Harvard President Larry Bacow says that Harvard is committed to confronting the climate crisis. Harvard fundamentally built its wealth and prestige on an unsustainable system of growth – family policies – that externalized their costs on others and did nothing to protect nature from the Anthropocene. Is Harvard reversing its position on those family policies? Is it employing a restorative standard for climate mitigation? It is pointing the world towards optimality, or growth that will multiply unforeseen threats – the very thing that happened with greenhouse gasses?
If Harvard is not changing course on family policies Bacow’s statements are misleading, with growth remaining the fundamental driver of the crisis. You cannot make any claim of a policy impact that does not start with, and become fundamentally contingent upon, people and the family policies that create them. And in a democracy, those people – comprised as relatively self-determining – are the baseline to assess costs and benefits.
The same questions can be raised with Harvard’s recent purported commitments to racial justice, child welfare, animal rights, or human rights and democracy. Is it embracing redistributive policies that eliminate the massive birth-wealth gap between black and white children? Does it apply the Children’s Rights Convention as a standard for family planning? What is it doing to prevent our species from overrunning and eliminating others? Growth and inequity have ensured the average person will have little if any impact on their systems of governance. Is Harvard reversing that process?
Quietly undoing downstream fixes with upstream anthropocentric growth and birth inequity is disingenuous, has concentrated power in a few, and foisted social and ecological costs on others. Harvard is one of those concentrations. The family policies it tacitly accepts, which pretend that our social and ecological positions are a matter of some magic fortune, are the fundamental source of injustice. The greatest act of justice, for the vast majority who will live in the future, means recovering those costs and using the wealth to plan just and sustainable families where power is physically limited and decentralized.
Urge Larry Bacow to tell us all the truth about these matters. Contact him here:
617 495 1502 Email: president@harvard.edu
We cannot afford to lose ground on these issues having missed the fundamental driver and allow concentrations of wealth and power to use people to further exacerbate power differentials.
We are writing to urge you to dissolve the barrier between family planning policies and children’s rights policies. If instruments like the Children’s Rights Convention are meant to be effective they must be applied to the majority of children, those who will live in the future.
Growth-biased policies both fail to take into account the needs of current children and harm future children, whose rights and well-being are increasingly under threat due to the worsening climate crisis, resource depletion, rising inequality, unemployment, and political instability. In fact, the best interpretation of the Children’s Convention (“CRC”) considers the rights of future children just as much as the rights of children who exist today, which makes the Convention the centerpiece standard for family planning.
The key to achieving just and sustainable family planning policies involves balancing procreative autonomy with procreative obligations, such that the rights of intending parents to have children are balanced with the rights and well-being of potential children. We need new norms that place children’s rights at the center of every family planning decision, affirming the right of every child to enter a family and community that is prepared to provide for her physical and cognitive development, education, and health. Such norms, in turn, allow true adult autonomy or relative self-determination in the long run.
It’s not about population/numbers. We either bring kids into select and safe conditions, or we are being fundamentally unjust.
We Have to Admit That Failure to Apply the Convention in Family Planning Hurt Women and Children
Collectively, we have yet to reckon with birth rates and family size as drivers of the current crises in human and planetary health. While maternal and child welfare has improved worldwide, the reality is that outcomes are poor: costing the lives of nearly 300,000 women and over 5 million infants and children each year. Recent studies, of course, do not reflect the horrific impacts the climate crisis will have on those outcomes.
These outcomes could have been avoided had family planning policies oriented around the objective needs of future children, like those specified in the Convention, rather than around the the oft-cited “rights” of parents to have children–including patriarchy, the preservation of oligarchic family structures, and the needs of population growth-based economies. The reorientation could have easily been implemented by prioritizing child equity in family planning, and using progressive taxation on the wealthiest to fund family planning incentives and entitlements. That change would have also moved the world towards more optimal and sustainable population levels, and allowed us to meet sustainable development goals and climate mitigation targets.
