The climate crisis exposes a fundamental problem in public interest work: how can a system that perpetuates inequality and environmental destruction be truly in the public interest? Millions will die from heat waves, yet many charities and funders claim to be helping while reinforcing the very structures causing the crisis.
The Root of the Problem: Inequitable Growth
Wealthy families, who initially funded public interest work, did not ensure their wealth reflected actual value relative to an objective standard, such as a healthy climate. Instead, they manipulated demand through poor family planning, creating an artificial audience and perpetuating low educational standards. This system violated children’s rights, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens. The result? A cycle of inequity that diluted democratic influence, ensuring the continuation of a system destined to fail.
By using anthropocentric standards to define sustainability, these funders ensured benefits for their own investments and children rather than addressing the rights of the most vulnerable, such as those in Uganda. Their sleight of hand privatized power, treating democracy as an abstract concept rather than an equitable political relationship.
Exposing the Charitable Fraud
Wealthy donors and activists alike contributed to this crisis by prioritizing profit and convenience over fundamental change. Activists often ignored their own obligations to empower future generations, while fundraisers urged compliance with deceptive narratives to secure funding. Many charities focused on surface-level solutions, avoiding deeper accountability.
The crisis we face stems from a fundamental truth: you cannot achieve justice from a foundation of injustice.
The Systematic Failure of Reproductive Justice
After 1948, world leaders privatized freedom by conflating the decision to have children with general autonomy, rather than ensuring political equity for the child. This resulted in standards that systematically devalued children of color and perpetuated inequity. Leaders also defined power solely as state violence, rather than broader human influence. Consequently, people today face climate catastrophe with no real influence over policy while struggling to survive heat waves.
Family law was used to systematically undo civil rights progress by detaching individuals from the context of their birth and development. If public interest organizations were to account for how children enter the world, they would expose this continuous undoing of rights.
The Fair Start Movement: Holding Charities Accountable
The Fair Start Movement works to expose those responsible for this crisis. Many charities and institutions hide their complicity through fraudulent impact assessments that ignore positionality and birth context. They obscure the reality that reproductive rights systems assume children of color are worth less, leading to deadly consequences as the climate crisis escalates.
Fair Start activists previously contributed to a fantasy world of “positive impact,” such as promoting vegan brands, without accounting for the real conditions children are born into. This illusion allowed democratic relationships to erode into commercial exploitation.
How We Expose the Truth
Through the Tell the Truth and Act Campaign, we urge organizations to acknowledge that their work is undone daily as children are born into inequitable conditions. Violating children’s fundamental rights has done more harm to missions than any progress these organizations claim to have made.
We demand:
Transparency about the systemic failure of family entitlements that undermined civil rights movements.
Contextualized impact assessments with neutral fact-checking
Disclosure of how much good was undone by inequity, ecological degradation, and political disenfranchisement.
If organizations genuinely value the causes they claim to support (e.g., biodiversity, animal welfare), they must take responsibility for past harm and contribute to equitable solutions. Otherwise, they are frauds who benefited at deadly cost to others and deserve no protection themselves.
Legal Accountability and Reparations
Those who profited at the expense of future generations can be held legally accountable.
In the mid-20th century, world leaders deliberately ignored the interests of future children and political equity when shaping reproductive rights. This likely stemmed from their unwillingness to invest in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions.
Both left- and right-wing leaders defined power narrowly—as the violence of the state rather than any form of human influence. This meant that while people had the right to terminate pregnancies, they now face deadly heat waves without any real influence over climate policy or the means to afford air conditioning.
The failure to invest in equitable beginnings directly fueled catastrophic population growth and extreme inequality. These factors have caused significantly more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts—many of which were motivated by the desire to exploit that growth—have ever managed to repair. Today, projections show that millions will die due to the climate crisis.
These omissions also led to a system that treats children of color as deserving only a fraction of available resources while exposing them to exponentially greater risks. As a result, billions today face extreme climate threats despite contributing little to the crisis.
The Hidden Harm of Inequitable Growth
We know that avoiding children’s interests has done more harm than good. By bringing them into conditions that violate their fundamental rights, we have degraded the very ecosystems they rely on for survival.
This inequitable growth has also weakened democracy, disenfranchising the average voter and obstructing their ability to stop these unfolding crises.
There is no way to assess value in the world without measuring it relative to infant health and life prospects, including self-determination. Infant health and development form the objective basis through which humans experience all value—serving as the foundation for health, equity, democracy, and other unifying ideals. It is the minimum standard for political legitimacy.
Philanthropy’s Role in Concealing the Problem
Many philanthropic efforts today avoid addressing how inequitable growth has reversed progress in infant development. Instead of fixing the problem, they obscure it.
By omitting discussions of birth conditions, these efforts conceal liability—and the right to self-defensive reparations—for the climate crisis’ deadly impact on millions of children of color, who are born into extreme disadvantage compared to the children of wealthy white funders.
The Solution: Measurable Standards for Justice
The most effective solution is to adopt measurable standards for true social justice and ecological restoration. Climate reparations must be directly tied to the self-determination of each child entering the world.
Because our positionality—our standing relative to others and the environment—is legally preemptive, we must take bold action to reclaim reparations and correct these systemic injustices.
A Call to Action
The primary function of law is to protect the most vulnerable. A system that fails to ensure basic welfare at birth is inherently unjust. If oppression begins at creation—through a status quo that denies minimum welfare standards for children—then dismantling that status quo requires an objective foundation, such as offset or zero baselines, to measure and enforce change.
TAKE ACTION: Support efforts at the United Nations to replace dysfunctional reproductive rights systems with Fair Start policies.
If you see Trump and Musk as threats to democracy, ask yourself: What has your company done—at the most fundamental level of empowering children at birth—to actually protect democracy?
Does your company’s cost/benefit analysis account for ensuring children are born into conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, the foundation of human rights and democracy? Or, like Trump and Musk, does it treat children as economic inputs in a growth model?
