Here Amanda discusses the impacts of her decisions to break free from the family molds that confine how many others live in order to write her own life story, and to show us her profound and self-authored vision of family and love.
Her freedom has freed others – ecologically, socially, and in terms of how she shows others what is possible.
On India’s Independence Day on August 15, 2019 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on the central and state governments to implement policies to control the country’s population growth rate: “Population explosion will cause many problems for our future generations. We have to be concerned about population explosion. The central as well as state governments should launch schemes to tackle it,” Modi said in his Independence Day address before the nation’s iconic Red Fort in Delhi according to NDTV. The prime minister also called on Indian couples to have smaller families and praised Indian citizens who have already embraced smaller family norms, saying that having fewer children is “an act of patriotism.”
In November, 2022, the Supreme Court refused to entertain the petitions seeking directions to control the population, saying it is for the Central government to look at the issue of population control. The Supreme Court also said that it was not an issue where the court should interfere.
However, in November the Court also ruled that under India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancies Act, 1971 (MTP Act), and its related rules, all women are entitled to safe and legal abortion, regardless of their marital status. This enables legislation that would seek to reduce family size.
At the same time, India shows great disparity in equality of opportunity among children. A recent study used two rounds of Indian National Family Health Surveys and concepts of Inequality of Opportunity and Human Opportunity Indices to measure inequality arising out of unequal coverage of full immunization and minimum nutrition for Indian children. The results suggest overall high level of inequality of opportunity with substantial geographical variations. Changes in inequality of opportunity in the two services during 1992-1993 to 2005-2006 were mixed with some geographical regions outperforming others. The findings also call for substantial policy revisions if the goal of universal full immunization and minimum nutrition has to be achieved. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/41487420
Modi’s call for a smaller family policy can thus be recast as a promoting equity, through measures which mimic calls for reforms to U.S. tax policy using devices such as “baby bonds” which create savings accounts for children, and could be used to incentivize delayed fertility.
More specifically:
1) Cut all benefits to wealthy families who don’t need the funding.
Moreover, these policies can override conflicting rights and policies because family planning is the first norm from which others derive, accounting for the creation and existence of persons, from whom governance and all of its practical norms derive: See https://bolognalawreview.unibo.it/article/download/13299/12829
The actual policy changes would flow from 1) the UDHR and International Bill of Rights, and a correct interpretation of Article 16, see https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-file-update-to-un-human-rights-council-petition-our-overriding-right-to-nature-and-equity/, to 2) mandate scaled family planning entitlements, like baby bonds, through India’s current family incentives progam. In an effort to encourage Family Planning (FP) adoption, since 1952, the Government of India has been implementing various centrally sponsored schemes that offer financial incentives (FIs) to acceptors as well as service providers, for services related to certain FP methods.
George Monbiot tweeted recently that anyone claiming he and other leading environmentalists did not do enough to stop the climate crisis must not be familiar with his work. That’s a haughty claim.
Instead he chose to privilege his own biological children, relative to the scores of children dying in infancy in the Global South, the children whose climate now threatened by the system George upheld. Family planning entitlements could have avoided that. In practice George is anthropocentric, nor ecocentric.
George has long opposed family reforms that would ensure children are readied for the future, and instead chooses to use his platform to talk about food. He’s misusing his platform, doing what many vegan funders do – choosing to convert a miniscule fraction of the world to diets while benefiting from the growth that on balance does much more harm to animals.
He just assumed that family planning policies – all based on parental autonomy – were part of a menu of choices governments could use to improve outcomes. He never realized that no government is legitimate if it is not empowering its people, and that word “empowerment” is not rhetoric – it means something and is measurable. George may be an environmentalist relative to conservatives – but that is not the standard by which he should be judged. The Children’s Convention – or who we should be – is the standard, and George never advocated for ensuring all children birth and development conditions that comply with it – a move that would have blunted the worst of the climate crisis.
Unless someone is willing to claim that people should not be empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live, then they must admit they made a critical mistake by not using that baseline (seeing creation of persons as the first human border of human power and freedom, or compliance with the Children’s Convention that ensures minimum levels of welfare, equity, biodiversity through climate restoration, and participatory democracy) in the past, a mistake that harmed many.
TAKE ACTION: Urge George to admit this mistake and pay what he owes, or to defend his position in an online debate at Lewis and Clark University on Aril 18th, 2023.
When we talk about freedom we are really concerned with relative self-determination (some level of capacity to consent, or level of choice), which would logically start with an account of our deontological population ethics – including egalitarian thresholds for entry into the world that free us from others – because all systems derive from some level of obligation. The climate crisis has taught us that the borders of human power are not lines on a map, but the creation of humans into the nonhuman world. We would thus have to start with a creation norm, or first and overriding principle / universal family planning policy, that looks to comprise systems of governance where populationgrowth is directly inverse to absolute self-determination. This would look like systems akin to 0123…0, with point zero being the absence of power (nonpolity or nature), self-determination being relative to point zero, and offset equally as new persons enter, up until division or subdivision of the system is required.
That norm would precede and thus override all competing norms and rights, including property rights that would otherwise block the redistribution of wealth and resources children need to be empowered enough to offset others equally over the phase in which they enter our systems.
