Fair Start board member Seeta Begui recently marched for reproductive rights in Florida. Go Seeta!
Check out the photos below:
Many have chosen to remain childfree because of the impact that creating more people puts on animals raised for food, wildlife, the environment, and concern for the world that will be left to the next generation. The ability to choose has now been significantly limited, and for many, eliminated entirely. But we can push back.
Let’s take a clear position on the right to plan families as being instrumental to animal and environmental advocacy, and to mutual liberation. Planning is a human right. Help us improve and protect it.
TAKE ACTION: There are dozens of ways to make reproductive rights the centerpiece of freedom and democracy, including elevating every child’s right to a Fair Start in life.
We’re reflecting on this July 4th. I’m finding it difficult to celebrate this year as a fundamental liberty has been stripped from half of Americans – autonomy over our bodies. This move has created space for new attacks on women’s autonomy. In more ways than one, the Roe/Dobbs decision narrows the distance in the fights for human rights and animal rights.
The parallels start with the matter of consent over our own physical being, and how that consent aligns with ecocentrism and true nonhuman autonomy.
The decision also has massive repercussions for the non-human world. Many have chosen to remain childfree because of the impact that creating more people puts on animals raised for food, wildlife, the environment, and concern for the world that will be left to the next generation. The ability to choose has now been significantly limited, and for many, eliminated entirely. But we can push back. Our policy advisor, Carter Dillard was again published (with a great assist from GreenFire Law) in The Hill this week on this topic: State abortion bans create new governmental obligations for children.
My fellow animal advocates, I know that you, more than anyone else, grasp the urgency of large scale change in our food systems and beyond. We can’t remain safely in our silos while these intersecting crises hurdle towards an ever-increasingly harmful reality for the most vulnerable, across species.
I urge you, as the courageous game changers that you are, to take a clear position on the right to plan families as being instrumental to animal and environmental advocacy, and to mutual liberation. Planning is a human right.
Human rights override the authority of governments, and the first human right is the right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life. Today the Supreme Court made clear the United States government will not protect our right to be free from the climate crisis, or our children’s right to nature. Regardless those rights give us an overriding right to directly target the people who fundamentally violated them – people like the Raymond family.
The American Revolution was born on the idea of defeating tyranny. This is the same thing. This is a matter of defending ourselves and others.
Are we going to let men like Lee Raymond hurt our children while the government does nothing? Brave people will not.
Take action: Urge Lee Raymond to pay what he and his family owe in the form of family planning reparations that will most effectively offset the harms he and others have caused future generations.
In a 6-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe. v Wade on June 24, 2022. This is a pivot point and a wake-up call that it is past time to address the injustice set in place by this ruling. It allows children to be born poor, and others rich. Some begin life in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, while others begin with guaranteed health and safety,
We can oppose the forces that killed Roe for what it does to women, but also because of what it does to children, equality, our environment, and participatory democracy.
It’s a pivot point because no government is legitimate, and we are under no obligation to follow its rules, if that government pursues policies that do not ensure the equal empowerment of its citizens, ensuring they comprise town halls instead of filling shopping malls. Texas fails this test.
As the Fair Start Movement will argue in court next month, the forces of justice must restore and create equal and just societies. Huge swaths of people have been stripped of fundamental rights with this ruling. As unwanted children are forced onto this earth by indifferent government officials, their parents will demand, and if necessary, take their dues from the concentrations of wealth and power responsible for this travesty.
A decent proportion of the next generation will be born through force, not consent. The child has no say in the matter, and his mother has none at all. Healthy communities and families grow when every individual has a say in what’s good for the whole. Consent is the key. This generation could grow up without proper education, and in many instances, without proper care and nurturing from a family that wasn’t prepared to have them. They will see governance as somebody else’s problem – from the shopping mall, not the town hall.
We will level the playing field for all kids ecosocially because justice demands a Fair Start in life. This decision has swept away any hope for our ideals in the near term. That’s why this fight is more important than ever.
Here’s what Brooke Morales, one emerging leader in the fight against oppression had to say:
“The overturning of Roe v. Wade harms women, children, and society. It allows a woman’s right to choose to be revoked, it does not guarantee children a fair start in life, and it exacerbates societal crises we face today. To ensure that children are born into equitable conditions, action must be taken. We cannot allow children to be forcibly subjected to the poverty cycle or environmental injustices. The decision to have children must be more carefully addressed, with every involved party taken into account.”
– Brooke Morales, Fair Start Movement
Why Does Family Planning Reform Enable Redistribution of Wealth? It’s About Baselines.
If you believe in freedom, it’s impossible for a group of people to just define what the world should look like for others. The baseline, or what the world should look like, is instead itself a group of relatively self-determining – or free – people. And that requires limiting the power each one of us has over one another by ensuring a restored, natural and biodiverse environment.
It requires all children to be empowered through things like a fair start in life that ensures true equality of opportunities in life (not the world today where the rich control the lives of the poor), as well as more functional democracies where each voice can actually be heard. Read more.
Rich nations are refusing to pay for the harm they caused poor nations through systems that created the climate crisis. But nations and the rich families they are protecting have a baseline problem. They cannot assign and defend property rights while simultaneously violating the right of all to be free. We have the right to take back the wealth and use it to offset the harms, through things like equitable family planning, by all means effective. Help us target the Raymond family, one of the worst violators, to pay what they owe. Contact Ashley@FairStartMovement.org.
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.
