedom: The First Obligation

The following is a summary of the thesis of new book by Carter Dillard titled Justice as a Fair Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children (Eliva 2021). The book was recently recommended reading by leading constitutional law professor and political theorist Larry Solum at the University of Virginia.

There is a particular and fundamental mistake in our language and behavior that impedes freedom. It’s called the constitutive fallacy, or mistaking the first obligation or principle (the grundnorm) as anything downstream from the norm that should create us.

Put simply: When we have kids, the act has to be child-centric and fair because having children is what most determines the fair society we should orient from. The collective act of having children creates the people around us, and through their development, largely makes them the people they will be. As will be argued below, then, fairness in our creation is thus the first obligation, or grundnorm (because we are before we do, and because who we are is the product of the norms that create us); its praxis means we will be coming from a just place.

There is another way to say this. Before we can have anything like a written constitution, iconic representatives, or lists of human rights, we would first have to be physically constituting ourselves as free and equal people who can self-determine (much the way we would in a popular constitutional convention), relative to an absence of being determined by others, or a zero-baseline. If government derives its power from the people and people derive from their creation, ensuring a creation norm that maximizes consent — again, imagine a dynamic constitutional convention — acts as a sort of “first election” to bring in future persons as new members (who always constitute the majority of persons) before we ever elect any representatives. And we have to constitute ourselves as if for town halls — with fewer and highly developed people — rather than as crowds of consumers for shopping malls, because the former regulate the latter.

This truly self-determining state of affairs requires, despite our temporal myopia, 1) conceptualizing of power as any form of human influence, and 2) temporalizing our conception of human beings to first assess fairness in the first creation — or procreation — of power relations. These moves constitute us as free and equal people by limiting and decentralizing the power that others have over us. This form of intergenerational justice subsumes all other forms, including distributive, retributive, and ecological, by factoring them into our creation. To the extent we have considered justice in the abstract, we have hidden the fundament: how justice and injustice make us who we are.

How do we know we are moving in the right direction, and that this is happening? Our relative self-determination will be directly inverse to the number of people in our democracies, and those democracies should divide into others at particular thresholds to maintain the baseline.

This dynamic process resolves the fallacy and unifies values like justice, relative autonomy, nature, freedom, equality, etc., at the most fundamental structure of human power. It’s also a pathway to qualitatively determining optimal populations using very specific and current legal standards to determine the values above. We simply cannot create a person without simultaneously impacting all these qualitative values. By seeing freedom as akin to the dynamic emancipation of children, we eliminate false generations of rights that divide values like development and welfare from liberty and we find that truly becoming a citizen requires at a minimum being sufficiently other-regarding to constitute future democracies through collective and child-centric family planning.

Assuring this level of empowerment and equity begins with policies that 1) fulfill minimum levels of welfare approaching birth equity for all future children 2) ensure each child a meaningful voice in their future democracies. This is not about people as numbers, or as population. It’s about making people matter, politically, and freeing them from others’ power — or physical influence, from disparate inherited wealth to ecological impacts — so that they may actually consent or become relatively self-determining. The closest analogy to this, in our current lexicon, is the freedom to associate.

We fund these policies by taking wealth (one form of influence) from the top of the economic pyramid as a matter of right, and thus limiting and decentralizing the power others have over us. This is obligatory, given the irrefutable facts that this wealth 1) was created using an unsustainable and unjust system of growth that violated multiple human rights including the Children’s Convention, environmental rights, the right to equal opportunities in life, and the right to an influential role in one’s democracy, 2) foisted its costs, including the loss of freedom, on future generations, and 3) is most comprehensively and effectively redressed using Fair Start family reforms and redistribution of wealth as equitable family planning incentives. The economic pyramid was built by moving the locus of power and control to the top in the form of wealth and political control (based on the threat of violence), rather than forward into future generations, and to preserve relative self-determination must be redirected.

Again, this is not about population or consumption; it’s about becoming existentially just and abandoning the fallacious reasoning that life is not fair because our creation is not fair — and can’t be.

This shift, which means humans will matter politically, will eliminate the misconception of procreative autonomy in favor of procreative justice. Procreative autonomy largely derives from religious autonomy. But note how it would violate obligations to separate church and state to live under a world defined by others’ religious beliefs, including the ideas that life is not fair because God and creation is not fair.