Have you benefited from growth-based investments that reversed climate and animal protection reforms while enriching those you criticize? Did your company profit from vegan food investments that relied on growth and deep wealth disparities between Black and white children—ultimately doing more harm than good?
Justice cannot be built on injustice, especially when infants and animals remain unprotected at birth.
The Root of the Problem
Wealth today was built on growth at the expense of children’s rights. Nations illegally sidestepped their duty to ensure children are born into fair conditions. Instead of prioritizing birth equity, they allowed wealth to concentrate among the privileged.
This failure is perpetuated by entities in the most climate-damaging nations, using fraudulent impact assessments that ignore how birth inequity undid sustainable development gains—concealing their role in the deaths of millions.
A Just Solution
All climate reparations must be based on measurable collective self-determination. There is no justice outside of this system, given the climate’s impact on infants. We must identify and hold accountable those who continue to use misleading standards to evade responsibility. Governments and the wealthy cannot redefine “harm” to escape liability for millions of deaths.
Language matters. True freedom and self-determination require clear communication about our fundamental obligations to others.
The Path Forward
To protect democracy, companies must foster real power structures from birth. In the name of intergenerational justice, we must:
Expose key bad actors who profited while concealing harm.
Demand accountability for fraudulent impact assessments.
Redirect wealth toward delayed parenting and family planning incentives that prioritize birth equity.
Those who made their fortunes through fraud and unfair competition—omitting deadly costs in public impact statements—owe it back to society.
We have a moral obligation to reclaim and redistribute that wealth to ensure no child is born without empowerment and opportunity.
Humans are animals. Recognizing this helps shift us away from anthropocentric thinking that drives the climate crisis and leads to mass suffering. Animal law isn’t just about legal protections for nonhumans; it’s about fostering relationships between humans and nonhumans that prevent suffering.
Most acts of animal cruelty go unreported. How do we address that? True animal law starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that foster empathy, empower future generations, and protect animals. Human and nonhuman liberation are interconnected, as the way we shape our relationships drives outcomes for both.
The Hidden Undoing of Animal Law
Many organizations promoting animal law ignore how their efforts are undermined by unchecked human growth and the erosion of political equity. They claim progress without acknowledging that expansion in human populations, wealth concentration, and political inequity counteract their efforts. By ignoring these fundamental drivers of animal suffering, these organizations uphold a version of animal law that ultimately harms animals more than it helps them.
This omission is intentional. The organizations rely on assessment and reporting standards that obscure the real impact of human expansion, protecting the interests of wealthy donors rather than the vulnerable beings they claim to defend. They omit the connection between animal protection and just, sustainable human development because it threatens entrenched power structures.
The Fundamental Truth
We have collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life. We have prioritized economic growth over political equity, allowed unsustainable population expansion, and ignored the needs of marginalized communities. These actions have caused more harm to animals, ecosystems, and human justice than any isolated intervention can remedy.
Animal law isn’t just about legal directives referring to animals; it’s about ensuring legal systems protect nonhumans meaningfully. The best measure of animal law is found in constitutional preambles and the structures that shape human-nonhuman relationships—not just in laws that mention animals.
The Creation Problem
Our birth and development—our creation—is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior. Our creation also dictates how legal systems function, determining whether they genuinely include and empower the vulnerable or serve only the privileged.
Animal law must begin with the ethical considerations of human creation. Without this foundation, no legal system can meaningfully protect nonhumans. Yet, discussions of creation ethics are avoided because they raise uncomfortable questions about racial equity, climate reparations, parental responsibility, degrowth, and liability for misleading charitable work.
The Wealthy Influence on Animal Law
For decades, wealthy families and funders have shaped animal law to serve their own interests. They support narrow definitions of animal law that ignore the role of population growth and political inequity, ensuring that advocacy remains performative rather than transformative. Many advocates embrace this limited scope because it offers well-compensated work with little real impact.
Growth continues to undo the progress claimed by these organizations. It is easier to engage in performative animal law—discussing legal references to animals while ignoring the broader forces that shape their suffering. Large media budgets promote interventions that favor donors more than animals, drowning out solutions that would have a real impact. But there is no such thing as anthropocentric animal law.
Justice cannot emerge from injustice. We cannot create a just society while violating children’s rights at birth, ensuring inequity from the start. Nations cannot be legitimate if they provide no functional protections for children as they enter the world—or for the nonhuman world they will impact.
The HSUS Example: Monetizing Animal Liberation
In 2003, Fair Start advocates working with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) framed farmed animals as the most numerous victims of human cruelty. This framing aligned with corporate interests, such as Whole Foods, which profited from growing public outrage over factory farming. The strategy monetized the concept of animal liberation without actually achieving it.
The most numerous class of animals, however, are future animals. HSUS and others ignored this reality, treating future beings the same way growth economists treat future people—as expendable. Rather than promoting small family ethics and policies that would reduce suffering, HSUS focused on food reforms within a growth-based market.
Many advocates profited from the food sector while using sensational campaigns to overshadow the macro-level drivers of suffering. This growth-driven demand, not food choice alone, remains the largest determinant of climate outcomes and animal suffering.
The Corruption of Animal Law
Animal law, as the most demanding form of social justice, serves as a measure of broader justice. It should assess how we include future generations in legal systems, empowering them to protect animals. However, from 2003 to today, most discussions of animal law focus on food and other downstream interventions. Few address family reforms that could benefit both animals and vulnerable humans.
Many nonprofit funders manipulate the field by using media, academia, and legal framing to obscure real impacts. Harvard University, for example, claims to improve animal treatment through law but does not address the fundamental driver of suffering: anthropocentric growth. Their policies benefit funders more than animals.
A senior funder associated with Harvard’s program has refused to include abortion access in animal law discussions, despite its disproportionate benefit to animals compared to food reforms. Their metric for impact ignores growth and birth-related impacts, ensuring inequity continues. Many organizations dependent on this funding remain silent, allowing resources meant for animals to sustain human privilege instead.