Change begins with our admission that if children deserve certain things, then future children do as well. From this admission follows changing the policies that surround family planning and permissible birth/child development conditions, and moving from a parent-centric model based on autonomy (which ignores future child welfare) to a future child-centric model based on equity.
Failure to do this is encourage men to use their wealth and positions of power to push women to have more children to be used as consumers, workers, and taxpayers. This degrades the capacity for participation each person would have in a functional democracy, and exacerbates the climate crisis. They want us to believe that one’s birth entry position – rich versus poor, in nurturing or horrific conditions – is a matter of fortune, or an act of god. Instead it is the absence of just family planning policies and the UNFPA’s failure to apply the Convention prospectively exacerbates this.
There Is a Clear Policy Pathway for Implementing Child-Centric Family Planning Policies to Comply with the Convention
To develop the political will and the policy framework to advance these changes, we need a US federal entity to oversee children’s issues and advocate for children’s rights across all levels of government. Additionally, federal adoption of other key CRC principles – child impact statements and the best interests of the child standard for all budget and policy decisions – will advance children’s interests. Within this structure, the very initial steps towards dissolving the barrier between family planning and children’s rights will involve changing the discourse around family planning and the Convention in five specific ways:
First, we can adopt family planning policy reporting as part of ESG disclosure frameworks. This should include past, present, and anticipated policies. The inclusion as part of the framework would begin to create a culture among institutions – public and private – of factoring in family planning as the key driver or open multiplier of all crucial ESG impacts.
Second, we can urge the United Nations Human Rights Council to interpret Article 16 of the UDHR and relevant provisions of the international bill of human rights as requiring just and sustainable family planning that can be practiced by all generations in perpetuity. This would require that reproductive rights be balanced with the obligations of intending parents towards potential children – current and future, with the understanding that future generations have the same human rights we do.
Third, the UN Secretary General, and heads of the UNFPA, UNICEF and UNEP, can provide informal statements that support the reading of Article 16 above, and that treat the Convention as the centerpiece of family planning policies, capable of being implemented with the redistribution, incentive, and entitlement policies discussed above. Informal statements lay the groundwork for changes at the level of population conventions, and eventually binding treaty interpretations.
Fourth, we should reorient more traditional reproductive rights frameworks that focus on preventing pregnancy around state obligations to ensure conditions that produce self-determining citizens rather than economic inputs in a system of unsustainable growth. That state interest precedes and enables individual rights, creating the context in which they occur, but is currently absent from the discourse. Again, the focus here involves replacing procreative autonomy, which is a contradiction in terms, with procreative justice/equity, which in turn allows true adult autonomy or relative self-determination in the long run. While many might not readily accept that well-cared for kids make better citizens, that argument is based on a conceptual error. The people making it have a conception of good government that does not account for how the people in that system actually relate, e.g. how vastly disparate opportunities in life – which start at brith – carry over to disparate input in the political system.
Fifth, we can begin to support true equity in birth and childhood development, honoring the ideal of equal opportunities in life, by reforming the child tax credit system to promote parental readiness, a leveling of the playing field for all children, and a universal ethic of sustainable families. As with the other reforms, this reform goes “upstream” to protect children by improving the conditions in which they are born and raised through redistribution of wealth as family planning incentives/entitlements, which are especially needed to offset – or help repair – the harm we have caused future generations.
Conclusion
The best interpretation of the CRC applies it to future, and not just extant, children.
But they made a huge mistake. If you believe in freedom, it’s impossible for a group of people to define what the world should look like for everyone. The baseline, or what the world should look like, is instead itself a group of relatively self-determining – or free – people. This is why so many Nobel Laureates are focused on family reforms.
That requires limiting the power each individual or government entity has over others by ensuring a restored, natural and biodiverse environment for future generations. It requires that all children are empowered from the beginning by having a fair start in life.