Consider also traditional political borders: the line on a map between two nations. Existential justice moves past this archaic conception toward a real and primary border of human power — our creation — and accounts for how it determines our freedom, or more accurately, our relative self-determination. Our current political borders mask the way true personal sovereignty is directly inverse to growth, and in ways other political models would not.

The fundamental difference between preconstitutional systems like polities and economies, as opposed to legalities, involves the latter limiting and decentralizing power in the constant recreation of their constituents to make obligations relatively self-reflective. That is what it means to constitute. Any policy that does not start with a Fair Start or comparable transition does not come from a just place, is overridden by Fair Start and is fundamentally illegitimate. The proponents of such policies, precons, will be unable to account for how basic values, such as nature, welfare, equity, and democracy, and the actual people impacted, should relate.

There are many pathways to ensure existential justice, and these include a simple discourse of constituting ourselves as free and equal people. That discourse puts future generations into the stream of power and places their demands upon the living, a move that might have averted the climate crisis had the United Nations properly interpreted its human rights obligations. Regardless, the goal of existential justice is to become part of optimal world populations, qualitatively, that are relatively self-determining and therefore free.

Here are some examples of how to apply Fair Start, practically:

1. Urge the United Nations to interpret Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to have children, in a way that is intergenerationally fair, and compensates future generations for the harm we have already caused them from unfair prior interpretations.

2. Support a recent call for a federal executive order that would require disclosures of past, present, and anticipated family planning and population policies, and their multiplying impact on a variety of factors within the current federal reporting Environmental, Sustainability, and Governance guidelines.

3. Oppose abortion bans as a violation not just of privacy, but of governments’ historic human rights and democracy obligations to ensure every child has an ecosocial Fair Start in life.

4. Promote our universal right to restored, natural and nonhuman habitats and communities, including restorative climate policies, and the freedom these things create.

December 14, 2021
What’s the Most Important Law of All? The One that Makes Us Social

Education is compulsory for children, beyond the massive return on investment it ensures, because it is seen as a prerequisite to democracy. Why? Democracy requires people are sufficiently developed, and have enough of a common core, to come to agreement on the rules under which they should live. But most education laws were written before recent developments in child psychology that show the core of the ability to socialize with others and come to agreement — empathy and a disposition for prosocial behavior — develop very early in our lives, including our infancy.

That’s a problem. How can we have functional town halls without preparing people to care enough for each other to work together? Also, consider the return on investment point above: Education has a huge impact because it determines much about the full measure of our lives, and is designed to impact the majority of our — and all future generations — interactions with others.

All of this suggests that while family planning laws and educational systems are often decoupled, they should not be. We learn at least as much as home as we do at school. Rather, our family planning systems should be the first aspect of educational systems — moving upstream to help assure the social development and educational goals are achieved, and enough to meet that “town hall” standard.

What’s blocking this coupling of systems, family planning and education, that would do so much good?

Big business exerts a lot of influence on our family planning systems, using them to ensure population growth and poor educational outcomes in their quest to create lots of people for shopping malls, rather than fewer people for town halls where their voice matters.

Republicans pushed for changes in the tax code to do just this, and democrats were quick to join the effort. Yes, that’s the level of influence they have in keeping education from really working. They push as many people, through failing systems, as possible to ensure more consumers, cheap future labor, and large tax bases. That’s not what functional town halls look like. But the taboo against change is deep. I’ve worked with animal protection groups and funders whose purported missions commit them to this change, but they won’t support it for fear of backlash– in the end contravening their missions.

What’s the solution? Our political systems are not the final answer when it comes to making policy. Human rights override those systems and empower people to demand change at a constitutional level. Given that creating people for democracy is so important, so primary in nature, we can help intending parents to target the concentrations of wealth and power that made so much money debilitating family planning systems to pay for the reforms we need. Why?

Because people come first, and people come from family planning systems — whether they work well or not. We need to make sure they do work well, for example, through regearing them around equity: every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life as the first and overriding human right. Without that, how can we come from a just place?

And that move is not as abstract as it sounds. It could be as simple as replacing our pro-unsustainable growth federal child tax policy with a truly equitable and ecologically restorative one that funds family planning-based humane education as a matter of the fundamental right to full — and effective — development as part of true democracies.