The Demand for Climate Justice
As climate reparations become a global demand, animal lawyers will face scrutiny. What were they doing during the crucial years of the climate crisis? Did they challenge the systems enabling injustice, or did they serve the interests of the powerful?
Recent direct action movements offer hope that animal law can move toward true liberation rather than performative advocacy. However, if these movements ignore macro-level reforms, they, too, fail to serve nonhumans meaningfully.
Fair Start: Exposing False Claims
The Fair Start Movement exists to expose misleading impact claims and hold institutions accountable. Our Tell the Truth campaign asks key questions:
How do organizations account for children’s rights when claiming beneficial impact?
Are their claimed benefits being undone by growth and inequity?
By challenging these false narratives, we push for policies that prioritize birth equity and sustainable relationships, ensuring that animal law becomes a force for real justice—not a tool of wealth and power.
Conclusion: Be Effective
The commercialization of animal rights as food consumerism is a stark example of how a justice movement can be co-opted. Organizations continue making fraudulent impact claims while inequity and growth undo their efforts daily. Many companies that diverted resources from fundamental reforms ultimately failed.
We can change this. Start by asking: “When you claim to benefit animals, how do you account for children’s rights? Is your work being undone by growth?”
Only by telling the truth can we ensure that animal law serves animals not the wealthy individuals who define it for their own gain.
(The following discusses legal and political theory. For a simpler read, see: Family Planning Offers the Best Means for Combating Climate Change: An Interview with Carter Dillard, Fair Start Movement (mahb.stanford.edu))
The Problem: A Broken System
For decades, children’s right to a fair start in life has been ignored. The world has prioritized economic growth over sustainability, leading to environmental destruction, political inequity, and the loss of fundamental freedoms. Many children, especially those of color, are born into conditions with fewer resources and greater risks. This systemic failure has harmed our shared values—like access to clean air, water, and food—more than any social or environmental efforts have helped.
The Root Cause: Growth Over Justice
Unchecked population growth, combined with political disenfranchisement, has weakened societies’ ability to address climate change and social justice issues. Wealthy elites, including corporate and philanthropic leaders, have avoided responsibility for the crisis by focusing on surface-level reforms while ignoring the root issue: fair and sustainable birth and development conditions.
Despite claims of reducing carbon emissions, many environmental organizations operate in high-emission nations where total emissions and negative birth outcomes continue to rise. The supposed progress is undone by the very systems of inequality that these organizations fail to challenge. Children and animals are left in increasingly dire conditions, without the political power or resources to escape harm.
The Fair Start Movement: A Constitutional Watchdog
The Fair Start Movement is the first global initiative focused on exposing the hidden standards that perpetuate environmental and social injustices. We investigate claims made by influential organizations, comparing their reported impact to objective measures of political equity and sustainability. Our goal is to shift the conversation from downstream interventions to upstream solutions—starting with fair starts for all children.
Holding Power Accountable: The “Tell The Truth” Campaign
Through our Tell The Truth campaign, we ask key influencers a simple question: How much of the good you claim to do is undone by ignoring birth inequity and its impact on political power?
By pressuring organizations and funders to disclose their true impact—including the harm caused by ignoring children’s rights—we push for real accountability. If they are willing to acknowledge the truth, we urge them to redirect resources toward ensuring all children are born into fair conditions, setting a foundation for a just and sustainable world.
The Stakes: Who Pays the Price?
For years, major contributors to climate change—like Coca-Cola and Exxon—have profited while shifting the burden of their destruction onto vulnerable communities. Black and brown children in the U.S. and worldwide bear the brunt of these injustices, treated as though basic rights are a privilege rather than a guarantee.
The consequences are visible: hurricanes devastating the southeastern U.S., wildfires ravaging California, and the increasing struggle of unhoused populations. These crises are not accidental; they result from a system designed to protect wealth at the expense of justice.
A Call to Action: Rethinking Justice
True justice starts at birth. If we continue to ignore how children enter the world—born into vastly unequal conditions with no say in their fate—then all other social justice efforts remain incomplete.
The Fair Start Movement challenges traditional power structures by focusing on fundamental rights:
Political Equity: Ensuring all children have an equal share in democracy.
Sustainable Growth: Holding corporations and governments accountable for environmental destruction.
Truthful Impact Reporting: Exposing fraudulent claims that hide systemic injustices.
We invite organizations and individuals to rethink their approach. Instead of using abstract measures of success, we must ask: Are we actually improving lives, or are we perpetuating harm?
Join Us in Demanding Accountability
The future depends on breaking the cycle of injustice. We call on all advocates, organizations, and policymakers to recognize the real drivers of climate and social crises—and to act on solutions that start where justice truly begins: at birth.
If we do not require deriving and conditioning, we start all we do from a position of contradicting our own objective values – values like enjoying moderate temperatures and access to food – by benefiting at deadly cost to others.
If we do not admit failure, and disclose how much of the value we claimed to add to the world has been undone by political inequity, we cannot be included among those who are constituting legitimate / inclusive obligations and a just future. We are continuing a family law system of getting people to think they’re democratic ends when they’re actually being treated as economic means, then getting them to do that to the next generation. We will be decrying this politician or that leader, and dealing with the symptom and not the existential cause.
4.
If we don’t start with measurable equity for children as they enter the world, and for the animals with whom they will interact, we start with injustice that illegally shifts costs onto and punches down on the most vulnerable.
Without Fair Start reforms, we are operating in a fantasy world where our obligations to others don’t arise from the actual creation of our power relations with them. Instead, they are just dictated from abstract, top-down positions that create the sort of moral inaccuracy that caused the climate crisis.
