They treated the act of people having kids as a personal, private and taboo matter, including the way it multiplied environmental impacts like climate emissions, because they wanted to avoid talking about their wealthy funders having to invest in all children and because that growth was making powerful people money.
But instead of this messaging to get us to a better future, we see constant pressure on women to have kids under the current norms and policies, exerted as a means to grow economies that generally benefit rich white men at cost to nature, women and children. The messaging is everywhere (just Google “baby bust” or “fertility rates”) – and it reflects white supremacy and ecocide that will disproportionally harm women and children of color.
First, none of the pushing women talks about ensuring birth equity for black children when people do have kids. Big surprise – black kids tend to be poor. Birth inequity is the fundament of racism in many ways, because it ensures white people have much more money and power – money and power they never earned, but were simply born with. And the inequity stems actually from the days of slavery.
Loving children means eliminating the inequities that give white kids a head start.
Third, all of the push comes out of fears that women being liberated from motherhood will harm our economy – god forbid rich people get lower returns on their investments than the unsustainable growth of the past has allowed. But immigration is actually a sufficient replacement to alleviate any risk this poses. However, there is a catch – immigrants generally don’t look like Tucker and Ezra’s white kids, so, that’s a problem for them.
Fourth, it will be persons of color with less money, and colonized societies, who suffer the most in the climate crisis and the ecocide it derives from. And pushing women to have kids will make the crisis worse – specifically worse for these more vulnerable people. How is that not racist?
And of course if the response to the argument that claims were misleading because they did not account for growth is that the claims countenanced the fact that fertility rates were falling, then: 1) Those relying on that fall should immediately endorse small family policies that lock in the beneficial change as reflective of human rights, 2) acknowledge that rates have not fallen quickly enough to evade the crises, that the policy changes should have been made decades ago, and that reparations are owed relative to this baseline, and 3) acknowledge that those rates are not falling in many areas of the world, which bring us back to square one.
That means children will die as the climate crisis unfold, and other species will die in mass extinction, because these people lied. They lied because that growth makes money for people like Elon Musk.
Farhad Manjoo wrote a great piece on the right to rescue farmed animals recently in the New York Times. He just needs to add a sentence or two more.
It’s misleading to omit the impact of family policy, which is hiding behind the story. FACT: Pronatal policies, which intend to push population arcs upward, will put more animals in factory farms than animal activists, or veganism, will ever take out – by far.
Most of the billions of people that will be born in the near future will not be vegan. So saving animals first involves family policy, not food choices. This is not rocket science. We think of the latter because companies control the narrative and want to sell products, not help animals.
This is not a separate issue from anything – family policy is the foundation of everything else.
FACT: The New York Times has run more stories pushing women to have kids because of an “underpopulation” crisis (a myth that Elon Musk helped start), and supporting pronatal policies like expanded child-tax credits rather than Fair Start planning entitlements.
Writers like Ezra Klein routinely push women to have more kids because he is anthropocentric, the antithesis of animal liberation.
FACT: Your cannot omit this impact from any form of writing or advocacy. Try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people.
FACT: Farhad and the New York Times show a conflict of interest when omitting these issues, because the family reforms would decentralize the concentrated power they have in controlling media – and the New York Times is exceptional in this regard. Their semi-monopoly on information is backed by a system of state violence. They have a conflict because they would be otherwise obligated to pay for their role in creating the climate crisis now devastating places like the Amboseli.
We don’t want to live in a fantasy world where we pretend to help animals with one hand, and increase their suffering and death with the other. The fix? Simply promote better family policies that actually liberate animals while doing the downstream work of how we should treat them.
Researchers in Ohio and North Carolina recently published and publicized research that suggested policy changes could increase birthrates by making it easier for Americans to have larger families, consistent with the desire many people have to do so.
That suggestion ignores that way population policies fundamentally drove the climate crisis, on many levels, and created a situation in which large families in the past interfered with the right of families today to have any children without having to condemn them to the threats of the climate crisis and other threats driven by family policy.
Caring about children means caring for the conditions in which they are born.
TAKE ACTION: Urge leadership at the universities in Ohio and North Carolina to admit these mistakes, and pivot research to promote all children’s right to a Fair Start in life.
Many nonprofits over the past decade claimed great success in saving animals or children, protecting the environment, or ensuring human rights and democracy. Instead they were quietly supporting family policies (including internal employment policies) that were undoing progress on all of those fronts – and accelerating the climate crisis.
It’s been up to nonprofit leadership to resist this, and do what is best for the entities they claim to represent. Failure to do can constitute consumer deception, and lead to litigation. And publicizing the truth of how family policy impacts our lives, and using that truth to lever wealth from the top and into future generations is the most good we can do. Litigation can make it happen.
TAKE ACTION:
If you suspect a charity you support made misleading statements contact us at Carter@FairStartMovement.org, and urge any charity you support to take part in the @WholeTruth campaign to save millions of lives from a crisis family reforms can help mitigate.
Thinking along these lines might ensure a fuller form of DEIJ, not just for us but for the majority of persons (human and nonhuman) – those who will live in the future. One way to bring this all into action would be by focusing funding on bottom up grassroots movements that are decentralized and operate around a central organizing principle of maximizing capacity for consent by all, putting freedom over property.
TAKE ACTION: The most effective change we can make involves family reforms. Take an action now.
Few people born today will ever be vegan. So one cannot effectively protect animals, from all those meat eaters and habitat killers for example, without reforming family policy too.
These companies and their funders are doing so because it ensures cheap labor and lots of consumers for their products. Moves like this also create political space for things like abortion bans.
These companies knowingly undo claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, many companies and funders have continued on course.
TAKE ACTION: If you want to actually help animals, ask any company appearing to benefit animals to disclose their family policies, including how they are protecting women’s right to terminate their pregnancies and whether they have employment policies that avoid wealthy employees passing massive privilege to their children.
Wealth was built by externalizing costs on freedom, by being able to consume the nonhuman world, and benefit from the growth not having to invest equally in children allowed.
Older generations of wealthy people often either have trouble understanding this, or simply do not care. Their adult children, who benefitted from more aware systems of education, are different. They have more at stake in the future, understand that large and consumptive families are not sustainable, and can often see their unearned privileges.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Ireland Baldwin online, or find and engage her in person, to publicly admit these truths, and adopt Fair Start family reforms that invest in freedom. She owes us, and the future, the change such a good use of her influence would bring.
