Fair Start Movement

Category: Campaigns & Accountability

Don’t Get Scammed: Is Your Charity Going Backwards?
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.

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March 25, 2025
How Fake Liberals Enabled Musk and the Climate Crisis And Why Real Change Goes Beyond Left vs. Right

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.

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign

March 25, 2025
Yes, You Created Musk and Trump. Take Action
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.

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign
March 25, 2025
What is Animal Law? Don’t Get Scammed. It’s a High Ideal Being Hidden
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.

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign
March 25, 2025
Fair Start Movement is Exposing Reparations Fraud and Hidden Climate Crisis Liability
(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.

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign
March 25, 2025
Tell the Truth Campaign: Ensuring Birth Equity as the First Human Right
The Tell the Truth campaign calls on all who claim to improve the world to report their impacts in the context of children entering the world—relative to the rights and conditions they are promised.

Are organizations truly accounting for the life experiences of the most vulnerable—infants and the animals they will impact? When we evaluate this honestly, we see how today’s ecological and political crises arose: those who appeared to be making progress were, in reality, reinforcing inequality and environmental destruction.

Exposing the Truth

We are fact-checking organizations that claim to support justice but fail to account for birth equity and sustainability, including:
- The Weeden Foundation
- Mercy for Animals
- Wikipedia and the Center for Biological Diversity
- Animal Rights Philanthropist Brad Goldberg
This process reveals how public interest efforts often use flawed standards that hide their role in worsening the crises they claim to solve. By failing to prioritize birth equity, they reinforce systemic injustice, climate devastation, and political inequality.

The Core Issue: A Flawed Standard Driving Global Crises

For decades, nonprofits, media, and business leaders ignored the impact of population growth and inequality, creating a false narrative of progress. Their standards for measuring impact exclude birth equity, ensuring a cycle of privilege for some while disempowering others—especially children of color. This approach has:
- Undermined climate and racial justice efforts
- Allowed unsustainable economic growth to masquerade as progress
- Ensured wealth remains concentrated at the expense of the most vulnerable
A Necessary Shift: Fair Start as the Overriding Human Right

Instead of perpetuating injustice, we must reallocate extreme wealth to ensure every child is born into a system of reparations, with access to essential resources, education, and a sustainable environment. This includes:
- Parenting delay and readiness programs
- Family planning incentives inversely tied to privilege
- A shift in policy to prioritize children’s rights as the foundation of justice
Holding Institutions Accountable

Fair Start activists, many of whom previously worked in leading nonprofits, are exposing how these organizations profited from systems that violated children’s rights. Legal action is underway, including climate tribunals in Africa, to challenge these harmful practices.

Take Action: Tell the Truth

We urge organizations and individuals to:
1. Assess and report impacts honestly—How does your work account for birth equity and the rights of future generations?
2. Support policy reforms that place children’s rights at the center of governance and sustainability efforts.
3. Admit the truth—continuing to ignore this reality does more harm than good.
Justice starts with birth equity. It’s time to tell the truth and demand real accountability.

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign
March 25, 2025
Six Truths to Tell About Avoiding Equity Fraud

1.

To be free, we have to ask political leaders and the wealthiest among us to derive their legal authority and entitlement to wealth from, and condition it on, a showing of how they are measurably empowering into equity each child / new member of our democracies. We can’t get to justice from injustice and universally deconstitutive language that omits how we benefit from a system of inequitable growth that is harming infants and animals. We can’t ensure obligations to ourselves from others by violating the duties we owe to the most vulnerable in our societies.

What does that violation look like? An extreme example would be animal rights organizations claiming to benefit animals with downstream decoy tactics, while quietly choosing to back inequitable growth that easily undoes the good they claim to do. That requires manufacturing metrics to discount future persons, especially persons of color, and animals.

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.

That’s political equity fraud, and at a fundamentally objective level, that overrides any political or legal authority to define it otherwise. That said, we can use existing legal systems to address it, by urging existing law enforcement agencies to track the impacts on all of our capacities to self-determine as children enter the world each day, contrasting those facts with value and impact claims being made by influential entities—the ones exploiting growth, birth positionality, and illegal levels of influence—in that jurisdiction.