What does that punching down look like? Coca-Cola and Fairlife LLC do it. In many more legal filings to come, Fair Start will allege they manufacture numbers in their cost/benefit analysis that discount the value of vulnerable entities, who under various laws cannot be discounted.
The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations and freedoms. Without Telling the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in our language, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us.
TAKE ACTION: FOR ANYONE CLAIMING TO DO GOOD IN THE WORLD, ASK THEM THESE QUESTIONS:
How were you accounting for your work being undone, each day, by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back, and condition it on, ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems, decades ago, to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
If you are worried about Trump and Musk as threats to democracy, ask yourself what your company has been doing – at the most basic level of measurably empowering and freeing children as they entered the world – to actually protect democracy.
What in your company’s cost/benefit analysis covered the costs of children only being born into conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, the basis for human rights and democracy? Or did your company, like Trump and Musk, assume those kids were valuable economic inputs in your growth model?
Were you quietly enjoying growth-based investments that exponentially undid climate and animal protection reforms, and enriched those you criticize? Did your company make money on veganfood investments relying on growth, and massive wealth differentials for black and white kids, that did more harm than good?
We don’t get to justice through injustice, and punching down on infants and animals with zero actual birth equity protections.
Hypocritical companies, fake charities and nepotistic foundations that did nothing to ensure fair starts in life for all kids, which means measurable equity or effective shares in one’s democracy, created Trump and Musk at the most basic level.
Take action: If you knew your company, foundation, or charity was making fake impact claims where benefits were being undone by growth that enriched some families at deadly cost to those in vulnerable hot spots around the world, please contact: info@fairstartmovement.org
If we want to protect democracy our companies have to build it through the creation of actual power relations by starting at birth and, in the name of intergenrational justice, targeting key bad actors who lied about impacts while making their money at cost to children and animals. They owe that money because they used fraud and unfair competition, omitting deadly costs in their public impact statements, in order to make it.
We have an obligation to take that wealth back and ensure – through delayed parenting and collective family planning incentives inverse to wealth – that no child is born beneath a line of being empowered.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
Fact: Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, by using unsustainable growth and loss of political equity and effective shares in democracy to degrade ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath a key threshold, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk, has done more to harm our shared values – like experiencing moderate temperatures and enjoying access to food and water – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.
Why? The growth those violations enabled has degraded the capacity of the Earth to support infant health. This is exacerbated by vast inequity and political disenfranchisement that inhibits the ability of the average constituent to change our current trajectory, and all of this loss of freedom and welfare is measurable by widely accepted metrics used for assessing sustainable development.
And yet legal systems, and legitimacy, require the measurable inclusion of constituents in order to be representative, and to legitimately claim exclusive use of violence to ensure compliance with the law. Illegitimate use of violence, of course, breeds violence.
How could we account for fundamental obligations without first ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions, the fundament of empowering relations?
And yet several organizations in high-emission nations have been running animal protection and environmental campaigns – our most demanding ideals – by fundraising on claims of reduced emissions, while total emissions and negative infant outcomes are rising, the claimed reductions in emissions having been vastly undone by growth, an enabled by political inequity. More and more children and animals have been brought into conditions with no resources with which to deal with the impact of the growing emissions, lack of political influence, and degrading eco-social safety systems.
Human birth and development is the largest determinant of all outcomes we experience. It is thus the fundamental driver of the climate crisis – not just emissions, but political influence to control them, and resilience to deal with them. And yet even now, wealthy funders driving social justice reforms are hiding their liability for the violations and undoing – and undoing that moved wealth into their hands, and undoing that is costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barrierswho should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in violations of he rights of children and animals. We contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent base value of being free.
How then could we account for fundamental obligations without ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions?
If they are willing to tell the truth, we urge key barriers to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today.
Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “non-constituitive ” barriers – those who refuse to derive authority and entitlement back to demonstrably empowering the constituents from whose sovereignty these things flow and are conditioned upon. While nonviolence is key these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.
Children Healers is a transformative initiative dedicated to addressing the profound mental and emotional toll experienced by children affected by trauma. By breaking down barriers to mental health care, we empower children to heal, rebuild, and thrive. In partnership with the Fair Start Movement, we advocate for a more equitable world, where children regardless of their background—have access to the resources they need to succeed.
Together, we are focused on ensuring that the most vulnerable children, especially those impacted by the climate crisis, are not left behind. Supporting Children Healers means joining a global effort to provide essential therapeutic services, education, and hope to those who need it most. As we work to create lasting change, we invite you to stand with Children Healers, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to heal and grow in a world that offers them a fair chance at a brighter future.
Every child has a right to come into the world with their needs met. But due to the actions of major contributors to climate change, like Coca-Cola and Exxon, for the last several decades those rights have been diminished to a point where basic rights are treated like a privilege, especially for black and brown people in the U.S. and around the world.
In the West it’s become disgustingly clear, as we’ve watched Helene ravage the southeast United States, watched fires ravage Altadena, and as we’ve watched the unhoused struggle and suffer just to survive in a country that can consume all while outsourcing its labor needs. The people of the globe, and of the United States, are owed.
Regina Stone Grover,Rei Stone-Grover MA – Co-Executive Director, Fair Start Movement, Poet, Writer, and Trauma educator; Commit To Healing Vol. 1 https://www.amazon.com/Commit-Healing-Vol-Poetic-Experience/dp/0578900327
For many years, There has been an error in addressing climate injustices and birth inequality until the world is at threshold and soon bursting. Very many charities and foundations emerged in addressing climate injustices and birth inequalities but the method used by these charities is insufficient in that it lacks the measurable accountability to the death of vulnerable children from harm hidden in Their charity because they didn’t address the root cause of the crisis. Whereas indigenous emerged from the grassroots from Affected communities with Afrocentric model to address climate injustices and birth inequalities but have limited access to funds to execute this model in saving the next generation.