We might initiate this through a simple discourse of demand and override — in which the wealthy are urged to admit what they owe, we can lay claim to the funding that would link family planning and educational systems, and build the democracies we deserve, one child at a time. We could combine that with eliminating tax credits for wealthy families (150K+ a year as an example, or a multi-faceted eligibility approach to determination) and the savings could be used 1) to increase credits proportionally for lower incomes, 2) fund a federal human education pilot program under the Dept. of Education, 3) accompanied by a federal messaging campaign modeled on NTSB seatbelt campaigns to promote “delayed families for all.”

Let’s see family planning and education as part of the same system, and start making citizens for town halls, not consumers for shopping malls. That’s what freedom requires.

Take action in dozens of effective ways.

November 29, 2021
Don’t Get Scammed: Tell Thomas Friedman That Justice Begins With a Fair Start in Life

Thomas Friedman’s recent piece on Musk and tech capital as a solution to the climate crisis is a jarring poke in the eye for those who decry more geoengineering as a solution to a crisis created by geoengineering. But Friedman missed the crucial history, and issue, at play. Fundamentally, climate change flows from the failure of world leaders to adopt sustainable family planning policies in the Twentieth Century that would have used nature as a limiting factor.

They chose growth, and permitted massive birth inequity, instead. That system also created Musk, which is why he and other concentrations of power are pushing even now for more population growth. They exist because we ignored our historic obligations to give all children equal opportunities in life, and instead treated people as fodder to grow economies. Their wealth is the product of that growth.

The solution? Embrace a new family model based on equity and ecological restoration, and use the wealth bubble at the top of the pyramid – the one that buoys up the uber-rich of the world – to fund the transition as a matter of ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life.

Urge @tomfriedman to get it right.

What is Fair Start?

The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life. Let’s stop counting people, and start making people count. How? Move wealth from the top of the economic pyramid and into incentivizing better family planning and more equitable, sustainable families. That wealth was made through poor family planning policies that put costs on women and children. Redirecting that wealth is how to do the most good for children, animals and the environment, and the only way to make people truly free.

Without giving every child an ecosocial Fair Start in life we never come from a just place. Changing that is the first obligation, for all of us, and as such it is achievable by all means effective.

November 20, 2021
Does the UN’s Right to a Healthy Environment Require Restorative Environmentalism? Probably So.

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The United Nation recently accelerated its human rights work by adopting the universal right to a healthy environment.

But what does that mean? Is the Paris Agreement sufficient, or do we have to be more aggressive and pursue a restorative approach that removes greenhouse gasses and prioritizes #fairstart and other family ecocentric reforms that align our species with nature?

The latter. The evidence is mounting that even small shifts in our climate have major implications for our health, and especially the health of the most vulnerable among us – like infants. Even under current climate changes, they are being harmed. Infants and children are already experiencing stunted growth and death – especially in the most impacted regions – because of our inaction.

What’s the solution? The UN should use the right to a healthy environment as a springboard to a more aggressive or restorative approach that restores nature and habitat, for all species.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the UN’s Human Rights Council to adopt #FairStart as the anchoring standard for all human rights. Contact them at infodesk@ohchr.org and share the body of this post.

The best way to compensate young people and future generations for this violation of their environmental rights is by properly interpreting Article 16 via Fair Start modeling, which encourages birth equity-level transfers of resources as Fair Start family planning incentives/entitlements, using an ecocentric standard as the environmental baseline. This is forward-facing climate reparations at their best. Given the special foundational nature of Article 16, and when properly interpreted its peremptory status as the grundnorm overriding even state-created property rights, younger persons have the right to take the Fair Start resources they need and we will encourage them to do, including those that will ensure future children’s enjoyment of their rights under the Children’s Rights Convention.

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November 2, 2021
We Were Scammed Out of Freedom and Justice. Let’s Take Back What We Deserve.
Moving wealth from the top of the economic pyramid to incentivize better family planning and sustainable families is the best way to do the most good

The crises we face today, from the climate to massive economic inequality, did not magically appear. They are the product of a scam in the middle of the Twentieth Century, in which world leaders in government and business embraced poor family planning and population growth over promoting parental readiness, sustainable families, and investing more in kids. Instead that money, through a process of isolating families and encouraging growth, went to the top of the wealth pyramid. Those who acted stole resources that should have gone into future generations, by externalizing the costs that human rights and democracy would have required them to internalize. They didn’t even interpret the relevant rights in ways that would protect future generations equally.

When else would justice begin?

Today many are fighting to change this, get the wealth back, and use it to most effectively reverse the crises we face. We can separate those people from the politicians, fake charities and others protecting the wealth bubble at the top – and hurting our kids – with a simple language test.