This tracking informs our right to self-defense against undemocratic concentrations of power, those who drive violence by allowing states to use it without having legitimated themselves via child-rights based creation norms first.

2.

Not doing this – and consistently using an illegal assessment and reporting standard that avoids it – does more harm than we do good because it degrades the capacity of the earth to support human health, while treating children of color as deserving less resources and more risk, while politically disenfranchising the average person.

3.

Admitting the use of that illegal standard in our work to date and structuring changes in reproductive rights to incentivize, and fund the assurance, that no child is born below the threshold of conditions that comply with their rights and equity is the most just and effective thing we can do today. Practically, we get there by parental readiness and delay entitlements, which move us towards the qualitative optimality envisioned by those (in more quantitative and less qualitative/normative terms) by Dr. Chris Tucker and Sir Partha Dasguta.

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.

5.

It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to assure that persons are created, developed, and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not representative at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live.

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.

6.

The solution includes using rules to ensure accurate commercial language to slowly democratize and reconstitute what has become an essentially commercialized political system. This can be achieved through a preemptive standard for interpreting domestic constitutions and laws, as well as human rights obligations under instruments like International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to ensure actual and measurable self-determination, through the accurate use of obligatory language ensuring that persons are created, developed, and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

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?

Click here to Donate to Fair Start Movement Campaign

March 24, 2025
Urging Leaders of the UN Commission on the Status of Women to Tell the Truth, and Admit Their Death Debt
Fair Start Movement activists, who are attending the 69th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, are urging leadership to Tell the Truth:

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, illegally violated the first and overriding human right, the right to an ecosocial fair start in life for all, and as such has done more harm than good because it thereby exacerbated inequity and deadly ecocide, leading to the deaths of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.

One fix?

Leadership should change course, consistent with the policy advice below, and further urge the United Nations Secretary General to back fair starts in life, and measurable political equity, as overriding any system of governance that does not prioritize those things.

FAIRSTART’S ADVOCACY PAPER FOR CSW69: CENTERING CHILD RIGHTS IN REPRODUCTIVE POLICIES

Integrating Child Rights into Reproductive Policies: A Fair Start Approach

The Fair Start Movement advocates for a fundamental shift in reproductive policies, moving beyond traditional frameworks focused solely on fertility rates and contraception to a holistic, child-centered approach. At its core, the Fair Start Movement is committed to ensuring that every child is born into an environment that fosters their well-being, growth, and future success. Aligning with global frameworks, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Beijing Platform for Action, the Maputo Protocol, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Our mission is to ensure that every child is born into conditions that foster their well-being, rights, and future opportunities, granting them the ability to influence their outcomes in a just and equitable society.

In line with this, FS has initiated petitions before the UN and ACHPR, and has launched a Tell the Truth (TTT) campaign, to bring these changes to the forefront of international legal discourse.

Reproductive Rights as a Foundation for Child Well-being

For too long, reproductive policies have been narrowly defined by access to contraception and abortion, neglecting the broader socio-economic realities that shape family planning choices. Fair Start advocates for a paradigm shift from simply reducing fertility rates to creating environments where informed reproductive choices are supported by education, economic security, and child welfare protections as exemplified in our Seed for Future Africa Program across Africa.

Key Policy Advocacy
- Governments must prioritize investments in education to empower individuals to make informed reproductive choices.
- Reproductive rights frameworks should be integrated with child rights protections to ensure intergenerational equity and sustainability.
Child Rights in Reproductive Policies

Current reproductive policies often ignore the long-term welfare of children born into poverty, conflict, or fragile health systems. To achieve sustainable development,

reproductive policies must be framed within a child rights perspective, ensuring that every child is born into conditions that allow them to thrive.