The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal, and fundamentally racist, assessment and reporting standard that hides climate damage liability. This standard is based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard –deriving from power grab efforts by wealthy families in the Twentieth Century that subverted the civil rights movements – used the contradiction in terms of procreative autonomy, and by hiding measures of the loss of political equity, started to silo justice into downstream issue areas that acted as decoys with the work being undone daily by growth.
Reproductive rights regimes based on isolated decision making, which ensured long run inequity, have become the base driver of a white wealthy supremacy that will kill countless children of color.
This move effectively skipped ensuring children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This shifted costs onto mostly children of color, evading hard checks on growth, avoiding racial equity, and ensuring status quo in the direction of power. This racial subversion standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.
If you ask the right questions, those engaged in it become obvious: Their work is inevitably abstract, ignoring the entry into the world of children, and starts by assuming entitlements that contradict the values and impacts they claim, entitlements that enable the industries they claim to fight.
This further cements in place the subversion of civil rights.
In the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign we ask all how they are first accounting for children entering the world relative to what their rights require, because social justice reforms should address this – the largest determinants of outcomes – first.
We can all start to change that, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like:
“We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact?”
You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact.In essence the proponents are using a shell/ponzi scheme, identified as such by Nobel laureates, which has caused the deaths of millions of innocent persons around the world.
Forget left versus right politics and focus on the top-downs: Government over citizens, owners over managers, employers over employees, parents over children and future children, and humans over nonhumans. It’s about a choice of power, a directional binary choice between entitling the powerful or the vulnerable, with the former choice illegally violating infant and animal rights, rather than creating an inclusive system where the powerful can represent the vulnerable.
How could we invert that system, in practice?
See more below, but in essence one can invert by talking about the vulnerable when assessing and reporting impacts – by talking in a dynamic way about constituting relations, rather than focusing on a static national constitution that has nothing to do with deriving and conditioning authority on the empowerment of subjects. Just the way binary gender language erases nonbinary identities, or nationalistic language erases rightful indigenous land owners, static language erases future children as the priority class of most numerous and vulnerable entities.
What’s justice? It starts with existence and birth, or developmental and emancipatory positionality – or what we understand to be the commonly accepted idea ofintergenerational justice as minimum thresholds for children entering the world, though these thresholds must now be modified to account for the fundamental driver of the climate crisis.
Fair Start’s research shows that – given the millions of deaths being caused by the climate crisis – ignoring this factor meant that many charities on balance did more to enrich the families of wealthy investors/funders than accomplish their missions.
More vulnerable entities will suffer and die, because of the subversive standard and the protection of generational wealth, than most prominent charities will have saved.
By not accounting for the fair or equitable creation of actual power relations at birth, our social justice and public interest work became performative, abstracted from reality in a way that ensured the current crises. As described above, our research also shows that all legal obligations derive from language that accurately captures our first obligations to others, and given our harming future children in the climate crisis, the corrective admissions we call for here are needed to move our language towards mutually empowering all using measurable self-determination as the base value.
Dignity – and the human rights that derive from it and equity – require orienting from truth, not failed forms of justice derived from injustice.
Change can start with interim disclaimers like “our work does not account for inequity,” as well as making disclosures under the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign contrasting omissive claims that used the status quo standards with new measures of actual harm to vulnerable infants and animals.
After World War Two, aspirational standards for social justice, like environmentalism and animal protection, were largely left by governments and businesses to a third sector, civil society.
But there was an inherent conflict of interest. Large, wealthy families like the Rockefellers largely controlled the sector through their philanthropy, and they had a history of conveying generational wealth rather than ensuring equity. They, and the church, played a crucial role in privatizing reproductive rights regimes, and focusing them on the quantitative issue of population, over the qualitative issue of one’s effective share in one’s democracy – one’s political equity. It was not conservatives or the government that set low standards ensuring the crises we see today.
Without political equity, reproductive rights regimes became fundamentally unjust and unsustainable, skewing what it means to be self versus other-determining by wrongly treating the act of having children as more personal to the parents than other-determining for the child. The regimes enabled prior = generations to abuse an unlimited right to have children at cost to the rights of current and future generations, creating massive inequity and ecocidal growth.
To the extent wealthy and mostly white families owed reparative justice, this was reparations fraud, the evasion of the heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions child rights required.
The lack of investment, the lack of necessitating rights-compliant early childhood development conditions, directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth and enabling some kids much further ahead than others, did more harm than good because it blocked life-saving funds in favor of concentrating and growing generational wealth.
It was not conservatives that fundamentally caused modern ecocide, inequity, and autocratic nationalism. It was the hypocritical liberals behind philanthropy who refused at base to reconcile their generational wealth and unearned privilege with justice, and they thereby set horrifically insufficient goals for social justice movements, siloing justice away from birth equity and into decoy versions of the ideals that through inequitable growth ensured the climate and related crises.
Those concentrations are so extreme today that they can ensuresustained propaganda of an underpopulation “crisis” in the middle of a growth-driven climate crisis killing millions.They use an illegal standard for cost/benefit assessment and reporting that was designed to benefit the children of wealthy investor-philanthropists by arbitrarily scoring their worth higher than other children, in violation of the rights of all children.
Continued use of that standard gives rise to justifiable retaliation by those tricked into being obligated to follow the law without being fairly empowered to change it (what we might call the #equiscam).
The impact claims this philanthropy funded were wildly off base, being undone daily by the growth / political inequity. There is no universe in which those positive impacts occurred – they were simply reported out of context, omitting the largest determinant of outcomes undoing the benefits every day, making social justice a top-down and performative charade, a cosmetic version that started by mis-entitling the powerful and ignoring universally enforceable obligations.
Activists now with Fair Start will admit being paid by funders of other nonprofits to create a fantasy world that made it look like there was progress and a better future, when in reality both were just moving money towards themselves as the situation deteriorated for the most vulnerable. The activists used wealth to create a fantasy world that ensured audiences would assume entitlements that were contrary to the organizational missions, while they were shifting benefits away from the vulnerable and to ourselves.