How could we know what’s a cost or benefit, or the rules that allot them, without being organized as participatory groups capable of making such decisions? Wouldn’t capacity to participate first depend on the quantity, and civic qualities, of the participants?
How could we be self-determining or free in an anthropocentric world dominated by a singularly human-centric viewpoint, rather than a natural or nonhuman one that allow humans to consent to the power of others?
How do we create a fair start for all – ensuring each person as the capacity to consent to the power and influence of others – without accounting for how people are created and nurtured into adulthood?
The bottom line is that a diverse, inclusive, international coalition must debate the issues and create meaningful, realistic policy that can be implemented globally. We want a town hall, not a shopping mall. Only in the former are we truly empowered, but our family planning policies are crafted to create people for latter. Nothing provides greater evidence that our current family planning system creates commercial, rather than empowering political relations, than the ubiquitous reaction to falling fertility rates as an economic baby bust.
Fact: Population growth-based economic gains were created by intentionally violating the Children’s Convention, ensuring children would be born and raised in conditions that violated the Convention’s standards.Instead of making the first norm something that created normativity, we used growth to degrade it.
The Children’s Rights Convention should be our guide, shifting away from seeing people as population to a vision of constituting ourselves dynamically, and qualitatively. It presumes restorative laws and policies that protect wilderness and biodiversity, evading the harm our current anthropocentric policies are inflicting on children. It demands basic human rights that would ensure democracies in which people can meaningfully participate. It’s what lies behind the concept of “We the People,” in the United States Constitution. It’s of freedom from, and freedom to. It’s an alignment of values that often, downstream, appear to conflict.
What does seeing the baseline as who we could be, rather than what we do, change things? A focus on who we should be would precede and override all other obligations, including property rights. Just government derives from the people, who should operate from a just position (or creation norm). We cannot assign property rights that deviate from that position by degrading our natural ecology or ignoring the needs of future generations.
Based on our model – which has been subject to a 1/2 dozen peer-reviews – we can take wealth Exxon Mobil and others collected by degrading the baseline (the environment) while externalizing costs to others, primarily generation after generation of women and children, with or without the government because no obligation can precede or override the existential justice of being free and equal people. It always comes first. And if we could not restore nature and empower people as such, which we can, the baseline serves as a way to measure how compensate future generations.
We wish to restore empowerment to those affected – to incentivize / entitle / repair ecosocially just and restorative family planning. We want to support women’s right to plan a family, and incentives/entitlements work. And yet our systems have avoided them for decades simply because wealthy leaders did not want to open to door to redistribution, and the logical end-point of fairness that is inevitable.
Help us shift the foundation we all share – the norms that create and develop us – toward a just position. In a true democracy the norms that emancipate us should be derived from life experience and development, and not top-down pressure from iconic influencers, government coercion or market incentives.
TAKE ACTION: Urge @Exxonmobil to adopt Fair Start reforms.
The impending overturn of Roe. v. Wade has starkly and publicly revealed the new reality facing the United States. The anti-choice, pro-gun, ‘anti-everything-good’ conservatives are playing their hand face up. They have shamelessly stopped pretending to play by the rules and – if you’re listening – they’re telling us exactly what our future looks like. For 99 percent of us, it doesn’t look good.
The powers that be – mostly old, white, dusty antiques like Mitch McConnell, Eugene B. Meyer, Donald Trump – are climbing the castle walls in their 50-year strategy to cement in place their power and influence. As the world changes around them, as American society embraces all different stripes of people, the old guard conservatives and the wealthy 1 percent are terrified of losing their grip.
The Fair Start Movement approaches this fight from a new and different perspective. We believe that: No government, state or federal, has a legitimate standing to mandate the birth of every child conceived unless it is prepared to care for those children beyond the birth canal and give them a Fair Start.
At this critical crossroads in human history, we must acknowledge that every child born has a right to start out in decent circumstances. We must account for the wellbeing, equity and personal development of future generations if we are to foster a real democracy where each person’s voice matters. We must accept that our current system destroys the environment and does nothing, in fact takes negative action, to mitigate the oncoming crises.