Key Policy Recommendations
- Right to Survival and Development (UNCRC Article 6): Ensure reproductive policies are not solely focused on reducing birth rates but also on providing conditions for child survival, growth, and development.
- Right to Health and Nutrition (UNCRC Article 24): Strengthen reproductive policies to reduce child mortality rates, prevent malnutrition, and promote maternal well-being.
- Right to Protection from Poverty and Exploitation (UNCRC Articles 26 & 32): Link family planning policies to economic and social protections to break cycles of poverty.
- Right to Education and Equal Opportunities (UNCRC Articles 28 & 29)
Aligning with Global Frameworks

Fair Start’s policy advocacy aligns with major international frameworks, ensuring a unified approach to reproductive and child rights policies:
- Beijing Platform for Action (1995): Calls for universal access to reproductive health services while recognizing the role of socio-economic conditions in reproductive choices.
- Maputo Protocol (2003): Advocates for women’s reproductive autonomy but must be expanded to include policies that enable delayed fertility for child well-being.
- AU Agenda 2063: Supports human capital development, gender equality, and social transformation, aligning with sustainable reproductive policies.
- SDGs (2030 Agenda): SDGs 3, 4, and 5 highlight reproductive autonomy, education, and gender-responsive health policies as integral to global sustainability goals.
The Fair Start Movement’s Advocacy: UN Petition, ACHPR Petition, and the TTT Campaign

The Fair Start Movement is actively working to bring systemic change through various advocacy platforms, including our UN petition, ACHPR petition, and the recently launched TTT campaign.

The UN petition led by the Fair Start Movement calls for the integration of child rights into global policy frameworks, with an emphasis on addressing the long-term impacts of the climate crisis on future generations. The petition urges the UN to prioritize child welfare, ensuring that the rights of the future generation are safeguarded, especially in the face of environmental degradation and climate-related harm. It highlights the need for climate reparations to support communities most affected by environmental destruction, guaranteeing that future generations inherit a world capable of supporting their rights and opportunities.

Similarly, the ACHPR petition, presented to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, calls for the integration of climate justice into policy frameworks across Africa. It stresses the need for African governments to advocate for child rights and demand reparations given the impact of climate change in Africa. This must be done in order to mitigate the effects of environmental damage on children, especially the future generations in order to have the opportunity to grow, thrive, and enjoy basic rights, free from the consequences of climate-induced harm.

The Tell the Truth (TTT) campaign is Fair Start Movement’s latest campaign, focused on raising global awareness about the need for accountability and justice in the face of the climate crisis.

What Fair Start Is All About

At the core of the Fair Start Movement is the belief that every child should be granted a fair start in life, free from the constraints of systemic inequalities. We criticize any political standard that fails to prioritize child rights, particularly policies that perpetuate cycles of disadvantage. The standard we criticize is anything that does not use child rights to constitute nations with such investment in each child that there are equal offsets of each child’s capacity to influence outcomes relative to zero, or 0, 1, 2,……0.

In other words, political legitimacy should be based on ensuring that every child is equipped with the means to influence their future, starting from birth.

The Deadly Lie: Privatizing Freedom and Political Legitimacy

World leaders privatized freedom in the birth-creation of political relations after 1948 by conflating the act of having and not having children under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than treating the former as requiring political equity for the child. This hid the nature of freedom by privatizing the creation of political relations. And it led to

the measuring, assessing and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards meant to take oneself out of one’s birth and development context, ensuring children of color were treated as deserving less and placing them at increased risk. This was the hiding, linguistically, of birthright white supremacy and massive death debt with a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation, hiding the need for nations to invest equitably in each child just to have basic authority over citizens – to be “representative.”

Leaders conflated the two by defining power narrowly as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence, so one would be free to terminate pregnancies without law enforcement blocking you, only to now die in a heat wave because one had no influence over climate policy, and could not afford air conditioning.

As Zaharah poignantly states:

“How dare you? In this inequality and climate injustices that have harmed us from the global south, our children are dying and have no accountability, using a top-down system that isolated victims from the global south. The wealth you enjoy was made from the innocent blood of poor people from the global south. You will not escape blame, and it will pass into your children because your children are born in the luxury that was taken from us.”