For any policy claim being made, urge the person making it to account for the relative self-determination (or what we often think of as freedom) of the people who will be involved – long-term – in the policy. How do they account for how the people will be empowered by the conditions in which they are born, how they will be ensured equal opportunities in life without their economic birth position of riches or poverty carrying forward, how will they be assured influential voices in their democracy, and provided the freedom of nature. In other words, force them to explain how we can be coming from a just place without ensuring every child a #fairstart in life? (Hint: We can’t)

It’s not about counting people, it’s about making people count. The borders of just and inclusive nations are not lines on a map; they are comprised of people who trust one another, and engage in consensual and inclusive governance.

For example, if environmentalists claim to be protecting a river, force them to account for the way population growth will drive the climate crisis in ways that will degrade the river and increase demands for its use. Many environmental and animal protection groups raised millions to protect natural spaces that they knew would be destroyed by population growth, growth they were helping promote – furthering the Anthropocene. If child protection advocates claim to be investing more in kids with tax policy for example, as them why they permit children to be born into poverty in the first place, rather than incentivizing better – and even equitable – family planning. If groups claim to promoting democracy, ask them to account for how poor family planning and population growth is diluting our individual roles to the point of meaningless, and degrading the civil qualities of the people around us. But the first norm has to be to simply to create normative people, which can best be visualized as a functional constitutional convention of principles – free people – not representatives, and not with the expectation that the norms will require coercion or incentives because they are not truly reflective of the people involved.

Our world is the way it is because we never held those claiming to promote values to actually account for the truth: People are the most important factor in all policy, and people don’t fall from the sky. If officials or groups do not prioritize giving all kids a #fairstart in life, they are part of the problem, not constituting us as free and equal people (and hence preconstitutional or “precons”) and protecting the bubble of wealth at the top of the pyramid in ways that will hurt our kids.

We are at a fork. The choice is clear. Let’s take what our kids deserve and build truly consensual governance. Now, how?

To constitute ourselves as free people means to limit and decentralize the power people have over one another, and we do that by promoting a simple discourse in which intending parents agree to planning caring, and sustainable families in exchange for their future children’s entitlement to #fairstart funding and incentives taken from the top of the wealth pyramid. That’s a true, or physical, social contract, which is inclusive of the majority of persons – those who will live in the future. It reflects the alleviation of power differentials, the sort rich have over poor, parents have over children, and we all have over our natural ecologies. That is what it means to be sufficiently other-regarding, or empathetic, to constitute ourselves as free people.

We can take the wealth at the top of the wealth pyramid – as matter of the first human right, one that overrides government processes and property rights – and use it to bend the arc of the future to create greater welfare, equity, meaningful democracy, and nature. Or we can leave it at the top and have a future with greater inequity, less nature, and bloated democracies that don’ work. We can become free people, and defeat the precons. The wealth bubble at the top is big enough to bend the arc, and incentivize, the future we deserve. Let’s move that wealth forward.

Take Action

Moving wealth from the top of the economic pyramid to incentivize better family planning and equitable families is the best way to do the most good
1. Help us build the discourse of constituting, and of freedom. If someone puts property over people, they are part of the problem. Contact us at ashley@fairstartmovement.org to learn more, and support the Unite America campaign by urging Congress to act.
2. Urge the UN to interpret the relevant human rights, including the right to have children, to protect all generations equally.
3. Support a federal executive order – the Tell the Truth order – that would require the disclosure of corporations and nonprofits role in the scam described above, so that we can hold people accountable.
4. Promote constitutional amendments, in your state, that would ensure all children an ecosocial #fairstart in life as the first and overriding human right.
October 27, 2021
NEW COALITION OF ORGANIZATIONS CALLS FOR SUSTAINABLE FAMILY PLANNING IN FACE OF CLIMATE CRISIS
National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable

San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.

The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:
- Is human-rights centered
- Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
- Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights
On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.

Better family planning is the best way to reduce inequality. Other interventions alone are simply too late.

Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalized human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”

Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model.

Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.
October 27, 2021
Fair Start: Let’s Stop Counting People, and Start Making People Count

It’s this simple: If we – each one of us – wants to be coming from a place of justice, we have to prioritize giving every child a fair start in life.

That means reforming our family planning systems – through high incentives and entitlements – to ensure all future children minimum levels of welfare, approaching birth equity, and a meaningful role in their democracies. It means stopping pushing women to have kids.