We already see progress. Many people agree with our vision and are committed to real, positive change. As we build a truly democratic population, wherein everyone has a voice that is heard, we will move away from the toxic, crumbling society of today.
We will honor individual rights and guarantee universal healthcare. We will return to nature by respecting our place in the ecosystem, giving and taking sustainably. We will escape the domination of the selfish, greedy, wealthy few whose plan for the future – assuming they have one – accounts for their survival alone.
In the meantime, we must work within the system we have. The State must accept its obligation to invest heavily in common-sense family planning programs and science-based sex ed. Those items alone will automatically lower abortion rates and teach young people the truth about having and growing a healthy family.
The State must break its unconstitutional commitment to Christian moral dictates and adopt a reality-based approach to governing. It is absurd and completely unacceptable that 350 million+ people of every faith are governed based on the ethos of bronze-age men.
We must shift our paradigm away from the endless-growth-economy fantasy, which demands that mothers continually produce their supply of workers and consumers. Prisoners to boot.
Let’s change the conversation.
Fair Start has already taken action against ExxonMobil, demanding that they include the health of future generations when making policy changes. They talk a good game about how sustainable they are, but we have challenged them to take concrete steps toward guaranteeing the future of our species rather than living by the annual quarter.
The leak came out late on May 2, 2022. A source close to the Supreme Court had scooped Politico, leaking Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, finding for the defendant. Roe v. Wade would be overturned.
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey was next on the chopping block. Half of the country mourned. The other half took a victory lap, then quickly got back to work furthering their agenda.
We cannot go backward from this. We must find our way and define our new reality in a post-Roe world.
To that end, the Fair Start Movement has a vision that, hopefully, can breach the divide and bring us together. Everyone could have a slice of what they want in the debate over abortion.
Historically, the pro-choice lobby has focused heavily on an individual’s right to bodily autonomy and protecting their access to abortion. This approach takes into account only one stakeholder: the person seeking reproductive care.
In fact, we argue that there are at least three interested parties in each case.
1) The pregnant person
2) The future child (Not the fetus, but the future person if they were brought to term)
3) The community/society at large, which would be set up to help raise and nurture each baby born to them
In this vision, all people would identify as members of their communities. Society would be structured around a set of largely self-governing groups. Each member would begin life with a Fair Start, having the access and opportunities afforded to all. A pregnant person would be free to decide how and when to start or grow their family. The community would support them equally through any decision they made.
Any future version of Roe would require that we prepare healthy space and allocate resources for future generations. The current ‘family-planning’ model, and indeed Roe as well, did nothing to protect and nurture future children. A Fair Start would mean that each child begins life:
Being wanted
Being cared for physically, spiritually and financially
Being assured a level of comfort and opportunity only the wealthy enjoy today
If those criteria were met for every child born into society, our communities would automatically begin to thrive. Once one generation of Fair Start Kids is established, life will continually improve as long as this new egalitarian mode of living remains the norm.
The reality we face in the wake of Alito’s scoffing assertion that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong from the start” will include forced pregnancy and birth. It will worsen poverty, crime and human suffering. It will impact and end careers. Mental and physical health will decline. It will continue to turn a blind eye to the Climate Crisis. It will do nothing to improve the circumstances of anyone but the 1 percent currently alive and in power today. It will create our progeny but ignore their basic needs. It will create more children, but it will not be bothered about their quality of life.
We hope that our approach would plant the seeds of an empathetic, self-governing populace – one that cares for all existing (and future) members. We envision a community that does not dictate personal choices, that respects privacy and welcomes and cares for each member and each baby with open arms.
For a start, working within our current anti-choice, anti-privacy reality, we have a proposal that would help women and reproductive health care professionals.