This sentiment reflects the reality that wealth accumulated at the expense of the Global South has left many children dead, with millions more at risk of dying from inequality and climate injustices. We must adopt and support an Afrocentric model while dismantling the top-down systems that perpetuate these inequalities.

A Call to Action

The Fair Start Movement calls on governments, policymakers, and global institutions to radically transform reproductive policies by embedding child rights at their core. This transformation is not just a matter of political or social reform—it is a moral and legal imperative that ensures the survival, growth, and development of every child.

We demand a departure from outdated, population-control driven narratives and call for a shift toward child-centered policies that prioritize equitable investments in every child’s future. It is time for nations to acknowledge their responsibility to invest in each child from the moment of conception, ensuring that every child is afforded the opportunity to influence their own future and thrive in a world free from systemic inequalities.

Additional Advocacy Talking Points for CSW69: Integrating Child Rights into Reproductive Policies & Promoting Delayed Fertility

Reproductive Rights Must Evolve Beyond Contraception and Abortion
- Historically, reproductive rights policies have focused primarily on access to contraception and abortion without ensuring long-term socio-economic sustainability.
- A more holistic approach is needed—one that integrates child rights, economic security, and education policies into reproductive health frameworks.
- Key advocacy point: Shift the narrative from “reducing fertility rates” to “creating enabling environments for informed reproductive choices and child well-being.”
The Case for Delayed Fertility as a Policy Priority
- Studies show that delayed fertility (having children at a later age when socio-economically stable) leads to better health, educational, and economic outcomes for children and parents.
- Policies should focus on empowering women and families to make reproductive choices that align with their aspirations and economic security.
- Key advocacy point: Governments must invest in education, employment opportunities, and financial security for women to enable informed family planning decisions rather than just controlling fertility rates.
Child Rights Politics: Centering Children in Reproductive Policies
- Current policies focus on reproductive choices without considering the long-term welfare of children born into poverty, conflict, or fragile health systems.
- Child rights frameworks (such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – CRC) should be integrated into reproductive policies to ensure that every child is born into conditions that allow them to thrive.
- Key advocacy point: The shift toward child rights-based reproductive policies ensures that family planning policies contribute to intergenerational well-being, not just short-term fertility management.
Linking to Global Commitments: Aligning with Beijing Policy, Maputo Protocol, AU Agenda 2063, and SDGs
1. Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995)
- The Beijing Platform for Action remains a landmark policy framework that recognizes women’s reproductive rights as human rights.
- It calls for universal access to reproductive health services and highlights the role of socio-economic conditions in reproductive choices.
- Key advocacy point: CSW69 should advocate for full implementation of Beijing’s commitments, with an emphasis on integrating child rights and delayed fertility as part of women’s reproductive empowerment.
1. The Maputo Protocol (2003)
- The Maputo Protocol (Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa) guarantees women’s rights to reproductive health, autonomy, and access to safe abortion in specific cases (rape, incest, or when the pregnancy endangers health or life).
- Article 14(1) states that women must have the right to control their fertility and access family planning services.
- Key advocacy point: While Maputo advances reproductive rights, its implementation should extend beyond contraception and abortion to include economic policies that enable women to delay childbirth if they choose, ensuring child well-being and intergenerational equity.
1. African Union’s Agenda 2063
- Agenda 2063, Africa’s long-term strategic framework, emphasizes human capital development, gender equality, and social transformation.
- The Aspiration 6 of Agenda 2063 calls for an Africa where development is people-driven, relying on the potential of its women and youth.
- Key advocacy point: Sustainable reproductive policies must align with Agenda 2063’s focus on education, economic empowerment, and gender equality—ensuring that family planning policies are designed to uplift both women and future generations.
1. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
- SDG 3 (Health), SDG 4 (Education), and SDG 5 (Gender Equality) all highlight the need for reproductive autonomy, access to education, and gender-responsive health policies.
- The ICPD 1994 framework emphasized reproductive rights beyond contraception, advocating for health equity, maternal support, and economic empowerment.
- Key advocacy point: The CSW69 discussions should align with global goals and commitments, ensuring that reproductive policies support women’s empowerment and child well-being holistically.
Addressing Potential Criticism and Challenges