It was like a magic trick. At the end of almost two decades of activism with other organizations, many of our activists could demonstrate how despite their organizations’ claims, they had quietly chosen policies that placed more vulnerable entities in harm’s way, while simultaneously enriching themselves and their funders. We had benefited from a system of racist entitlements, exacerbated them through growth and the creation of a fantasy world of social progress that hid the reality of the crisis, and that enabled us to now enjoy comforts like air conditioning while those least responsible for the crisis died in heat waves.
We were leeches free-riding on the inequity and injustice of the birth lottery, benefiting at deadly cost to others while creating a fantasy world of impact that did not exist.
There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc. It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy. It’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born into economic use, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. In fact,funders have blocked some efforts to reform the standards, thereby minimizing climate damage evaluations, including amounts, the weight or priority of claims, universal enforceability, and priority uses of funds.
The many public interest organizations Fair Start activists are aware of have used concrete illegal practices, often employing a “social justice decoy” — a weaker version of the effective interventions needed, but instead one that would do more to transfer wealth to certain families than ensure mission objectives. One funder in particular, influential in reproductive rights and animal welfare, told me he chose a reproductive rights standard without equity because he benefited from the outcomes.
But continuing that tradition and policy of ignoring political equity in reproductive rights goes beyond bad acting, like racism. By hiding from policy the actual creation – at birth – of power relations, it skews how we see the world, treating the most interpersonal thing – having kids – as personal. This moves values, like nature, equity and democracy, from defining a subject-level “we” towards being objects in our sentences, which enabled things like discount rates and other top-down inaccuracies that exacerbate the climate crisis. Under this misdirection, the focus will be on emissions, ignoring how growth undoes reductions while bringing children into the world without the resources to deal with the impacts. The crisis is about power relations; emissions are only a tiny aspect of that.
Against all of this, Fair Start, or an equity-based focus, is the preemptive standard to assess reparations fraud because governments cannot create their own definitions of legitimacyin lieu of the objective measurefor that value.
There are a few tactics we can use to change the standard:
1) We can ask key leading social justice organizations:
What were you doing to ensure children’s birth rights to development and equity over unsustainable demand for the products you criticize? We can urge key influencers who might act as barriers to fair starts, and whose role modeling and inversion of political system would have a large impact whether they would have chosen to institute such a system decades ago had they known the climate crisis would unfold as it did.
This assesses the level of commitment to one’s actual values. This discourse can lead into the process of elevating reparations to a measurable level of self-determination, and treat those reparations as owed and payable to would-be parents to bend down the arc of growth and consumption towards child-rights compliant families that are smaller, equitable and democratic.
Why? Bringing future children into the world is the largest determinant of outcomes in the long run, and because who we should be – fundamentally relating to one another based on rights and not growth commerce – comes before what we do, we can take radical action to move the incentivizing funds. Would we really think it racist not to hire someone because of their race, but to ignore climate risks to millions because of race-based differences in generational wealth?
Climate change and inequality are birth-interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action.
This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it. If we care about a particular value, like animal liberation, biodiversity, children’s rights, or democracy wouldn’t we be eager to account for a fundamental cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the harm wealth has done to those values, and what it owes going forward?
2) We can identify and make examples of high profile barriers (“noncons,” or those who block constituting a just future), many of whom would have funded social justice “decoy” philanthropy:
Failure to resolve this injustice takes the debtors outside of deserving public (legal/inclusive) protection because by their bypassing child-rights compliant positionality and formation of relations, it would be impossible to account for their being included in a comprehensive system of obligation/rights that actually accounts for the costs and benefits of birth positionality. While nonviolence is key, these barriers fall outside of a legitimate “we” deserving of protection because they deny it to others, and because they rely on systems of state violence to protect themselves without actually empowering others subject to that violence in a way that makes the state legitimate and representative.
They are fundamentally illegal, and not based on an assessment using fictitious borders like lines on a globe, but the true border to self v. other determination controlled by who – via creation – we actually share the world with. In such an assessment and the horrors of the climate crisis, those seen as leaders become targets.
They deserve as much as they necessitate for the most vulnerable.No rights for infants in creation, rights that act as cost limits on our behavior, means no rights for the cost evaders. It was this override, the primacy of creation positionality and its impact on political equity, that those behind the racial subversion standard described above were likely terrified of, and hiding.
But their wealth was fundamentally made at cost to our freedom, and the freedom of others, and there is no reason we should not take it back in order to fundamentally liberate. Their behavior, each day, is evidence of whether they ensure legitimacy, or collective freedom from power, or assume illegal entitlements to benefit at deadly cost to others while masquerading as free.
This tactic can begin by asking government officials, wealthy individuals and families, and key leaders across all sectors whether they think kids deserve a fair start on life; how they are accounting for entitlements that ensure children only being born into conditions that comply with their rights under the Children’s Convention so that we can all share a legitimate, or a rights-based, political system; and to admit their entitlements derive from and are conditioned upon an obligation to measurably empower the constituents in a way that actually justifies governance.
This can include focusing on the adult children of key targets, who under the preemptive standards above would inherit the death debt of their parents.
Academia should be objective and that doesn’t mean ignoring one’s positionality. It actually means first accounting for it, especially to avoid contradictory exploitation and entitlements that conflict with one’s values.
There is no accurate evaluation, no assessment of values, without inclusive positioning.
If the micro-liberation of nonhumans looks like open rescues at factory farms, the macro would look like “real new deal” social contract demands for reparations in exchange for child-centric planning that would ensure a truly climate-restored and bio-diverse future in which humans areempathetic enough to be inclined to treat nonhumans well. But many academics, whose interests do not align with macro reforms, ignore the latter.
Regardless, there is no room for continued debate under the status quo entitlements, as the death rate climbs. Illegal power derives from the illusion of representative authority, which is used to to justify the exclusive right to use of violence.