The Fair Start SMA Project: Educate and Inform to Protect Choice
Fair Start’s initial response to the Politico leak was to issue a broad challenge to Gov. Greg Abbot (R) of Texas, demanding that he revise his draconian, myopic and cruel Texas SB8 bill. SB8 prohibits abortion six weeks after the pregnant person’s last menstrual period. Oklahoma was close on Abbot’s heels.
After May 2, we knew we had to think beyond Texas. Our modified proposal will go further. It will elevate and scale education programs for abortion-care professionals on supporting patients through self-managed abortions (SMAs). SMAs will increase tenfold once Roe is overturned, and these solutions are typically safe today thanks to medications like Plan B, sometimes called the “Morning After Pill.”
We will ensure our health-care professionals have access to specialized pro bono legal services when we launch in Texas and Oklahoma. Ultimately we aim to organize a fleet of pro bono lawyers who will intercede for educators, their professional students and patients in case of legal interference by the state.
We need your help creating this safety net! Anyone seeking abortion care, and in particular anyone who provides it will be on very shaky ground. We reject the notion of health care professionals in prison over helping someone take charge of their life.
A ‘Right’ to Elevate and Empower All
At Fair Start, we aim to replace the current outdated parent-centric family planning paradigm with one that is child-centric, ecologically restorative, objective and fair. This includes recognizing and promoting each person’s basic, singular and overarching ‘Right’ to life, safety, adequate food and shelter. Granting The Right to all at birth will also allow everyone to pursue their dreams, because they will not begin life at the bottom.
The concept of The Right is inspired by the concrete standards laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Beyond children’s rights, The Right would guarantee everyone independent, autonomous control over reproductive and other personal choices. Moreover, it would acknowledge and elevate the other two stakeholders in the family planning process: the future child and the community.
FSM pioneered the claim that The Right supersedes all others, because without the ideals The Right represents, personal autonomy, freedom and potential are null and void. When a child is born into poverty or abuse, the pursuit of higher goals and self-actualization are impossible. This concept is supported by voluminous peer-reviewed and recommended research.
Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at Cambridge University, writes “Our children and grandchildren have a right to sufficient food, shelter, and physical security, and to opportunities to develop and flourish.”
Today’s parent-centric, short-sighted approach does not even begin to gesture toward the looming and blatantly obvious questions about our future. It is focused squarely on ensuring that every pregnancy ends in birth. After that, good luck and good riddance.
Call to Action – Join the Good Fight
We know we have to take this one step at a time. Our ideals are lofty and would certainly face strong opposition. The fact is, however, our vision is all-inclusive. We want to bring everyone along into a gentler society focused on life and happiness, not locked in a deathmatch over wealth and power.
The government and societal models we live in today were simply dreamed up by old white men throughout the ages. It doesn’t have to be this way. None of this is carved in stone. Human suffering is a bug, not a feature! Governments CAN nurture and protect their citizens instead of groveling before their big donors.
The truth is: Human potential is vast. The only thing keeping us in this deadly downward spiral is a lack of imagination. Roe v. Wade is emblematic of our predicament. Ultimately these kinds of laws will become unnecessary. In the future, fairness and universal equality will be the base of the pyramid, not a pipe dream.
As the Supreme Court of the United States prepares to strike down Roe v. Wade, paving the way for the states to ban abortion, many are wondering how we arrived in this place. While the pro-choice lobby and legal maneuvering meant to protect the right to terminate a pregnancy has focused on women’s bodily autonomy, there are actually at least three interests at stake in that decision: 1) Women’s bodily autonomy, 2) the interests of the future child (not the fetus, but the child that would have otherwise existed), and 3) the interests of society more generally. As a safe rule of thumb if a mother does not want to have a child, interests two and three are not going to go very well.
And while women’s bodily autonomy is crucial, interests two and three actually precede it because that autonomy occurs after and within the formation of society – which is the thing two and three account for.
So how did we all kill Roe? We should have prioritized two and three, or the importance of the autonomy because by preventing forced parenthood it prevents bad parenting, the social chaos that results, population-driven ecological disasters like the climate crisis, and other things that now threaten us and our kids’ future.