Risk of Restricting Reproductive Freedom
- The shift towards child rights-based reproductive policies and delayed fertility must not be used to restrict access to contraception or abortion.
- Advocacy focus: Policies should be framed as expanding reproductive choices, not imposing delays on fertility through coercion.
Economic and Policy Feasibility
- Delaying fertility requires strong social and economic policies, including affordable healthcare, education, and job opportunities.
- Advocacy focus: Governments must invest in infrastructure that enables reproductive autonomy, rather than focusing solely on birth rate policies.
Avoiding Population Control Narratives
- Some policymakers might misinterpret delayed fertility as a population control strategy.
- Advocacy focus: This is not about controlling population but about ensuring sustainable reproductive choices and child well-being.
Key Child Rights Issues we can include in CSW69 Advocacy and How to Make Them Relevant

Child rights must be central to reproductive policy discussions because policies that affect fertility and reproductive choices directly impact the well-being, rights, and future of children. Below are the key child rights issues that should be included in the CSW69 advocacy, along with their relevance to the discussion on delayed fertility and reproductive policies.
1. Right to Survival and Development (UNCRC Article 6)
Relevance:
- A child’s right to life and healthy development is directly linked to maternal health, prenatal care, and economic stability of parents.
- When reproductive policies focus solely on reducing birth rates, they overlook the quality of life for children born under precarious conditions.
- Delaying fertility can ensure that children are born when parents are physically, emotionally, and financially stable, improving survival rates and reducing child malnutrition and preventable diseases.
Advocacy Point:
- Reproductive policies must not only provide access to contraception and abortion but also ensure that every child born has the conditions needed for survival, growth, and development.
1. Right to Quality Health and Nutrition (UNCRC Article 24)
Relevance:
- When young mothers (especially adolescents) have children before they are financially and emotionally ready, it increases child mortality rates and malnutrition.
- Studies show that children born to older, economically stable mothers have better health outcomes and access to healthcare.
- Unsafe abortions due to restrictive reproductive policies also lead to orphaned children or children left in unstable care systems.
Advocacy Point:
- Governments must strengthen reproductive policies to ensure that family planning services support women in choosing when to have children based on health and well-being factors.
1. Right to Protection from Poverty and Exploitation (UNCRC Articles 26 & 32)
Relevance:
- Children born into poverty are more likely to experience malnutrition, lack of education, child labor, and trafficking.
- Delayed fertility allows families to break cycles of poverty, ensuring that children have better access to education and resources.
- Young mothers, especially teenage girls, are often forced into economic vulnerability, leading to child marriage, sexual exploitation, and human trafficking.
Advocacy Point:
- Governments must integrate reproductive policies with economic and social protection policies to ensure that children born into any family have financial stability and security.
1. Right to Education and Equal Opportunities (UNCRC Articles 28 & 29)
Relevance:
- Early and unplanned pregnancies often interrupt girls’ education, pushing them into economic dependency and limiting their ability to provide for future children.
- Children of economically stable, educated parents are more likely to stay in school and achieve their full potential.
- Adolescent pregnancy is linked to school dropouts, creating a generational cycle where both mother and child face educational barriers.
Advocacy Point:
- Reproductive policies must prioritize delaying fertility to ensure that women and girls complete their education before becoming parents.
- Governments should expand school-based reproductive health programs that combine contraception access with economic and career development programs for young girls.
1. Right to a Family and Social Protection (UNCRC Article 27)
Relevance:
- Many children born into unstable environments experience neglect, abuse, and separation from their families due to economic struggles or unprepared parenting.
- Orphanages and foster care systems are overburdened, and lack of support for struggling families contributes to the cycle of poverty.
- Reproductive policies should not only prevent unplanned pregnancies but also support families in raising children in safe and stable environments.
Advocacy Point:
- Governments must align reproductive policies with child protection policies, ensuring that children are born into environments where they have access to stable family structures and social support systems.
1. Right to Participation and Decision-Making (UNCRC Article 12)
Relevance:
- Reproductive policies often focus only on adult decision-making without including young people’s perspectives on their own reproductive futures.
- Young people should have a say in family planning policies, especially in regions where early marriage and adolescent pregnancy are common.
- Cultural and societal expectations often prevent young girls from exercising their reproductive rights freely.
Advocacy Point:
- Governments must involve youth voices in reproductive policy development, ensuring that adolescent reproductive health policies are rights-based and inclusive.
Integrating Child Rights into Reproductive Policies: What Needs to Change?