That illegitimacy, that abuse, is what breeds all violence. How do we react well?
Free persons will only follow rules that are fair, and the first rule accounts for our creation or positioning into the system of rules, so that we are more self-determining than determined by others. The most basic legal rule of all – after World War Two and objective limits (human rights) on subjective individual and national sovereignty – requires representatives and property-rights claimants to derive their authority from those they claim to represent, from an objective system of empowerment.
Because of the racial subversion standard, that never occurred. Leaders exploited the arbitrary nature of the birth lottery, rather than ending it. That subversion is so internalized today that major figures in justice advocacy, like Martha Nussbaum and Michael Sandel, never even touch on the main driver of the climate crisis. God did not create them into relative positions of safety and benefit, bad policy did.
Telling the truth allows us to see who is sufficiently other-regarding to be included in the “we,” or those who support capacity for self determination, versus those who were engaged in a performative version of justice without covering the actual costs.
Telling the truth allows everyone to relate their experiences to the dynamic reality of the most vulnerable, children entering the world and impacting animals – in the actual first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful.
All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base. Language that accurately reflects and forms obligations has to be accessible to the people who are engaged in the discourse – meaning it definitely is not a traditional national constitution.
There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down with them. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all.
Above all, this is the most important thing to remember:
Law must be interpreted to legitimate itself, and the areas of positive law necessary to carry the Fair Start reform forward, including constitutional, fraud, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental, nationality, democracy, civil rights, and others, must be preemptively interpreted to ensure inclusion and representation. As such, treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as others must be enforced by the ultimate source of authority, the people, through things like the Tell the Truth campaign, and demand for reparations payments from key concentrations of wealth and power to class representatives of collective family defense systems.
This is not altruism.
Again: It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy, whose authority and entitlements derive from and are conditioned on the creation of liberating relations. Those that think and act otherwise – nonconstitutives – logically fall outside of the scope of protection free, or measurably self-determining persons, must give each other.
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How else would we account for unreported and unreportable animal cruelty, which comprises that vast majority of such acts? How else would the law account for avoiding that? What logically would precede ensuring relations likely to prevent it?
There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. They are just being stated out of context. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable
The undoing of their claimed beneficial work, and their masking of growth as the fundamental driver of the climate crisis, was enabled by the assessment and reporting standards that caused the climate crisis, standards that ignore illegal violations of vulnerable children’s birthrights. In other words, leaders at these organizations chose a version of animal law that – at base – excluded animal protection as a factor impacting how we invest in children coming into the world, and on balance this emaciated version of animal law did more harm to animals than these organizations did to benefit them.
We can fix this mess by moving what we claim to value – animal protection and liberation – into our fundamental constitutional regimes. How?
It starts with Telling the Truth:
Facts: We have all collectively violated children’s right to a fair start in life, by allowing unsustainable growth, trading economic growth for loss of political equity, ensuring the degrading of ecosocial birth and development conditions beneath key thresholds, and assuming children of color deserved much fewer resources and much more risk. This has done more to harm our shared values – animal protection and liberation, experiencing moderate temperatures, enjoying access to food and water, etc. – as well as our many of our public interest missions, than we did to further them.
“Animal law” does not mean talking about abstract directives that refer to animals, and relying in good intentions and symbolic acts to achieve animal protection. Yes, advocates may have better intentions than Exxon, but how much do animals care about our intentions, and why not measure justice from an objective standard rather than use bad actors as the standard?
It’s first and foremost about having functionally protective, legal relations with nonhumans, an idea better reflected in the preambles of constitutions than any reference or lack of reference to animals per se.
Background
Humans are animals and our birth and development – our creation – is the largest determinant of nonhuman suffering. It outweighs any other human behavior that impacts nonhumans, exponentially. Our creation also determines how – through participatory democracy and representation, or what is really just political equity or our functional shared in democracy – our legal systems function.
Animal law starts with that issue – the creation of humans – the first necessary condition for something to be animal law and capable of protecting them. It starts at the subject level of our grammar, the “we” in our constitutions, or the creation-accounted-for existence of our relations with them.
AI systems adept at assessing racial injustice can detect equity values at the subject-level of value claims (and those values will alter the human-animal relations), versus the object level of those claims. Consider the need to distinguish between something like equity in hiring decisions versus who is birth-positioned to make those hiring decisions. A goal for permissible climate emissions as the object of a sentence differs greatly from a low emissions standard implicit in the “we” subject of the same claim, with that collective subject implying the ability of all referenced to be free from harmful emissions. Permissible emissions as a goal/object frames the political system as consensual and legitimate (especially from the perspective of nonhumans), which it would not be without restoration as a condition of the collective subject.
But instead, these issues are rarely discussed because creation ethics, unlike food, zoning, shelter, etc. policies, involve big questions of racial equity, climate reparations, personal responsibility in parenting, de-growth and liability for charitable fraud that hid the drivers of the climate crisis.
Creation ethics as a subject, threaten the nepotistic families and funders who for decades have used their wealth to define animal law in a narrow way, relying on advocates eager to get the benefits of well compensated but low-impact charade work, contrary to the interests of nonhumans and vulnerable humans. Every day growth undoes the impacts and benefits animal lawyers and others advocates claim to produce. But few will admit that.
Performative Animal Law
It’s easier to engage in performative animal law where we just talk about how legal language refers to animals, while the actual benefits to animals and vulnerable humans are undone via inequity and growth, and we enjoy the benefits of our growth based investments and institutions. It’ s easier to use wealth made at cost to animals to create interventions that are being undone daily, in ways that benefit those creating the interventions more than animals, using large media budgets to drown out possible interventions that would on balance benefit animals. But there is no such thing as anthrocentric animal law.
You don’t get to justice by starting with injustice, by violating children’s rights in the birth-creation of actual relations. We don’t get to legitimate nations by having zero functional protections for children as they enter the world, and thus for the nonhuman world they will impact.