That bigger move, decades ago, might have resulted in a highly developed, self-governing and empathetic national populace unlikely to fall for people like Donald Trump. That’s not the populace we have now.
It’s not too late to make Roe three-sided, and as such much weightier, than it was before.
Here’s how: Help us fund a pilot program for the Reincarnation of Roe.
The Fair Start SMA Pilot Program
The Fair Start Movement (FSM) is dedicated to replacing the parent-centric and subjective family planning paradigm that fundamentally created the climate and inequity crises with a new paradigm of child-centric, ecologically restorative and objective systems of planning that are treated as the first and overriding human right (“The Right.”) The Right is premised on the concrete standards in the Children’s Convention, and is more weighty than traditional reproductive rights because it accounts for the interests of future children and society more generally, rather than maintaining a myopic focus on parental interests.
While initial FSM proposals centered on furthering The Right through a broad challenge to a recent ban on abortions in Texas, this modified proposal will support elevating and scaling programs of education for self-managed abortion (SMA) by abortifacients for paramedical personnel across the U.S. by offering a high-profile pilot program for pro bono legal services to such personnel (the Project), initially in Texas and Oklahoma.
In democracy self-determination always begins with your place in the town hall. Always.
The key here is creating a movement of pro bono legal services interceding for SMA educators/providers that treat the service as the constitutional priority and human right with the biggest impact on our collective future. Note that while legal services for SMA do exist, we have yet to complete a comprehensive assessment of them. Note too that we will be expanding our initial research regarding safety.
The Project Goals:
1) To publicize a specific pilot program for priority pro bono legal services to paramedical personnel educating women in Texas and Oklahoma regarding SMA, as an example of the emergence of The Right, 2) to connect that story as a driver of prioritized pro bono legal services around the country from a network of firms we have access to.
Depending on progress on 1-2, we may add 3) developing eventual litigation regarding suing Texas over harm to children consigned to state foster care because of the state’s historic abortion laws, which will include direct action demands for wealth transfers from specific high-profile targets to pay for the resulting damages under the theory of The Right.
We may also peg #1 above to the filing of an amicus brief defending a specific physician in Texas, but we are still assessing the status of the case.
The key is creating a national movement of pro bono legal services interceding for SMA educators/providers that treat the service as the constitutional priority and human right with the biggest impact on our collective future.
Project AOMIs and Project budget:
Final Activity List:
1) To publicize a specific pilot program for priority pro bono legal services to paramedical personnel educating women in Texas and Oklahoma regarding SMA, as an example of the emergence of The Right:
Budget: $6000 – primarily towards two law firms, and two public relations firms.
To finalize recruiting two law firms we are in conversation with.
To complete the initial research, and determine the number of hours we can provide pro bono.
To assess the target educator/provider audience, and to provide the advice.
To publicize the process nationally, via two public relations firms we are in conversation with.
To connect with leading family planning organizations in the nation to see whether they will replicate the process.
2) To connect that story as a driver of prioritized pro bono legal services around the country from a network of firms we have access to:
Budget: $3,500 – primarily towards FSM administrative contractors, and follow-on services from the public relations firms.
To solicit interest from our network of pro bono firms.
To develop a script for why this work is a priority.
To recruit at least twenty (20) firms who can provide extensive pro bono services.
To evaluate the services provided.
To publicize the process and seek to triple the number of firms in a future round.
Which activities can and will be used as key performance indicators for quarterly reporting?
The number of news articles, the reach of those articles, and other communication impacts, including social media. There are more precise metrics we can obtain from the firms.
The number of educators/providers reporting positive encouragement and advice that altered their plans.
The number of leading family planning organizations that will replicate the process.
The number of law firms that commit to pro bono services, and the hours they will commit to.
Climate mitigation anyone?
Project review assessment includes these considerations for a successful project award:
– Does the project promote innovation and experimentation?