That’s the message in a new peer-reviewed book, containing articles originally published by Yale, Duke, Northwestern and other university, by folks at the Fair Start Movement. As the book details, the way we think about having kids is the product of a power grab by elites in the Twentieth Century who wanted to evade their collective obligations to invest more in kids. This fact is indisputable: Those who designed our family planning systems 1) created something unsustainable, that 2) benefitted those in power and 3) hurt the most vulnerable.

Those systems make most claims about us making the world a better place misleading; our creation norm and paradigm contradicts and is busy undoing the things we claim.

Making the fair start change means moving from family planning policies focused on the unsustainable growth big business wants, to a universal child-centric Fair Start model focused on parental readiness, leveling the field between rich and poor kids, and promoting more sustainable families for all. That is the most effective solution to the crises we face today, from the climate to inequity, and starting from a just place frees us.

How? Every day we do things that show we wish to be self-determining people, to be free and not determined by others. But there is a cognitive dissonance at work here blocking that from happening. The level at which we can be self-determining first depends on who we are – on our creation and our initial relations to others. If we don’t use fairness at that point, we end up with power differentials that subject some person to the power of others. We never constitute, or come together as free nd equal people under an ongoing condition of limited and decentralized power.

Take Action: The most just solution to our crises is also the most effective

Our nations are not constituted by god-like founders in the past. They are constantly being constituted by people, as we create and care for them – and the majority of people and whose rights matter, will live in the future. If we don’t start that process fairly, at Fair Start, we always come from an unjust place. We remain preconstitutional. We can do better.

1. Join us in this simple discourse, in which we admit to each other that every child’s right to a Fair Start limits our right to wealth and makes it partially subject to the needs of future generations. No nation, or its legal system, can claim any form of political legitimacy without prioritizing every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, which transfers power – or constitutes – from the most powerful to the least.

Let’s come together from a just place.

2. Let’s urge the United Nations to make Fair Start – under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a universal standard. Nothing exists outside the frame of justifiable we, and it starts with the creation of future generations.

3. Finally, please urge any groups you support or work with to join our call for mandatory population policy disclosures. We need to know who, among us, promotes putting an unlimited number of children, without any guaranteed levels of preparation, equity, or influential role in their democracy, into an increasingly degraded ecological future.

October 13, 2021
Justice Without a Fair Start in Life? Don’t Fall for It. Help us Target Companies Greenwashing and Hurting Our Kids.

Welcome to the Tell the Truth Campaign

Which corporations and nonprofits are benefitting from unsustainable and inequitable family planning – the biggest driver of the climate and inequality crises – while pretending to further environmental and social justice? Federal Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure requirements provide an opportunity to find out and act. Support Fair Start’s campaign for an executive order to require disclosure of policies and advocacy around the biggest factor of all – families – so that we can hold bad actors accountable.

Why not be effective?

We are urging the Biden Administration to do what should be painfully obvious by now – actually account for the greatest driver of the climate and other crises that gave need for a new ESG disclosure framework: Our family and population growth policies.

Nothing has a greater impact. Full stop.

Why report at all if we do not account for the underlying driver/multiplier, and the volatility inherent in it?

We need to know who, among us, promotes putting an unlimited number of children, without any guaranteed levels of preparation, equity, or influential role in their democracy, into an increasingly degraded ecological future. And in terms of the past, we need to know which groups said they were making progress, knowing the growth they supported was undoing that progress the whole time and moving wealth away from effective investments in children and into the hands of people at the top of the wealth pyramid.

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TAKE ACTION:

Read our letter urging Biden to issue an executive order here, and urge any organizations you work with or support to join our call for the order.

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Support the Truth. Support Fair Start.

Governments are failing children’s right to an eco social fair start in life. We know that early childhood experience is pivotal to lifetime outcomes. Why are we waiting for adverse childhood experiences to occur before acting?

Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning. A fair start in life is the first human right – it overrides all others. It is what children are entitled to under the Children’s Rights Convention, and what allows them to eventually be free from the power of others, and truly self-determining. Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always proceeding from, or reconstituting our political societies, from an unjust position.

Ensuring an eco-social #fairstart in life for all kids can have ten to twenty times the long run impact on the key social and ecological crises we are facing today relative to other interventions.

It is the most effective and just thing we can do. And there is no justice without it.

October 6, 2021