For example, circa 2003 Fair Start advocates previously working with the Humane Society of the United States (“HSUS”) embarked on a policy to frame farmed animals as the most numerous class of animals subject suffering at the hands of humans. We did this while partnering with Whole Foods and other entities intent on commercializing the growing anger HSUS and others would create by publicizing the treatment of farmed animals. We had found a way to monetize the idea of animal liberation, but not actually accomplish it.
But HSUS and others chose to focus on food reforms, all of which assumed growth-based food markets. While the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas, looked at issues of human justice, that turn – to focus on food sales over fundamental justice – is the greatest example of the phenomenon he saw, once we measure by the numbers of victims impacted.
Many of the funders, legal advocates and activists working on these issues at the time would go on to make a lot of money in the food sector, in the years to follow, having used sensational campaigns centered on granular/micro issues of animal suffering that overshadowed the macro forces – like growth-driven demand – undoing the work. That growth driving more and more animals into suffering and acting as the largest diver of climate outcomes.
How does this relate to animal law specifically? Animal law is arguably the most demanding form of social justice, and thus a good measure for how systems fare in being just or unjust. It purports, in referring to a legal system capable of actually protecting nonhumans, to be inclusive of the vulnerable in a measurable way.
Animal law goes beyond impacts, and requires assessments about how we are including future children into legal systems in ways that empower those children and legitimate the systems. Look closely at all of the content being created and framed as “animal law,” from 2003 until today. You will see a lot of focus on food and similar downstream-only interventions. Look then for comparable work on family reforms that would have benefitted nonhumans, and vulnerable humans, alike. You will be surprised to find little if any, and with some of the organizations actually encouraging growth that ignores children’s rights in favor of economic growth.
In many cases the funding of animal nonprofits exemplifies a next-level expansion of the corruption that is well documented in philanthropy: The use of well-funded messaging, media, academia, etc. to limit the ability of audiences to use accurate criteria to judge the truth and value of claims and impact.
In one case, those designing programming at Harvard University define the scope of their work in an inaccurate way that implies a beneficial overall impact on animals that is totally unsupported by their work. When political equity is factored in, the scope privileges those funding the work more than the animals they claim to protect. The site refers to the program as “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system,” and yet nothing in their policies or work addresses the fundamental driver of animal suffering and death because that driver—anthrocentric growth—benefits the school and their funders.
One senior funder, associated with the program, is known for creating digests of animal law developments. That funder has refused requests to cover developments in abortion access precedent as “animal law” because, according to their representative at the time, the idea of “animal law” required legal developments that discussed animals. They ignore legal reforms around abortion access as a benefit to animals, despite the disproportionate benefit abortion access has for animals, relative to food. They define animal law in ways that ignore the largest determinants for animals, things like the notion of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
That standard – which is the same one used by a notorious milk brand – is key for the funder, because their entity is highly nepotistic, spending more on family members compensation than on policies capable of actually benefitting animals. Many of the entities relying on funds from funder avoid talking about this issue for obvious, but unethical, reasons. That silence ensures funds meant to benefit animals don’t – on balance – have that effect, while deadly inequity between humans grows.
In fact, many animal lawyers have continued to double down, explicitly embracing anthropocentric systems that have benefitted their funders more than animals. Why does all of this matter? Demands for climate reparations are growing, and many will be wondering what those attorneys and advocates working under the mantle of protecting the most vulnerable were doing during the most crucial years of us all knowing the climate crisis was unfolding, years when we were able to do something about it.
Animal lawyers, more than most, will have questions to answer for their role.
Were they advocating for performative behavior-changing standards without changing the fundamental relations being created, focusing on micro propertyhood, while hiding a much more lethal form of macro propertyhood? What role did funders making money on the latter, those who did not want to question their or their kids’ birth-based national, intergenerational, racial, etc. positionality, have in that fallacy?
If we have account for way inequity and growth undoes our claimed good work for animals, in which fantasy world were we actually benefitting animals? Some recent direct action efforts give promise that animal law can move towards animal liberation, and not just talking about it while living in ways – fundamental ways – that hypocritically undo it. But unless direct action animal liberation movements also include macro animal liberation reforms, they too are not serving nonhumans on balance.
Fair Start: Fundamental Fact and Value Checking
The Fair Start Movement was formed to engage in fundamental fact checking, scanning for use of the same fundamentally illegal standard of entitlements that caused the crisis by those who would use it to avoid liability for the crisis, and for life-saving and legitimating climate reparations.
Under the Fair Start Tell The Truth campaign, we ask questions to bifurcate key influencers into the fair and unfair, and in the latter identify key barriers who should disclose how much of the value they claimed to create has been undone when we factor in growth, and the violations of children’s’ birthrights that enabled that growth. In this process we contrast impact claims with actual harm, relative to a zero-harm baseline, or the neutral standard necessary for a coherent understanding of freedom.
We then urge those key barriers to admit the undoing, and shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today. Legitimate nations begin with – or constitute through – rights-based relations, and Tell the Truth identifies “nonconstitutive” targets blocking that process, often by creating a fantasy world of inaccurate impacts.
The Fair Start Movement formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal assessment and reporting standard to hide climate damage liability, a standard based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths. The standard – deriving from Twentieth Century power grab efforts to subvert civil rights movements – siloes justice away from birth equity into downstream issue areas that act as decoys, hiding a growing lack of birth-based political equity.
This power grab effectively skipped children’s rights in the logic of human rights regimes, applying them only after children were born into conditions that violated the rights. This was a way to shift costs, evade hard checks on growth, avoid racial equity, and ensure status quo in the direction of power. The illegal; standard centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation of relations.
Any most of the companies that diverted funds away from successful reforms actually failed.
We can all start to change this, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like: “We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this refers to the use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis – the one that does not require child-rights based family planning. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact? Were your impacts being undone?”
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