That’s exactly what many businesses and the nonprofits they support have been doing of late and the climate costs to our freedom, and to future generations, are astronomical.
How do we stop the #Famscam?
TAKE ACTION:
Target companies like Exxon to admit their role in this, and to pay the reparations they owe future generations. Bad family policies that disempower people are causing extreme violence in our communities, hitting innocent victims rather than those at the top who are responsible for and who benefit from the policies.
Urge any nonprofit you support to tell the #wholetruth, and to disclose their family policies – including internal employment and benefit policies – and how they have impacted and will impact the organization’s work and claims of success.
The climate and inequity crises the world faces today are worsening. They flow, fundamentally, from family planning policies centered around the Cairo Consensus that are anthropocentric, and do not ensure birth equity for children.
These are the facts:
You and your family, as well as the extreme concentrations of wealth and power operating in the world today, personally benefitted from these policies, which allowed economic growth that externalized ecosocial costs on the global south, and enabled your children massive head starts in life relative to many regions of the world.
These policies violated any reasonable reading of international law, treating the most interpersonal act – creating children – as a personal matter, and in ways that flouted the Children’s Rights Convention – never creating the birth and development conditions all children deserve. These conditions should have been the fundamental baseline for any cost benefit analysis, and failure to use that baseline empowered some at cost to others.
Because these policies also degraded actual participatory democracies, where all people matter and have a say in their governance, you do not hold authority or representative capacity through consent, but rather through the coercive political systems of your member states.
You have the titular authority to make informal statements to change this course, and to help the UN adopt more regenerative and equitable child welfare policies.
Without reforming family planning and child welfare policies you remain in a state of preconstitutionality, opposed to the truly free people constituting a just world using the Children’s Convention as a guiding light. That division is the first border of human power, and justifies action to protect future generations.
Under this new approach Congress would have no authority to reject your legislation, or better yet to reject a more radical version of it that ensures true equity, not nominal equality. This is an argument that transcends reliance on written constitutions or even international law.
This is the argument: Nations are not magically constituted in the past, but either constituting inclusive democracies or not, depending on the laws and policies that surround having children. If those laws and policies ensure minimum levels of welfare in the birth and development, at least begin to ensure equality of opportunity, restore the climate and biodiversity using ecocentric approaches, and treat the addition of each new person to our nation as inverse to the absolute self-determination of people already here, those laws and policies are constituting legitimate societies.
If we wish to maximize relative self-determination, where else would we find that value but family reforms? There is nowhere else.
An easy proxy for all of this might be the Children’s Rights Convention – and pegging family planning to it to ensure birth and development conditions consistent with it. We can also think of it in terms of a new vision of Roe v. Wade.
If nations do not do this, they are constituting something other than democracy.
This new model – where we take human rights and their ability to limit governmental authority – could present a difficult choice. It will mean abandoning the privacy model of family planning based on the Cairo Consensus as a failure that helped ensure the climate crisis and massive inequity, though it was the model we all relied upon. And it’s a pro-growth model many of your wealthiest funders made a lot of money on.
The alternative would be for everyday citizens, like the our members, to simply wait for Congress to mitigate the climate crisis, and protect and ensure the development of the children who will comprise our future, while watching Congress operate in total attenuation from its constituents, and amid widening inequity that empowers some at cost to others.
Free people would not be willing to do that. We are not willing to do that.
Scan the headlines of news today and you will see stories about celebrities hard working while also having kids.
These stories are not news, if we assume news should be about what really impacts readers’ lives.
Instead it’s content to carry advertising. In normal circumstances this is fairly benign stuff. But the world we live in today does not reflect normal circumstances. Media highlighting families – reinforcing different choices – without reporting the impact on our environment and communities is imposing costs – on at least five levels including exacerbating the crisis and expanding vast inequity – on you and your children.
That means children will die as the climate crisis unfold, and other species will die in mass extinction, because these people lied. They lied because that growth makes money for people like Elon Musk.
In her reporting on parenting Jessica Grose has an audience of millions, including policymakers around the world. She could choose to promote family reforms that could save millions from the climate crisis, more easily enabling climate migration and incentivizing effective family planning that prevents the death.
She does not.
She’s stuck in a frame of unjust family policy that outs parental autonomy over child equity, breaking justice for the majority:
Yes, we can take the privilege her white children gained by externalizing the costs of inequitable and unsustainable family policies in places like Uganda. Denying that involves a logical fallacy: Basing one’s obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than a bottom-up creation (or procreation) norm that can empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual/physical relations and equity stake in their democracies – in a measurable way involving an array of six factors. Resolving the fallacy entails limiting and decentralizing power at the top to empower and liberate, and by all means effective.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Grose via Twitter – @JessGrose – to explain how she plans to ensure all children birth and development conditions – including climate restoration – consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, not just for her kids but all children. Urge her to explain why exactly, given that the Convention purports to spell out the minimum all children deserve in order to become obligated to others in society, she and others with power deserve the protection of a system of justice they seem to refuse others.
Farhad Manjoo wrote a great piece on the right to rescue farmed animals recently in the New York Times. He just needs to add a sentence or two more.
It’s misleading to omit the impact of family policy, which is hiding behind the story. FACT: Pronatal policies, which intend to push population arcs upward, will put more animals in factory farms than animal activists, or veganism, will ever take out – by far.
Most of the billions of people that will be born in the near future will not be vegan. So saving animals first involves family policy, not food choices. This is not rocket science. We think of the latter because companies control the narrative and want to sell products, not help animals.
This is not a separate issue from anything – family policy is the foundation of everything else.
FACT: The New York Times has run more stories pushing women to have kids because of an “underpopulation” crisis (a myth that Elon Musk helped start), and supporting pronatal policies like expanded child-tax credits rather than Fair Start planning entitlements.
Writers like Ezra Klein routinely push women to have more kids because he is anthropocentric, the antithesis of animal liberation.
FACT: Your cannot omit this impact from any form of writing or advocacy. Try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people.
FACT: Farhad and the New York Times show a conflict of interest when omitting these issues, because the family reforms would decentralize the concentrated power they have in controlling media – and the New York Times is exceptional in this regard. Their semi-monopoly on information is backed by a system of state violence. They have a conflict because they would be otherwise obligated to pay for their role in creating the climate crisis now devastating places like the Amboseli.
We don’t want to live in a fantasy world where we pretend to help animals with one hand, and increase their suffering and death with the other. The fix? Simply promote better family policies that actually liberate animals while doing the downstream work of how we should treat them.
The problem, demand for a limited resource in a growing population plagued by inequity, stems directly from the Commission’s tacitly acceptance of family models – the fundamental environmental issue – that created and exacerbate this and hundreds of other use scenarios.
Let’s stop pretending to solve the problems we are ourselves are creating, upstream.
TAKE ACTION: Urge the Commission and Donne Brownsey, at Donne.Brownsey@coastal.ca.gov / executivestaff@coastal.ca.gov / (415) 904-5202 , to adopt Fair Start modeling and to lead others towards true solutions.
Researchers in Ohio and North Carolina recently published and publicized research that suggested policy changes could increase birthrates by making it easier for Americans to have larger families, consistent with the desire many people have to do so.
That suggestion ignores that way population policies fundamentally drove the climate crisis, on many levels, and created a situation in which large families in the past interfered with the right of families today to have any children without having to condemn them to the threats of the climate crisis and other threats driven by family policy.
Caring about children means caring for the conditions in which they are born.
TAKE ACTION: Urge leadership at the universities in Ohio and North Carolina to admit these mistakes, and pivot research to promote all children’s right to a Fair Start in life.