Yes. The Right as described herein is nascent in practice, but irrefutable, and Texas/Oklahoma provide ideal theaters in which to experiment with the messaging, political development, and eventual establishment of The Right.
– Does the design of the project include specific interventions that impact local or global population issues?
Yes. We intend to provide pro bono legal services in Texas and Oklahoma, and expand on that pilot towards a national provision of services. If this process furthers The Right, the impact on bending the population curve would outweigh many comparable efforts.
– Are there quantitative process and outcome measures that reflect the success of the project’s goals?
Yes, per the KPIs above.
– Does the project include new ideas and approaches that might improve or extend an activity into a new setting?
Yes, we have intentionally used a pilot-to-scale design, ideally around a movement that will be compelling.
Conclusion:
This project is not meant to further a particular goal while operating within the parent-centric and subjective family planning paradigm that fundamentally created the climate crisis. Rather it is meant to further a new fundamental movement that changes the paradigm towards child-centric, ecologically restorative and objective systems of planning that are treated as the first and overriding human right.
The Secretary General of the United Nations Promised to Mitigate Climate Change and Failed. Maybe His Son Can Help?
The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, has promised to mitigate the climate crisis. He is obligated to support doing so in the most effective way possible because of his position. The most effective long-run change alters the conditions in which we permit children to be born, requiring redistribution of resources to incentivize and entitle better family planning. António has refused multiple requests from dozens of organizations to both effectively mitigate the climate crisis and prepare future generations to be resilient in the face of ecological degradation. António has refused to begin policy reforms that would eventually assure that every child born enjoy what they are promised by the Children’s Convention.
Nothing has a bigger impact. This solution operates, or mitigates, on multiple levels. We can bend the curve to benefit future generations, or stay a failed course.
Do what is effective.
And yet his son, Pedro Guimarães e Melo Guterres, has enjoyed a life of privilege that is relatively free from the ravages of the climate crisis. That’s not right.
Let’s engage Pedro directly to help pay what he owes, and to offset the costs an unfair family planning system placed on others – especially in the global south – while he benefitted as the son of an influential European politician. We can make that ask because just family planning is the first human right. And we can replicate this tactic with all world leaders.
If some will take their own lives to try to bend our world away from the worst of the crisis, the least we can do is short-circuit a political process that’s failed and instead engage with the adult children of world leaders to bend a curve that benefitted them at cost to others. Perhaps this action is too personal? Not really. Ignoring the interpersonal nature of intergenerational power dynamics is what fundamentally created the climate crisis. The children of world leaders can support redistribution of wealth that incentivizes/entitles socially and ecologically just family planning. Urge them to do so.
Contact Ashley@FairStartMovement.org to help us engage Pedro.
We can change this by all means effective because people come first.
We Can Democratize Russia and Disempower Putin by Targeting His Concentrations of Wealth to Instead Fund Child Development
Vladimir Putin was able to invade Ukraine and wage war crimes and atrocities because for decades he has been able to prevent democratization in Russia. One of the most fundamental ways he’s blocked reforms involves a decades-old system of pushing women to have children – or to be mothers for the motherland – instead of requiring democratic family reforms that would physicallylimit and decentralize the power of Putin, his state infrastructure, and the oligarchs. Putin could not operate if Russia had to invest equitably in children as democratic citizens, rather than exploit them as future workers and soldiers.
Family policy in Russia is the fundamental source of his power – expanding the base of the pyramid atop which Putin sits. And while much of the world opposes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, world leadership has done nothing to demand reform of his family policies. In many cases world leaders looked to Russia – which pays women to produce children – as a possible model of creating growth in their own nations, much the way they supported the globalized fossil fuel economies that helped create Putin.
The theme is the same – the United Nations and world leaders are outraged by the invasion, but complicit in ensuring the fundamental top-down power relations that enable it.