To bridge the gap between reproductive rights and child rights, the following policy changes are also necessary:
1. Shift the Focus from Population Control to Child Well-being
- Traditional reproductive policies focused on controlling birth rates rather than ensuring that every child born has access to a secure future.
- CSW69 should advocate for a rights-based approach that prioritizes the child’s quality of life, not just reproductive restrictions.
1. Strengthen Economic and Social Protection Policies for Parents
- Delaying fertility must be supported by strong economic policies such as:
  ✔ Paid parental leave
  ✔ Childcare subsidies
  ✔ School reintegration for young mothers
- Governments must integrate reproductive health services with economic empowerment programs.
1. Expand Legal Protections for Young Mothers and Their Children
- Policies must ensure that young mothers have access to education, job training, and financial support.
- Laws must protect children born from unplanned pregnancies from discrimination and economic hardship.
Key Advocacy Message for CSW69
- Reproductive policies must move beyond fertility control to focus on child well-being.
- Delaying fertility should be a choice, supported by social and economic policies that protect both mothers and children.
- Child rights must be integrated into reproductive health discussions to ensure intergenerational equity and sustainability.
- Governments must invest in reproductive education, social protection, and legal frameworks that allow families to thrive.
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March 20, 2025
What is Total Liberation by Telling the Truth? Take Action.

One way to change mindsets is to show someone what they thought and said in the past was objectively wrong, and in ways that likely harmed others.

Work on antiracism shows this.

The core problem driving ecological and political overshoot is a system of political obligation that requires compliance with legal systems without actually empowering constituents to be ecosocially self-determining in a measurable way, relative to a restorative and democratic baseline.

That enriches some, while killing many.

Fair Start is counsel in a lawsuit against Coca-Cola / Fairlife LLC trying to set deviation from that standard or baseline as what it first and fundamentally means to “harm” others.

We think the United Nations Secretary General should admit to using the same illegal standard, a standard that obligates subjects without empowering them.

We are urging the Secretary General and other officials to admit that their and all governmental authority, as well as the entitlements to wealth they protect, derive from and are conditioned on empowering those he and other officials claim to represent, and that without prioritizing Fair Start as the first human right, he has no authority. If he does not tell the truth, he will be using a fundamentally illegal standard for assessing and disclosing costs/benefits, value claims, and imacts, similar to what Coca-Cola has been using.

Governments can’t avoid climate liability by redefining conceptions of things like fraud, political legitimacy, or equity, and what it means to benefit at deadly cost to others. As we show here, there are objective measures for these things.

Fairness comes first. Governments and the concentrations of wealth and power that influence it have no authority or entitlement to create a failed system that kills millions of people and then use that system to measure the harm as a means of hiding their liability

The Secretary General is the highest symbol of representative government, and if he makes clear the need for Fair Start reforms, change will follow. He can avoid equitywashing, or what is really constitutive reparations fraud, and join a community of truly obligated persons trying to constitute a just future.

The Secretary General should start by admitting that he benefited from an equitywashing system that illegally violated children’s birthrights and did more harm to the UN’s values, goals, and impacts than he did to further them.

By doing so, he can move towards the legitimacy of a neutral standard where some do not benefit at deadly cost to others, hiding harm to infants and animals on at least eight levels.

Admitting failure, and communicating an obligation to future children that overrides any obligation to governments and wealth-holders, is a linguistic act of constituting a better future.

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Urge the Secretary General to do so here: Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General: Telephone – (212) 963-7160 | Fax – (212)-963-7055.

March 19, 2025