We can reverse this trend by embracing every child’s right to a Fair Start, ecologically and socially, as the first and overriding human right. This enables demands upon, and the taking, of wealth and other concentrations of power at the top. We do this to limit and decentralize those concentrations, and to instead empower future persons as democratic citizens.
Take Action:
1. Fair Start has urged the United Nations Human Rights Council to embrace Fair Start modeling as the first and overriding human right. Ask them to publicly support the right of young Russians to demand and take wealth from the power structures that support Putin. Atrocities begin with the creation of people inclined, through our power relations, to comit them. The United Nations should be destabilizing despots, not supporting family policies that prop them up. Contact them here.
2. Massive sanctions against oligarchs are a step in the right direction, but we don’t want resources fueling the fundamental problem by simply propping up declining democracies outside of Russia. Urge President Biden here to use the sanctions to explicitly support Fair Start reforms in the United States that would restore democracy, and make the United States a true leader in empowering people.
Every child born in Russia has a right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, which will enable to safe, healthy and democratic future for all. Young Russians can fund their children’s future by taking wealth and resources from the top, from men like Patriarch Kirill, who pose a threat to the welfare and equality of all children. Russians can pressure him to admit this truth. Together we can fundamentally disempower Putin, and prevent future wars, by moving wealth and power from the top and into future generations. Here is an example of the change, in action.
Каждый ребенок, родившийся в России, имеет право на экосоциальный Справедливый Старт в жизни, который является основой безопасного, здорового и демократического будущего для всех. Такие люди, как патриарх Кирилл, представляют угрозу благополучию и равенству детей. Поэтому, мы должны заявить о том, что права детей перевешивают право собственности богатой верхушки. Вместе мы можем обезоружить Путина и предотвратить будущие войны, а также обеспечить Справедливый Старт будущим поколениям.
Putin sits atop a system where those with disproportionate power who chose him over democracy as he butchers civilians in Ukraine. How did he get there?
True democracies are created through family reforms that eliminate oligarchies and despots by ensuring children’s rights under the Children’s Rights Convention, including the right to equal opportunities in life, and to a meaningful voice in democracies surrounded by a safe and biodiverse natural world. Instead, world leaders are opting for a system that ensures old family hierarchies and unsustainable growth. That move fundamentally created the crises we face today, including the despotism of Vladimir Putin who rose to power on pronatal polices designed to create mothers for the motherland of Russia, not democracy.
Pushing women to have kids benefits who, exactly?
That system fundamentally supports wealthy strongmen around the world who then universally support population growth policies that expand their base, a population Ponzi scheme Nobel Laureates have recently called out.
That’s what you are seeing when men with disproportionate power push women to have kids, and we see these policies being pushed by many, from Vladimir Putin, to Mitt Romney, to Xi Jinping.
But 1) because these policies violate fundamental human rights, 2) because the beneficiaries of the growth never paid the full costs to our core values of the benefits they received, and 3) because every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life is the first and overriding human right, we can target the beneficiaries directly – governments supporting us or not – to redistribute the wealth to fund ecosocial Fair Starts in life.
So how do we target Putin’s economic base and move money from the top into Fair Start investing in women and future children, ideally in Ukraine?
The path to a better future is clear.
We hear a lot about Russian oligarchs, but plenty of American families – like the Koch brothers – helped prop up Putin over the years and still are. It’s time for citizen sanctions and reparations for ecosocial Fair Starts in life, rather than governments taking resources to reinforce the basic unjust power structure. Is the money better spent on physically building democracy in Ukraine, or going to governments for use by people like Donald Trump, were he reelected?
Exxon is one of those entities who propped up Putin, and one of the last companies to pull out of Russia after significant pressure. Many families in the U.S. are associated with the company and also enriched themselves through Putin. We can take those resources to reverse course and create the future we want. It’s not about the target as much as it is about the nature of the ask: We wish to change family policy to become a different sort of people than we are today, and will you pay what you owe to make that happen?
The first human right is the one that creates us, justly.