Even if we reject the demanding norm above we can ask anyone making any sort of claim what minimum levels of: 1) welfare, 2) equality of equality of opportunity, 3) ecological biodiversity and health, 4) ability to meaningfully impact the rules under which one must live, and of 5) efficiency in terms of ensuring high levels of personal development, they would require for each child born.
Most will give answers that show they have little, if any conception, of ensuring any levels for any child. After all, having kids is private stuff – the business of would-be parents.
This is not about traditional notions of population as counting people, but power relations created between people – and with their ecologies – as they are born, and a unity of value (one that far exceeds what Ronald Dworkin saw) that is within reach during this process.
Put another way, 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. Not possible. So we always start everything with an ecosocial fair start in life – and the ecocentrism of starting at zero – in order to maintain the capacity to consent to the power of others. Older theories of justice missed this, never dealing with actual relations because they ignored the creation of those relations. Without this account we cannot be free because we cannot account for our obligations to others, and their obligations to us. Those ignoring or blocking this account inevitably contradict the values they exhibit in their own lives, refusing them to others. They are preconstitutional and a threat to freedom, and can be targeted – as described in this Newsweek writing – as such.
That right to a fair start precedes and overrides all others because we have to first empower each new person equally, and from the time that it was feasible to do this – around the middle of the Twentieth Century – it should have been the baseline for assessing all costs and benefits. The right comes before nations can assign property rights that otherwise derogate from fairness.
Unless someone is willing to claim that people should not be empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live, then they must admit they made a critical mistake by not using that baseline (seeing creation of persons as the first human border of human power and freedom, or compliance with the Children’s Convention that ensures minimum levels of welfare, equity, biodiversity through climate restoration, the efficiency of maximizing each person’s potential, and participatory democracy) in the past, a mistake that harmed many.
This is not altruism. Free people will want the capacity to consent, as equals, to the influence others would have over them – including incoming citizens. They will not submit to sharing democracy with those not prepared by the conditions of their birth and development for self-rule.
In practice this looks like redistributing wealth as climate reparations to pay young women to collectively plan their children with delay and smaller families, with that being done as the praxis of the first and overriding human right as recognized by the United Nations. It would look like avoiding babies dying in the workers’ bathrooms at U.S. slaughterhouses. Wealth at the top was built at cost to freedom by using ecosocially unsustainable family policies that for decades slowly converted town halls to shopping malls via growth and a lack of investment in kids. Those at the top owe the difference in value, with that amount to be used to reverse the process and create natural participatory democracies in the future, the most effective way to protect the most vulnerable.
Many concentrations of wealth and power fund distracting nonprofits that appear to do good work but are actually blocking effective reforms that challenge the power structure. There is an easy way to test these nonprofits – do they advocate for using the Convention, climate restoration, birth equity etc. as a family planning standard? I have seen funders choose organizations that refused to do this, and have been wasting millions of dollars letting growth undo their own work, rather than fund a mostly-volunteer organization whose work would benefit billions of people, but which threatens the growth funders want and rely upon.
I have sat with the heads of foundations (the wealth of which was built by externalizing ecosocial costs on others) who were passing control – in nepotistic moves – to their own children, and who would rather see the missions of the foundations fail than turn to Fair Start reforms.
Free people will fight for a restored and democratic future, and against the shill organizations and those funders behind them that hide this truth about the baseline for costs and benefits, as well as the white supremacy that the hiding – including refusing to ensure birth equity – entails. To think that one is obligated to follow the law when they were created for shopping malls (and media covered falling fertility rates shows that we all were created as such) rather than town halls is called the “constitutive fallacy” – basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower people without disempowering others, and in an objective and measurable way. The acts of mass violence we see today could very well be driven by this disempowerment, and ending them may require the sort of empowerment family reforms can ensure.
Today the Fair Start Movement is releasing the assessment of Dr. Breeze Harper on the need for internal DEIJ reforms at the Fair Start movement, and the organization’s response to the findings and advice.
We are honored to have worked with Dr. Harper, found her to be the best consultant we had worked with to date, and agree that we have work to do, and commit to making the changes described below by May, 2023. We have begun by augmenting our Board and leadership with the promotion of attorney Esther Afolaranmi, and the platforming of fundraising projects by organizations in the Global South, and will continue to make changes.
We highly recommend Dr. Harper to other organizations, as she was able to digest our complex need and provide sound advice quickly, advising changes that many others find fitting.
Statement from Dr. Breeze Harper:
I have worked with Carter Dillard with FSM as a consultant over the past several months. Through our collaboration, I have helped FSM better articulate their intentions and outcomes more equitably— particularly through a more decolonized lens. My suggestions urge FSM to frame the concept of equitable family planning through:
● Alternatives to Eurocentrism, materialism, and utilitarianism methodologies
● Alternatives to [un]conscious white saviorism and paternalism
● Acknowledging that we live in a Plantationocene (as opposed to the more popular Anthropocene)
● Indigenous and Afrofuturism Methodologies, Ontologies, and Cyclical Systems
● Putting the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and other non-white racialized women and other gender minorities at the forefront, equitably redistributing resources to them as leaders in this movement, and prioritizing their decision making-power.
● Removal of “smaller families” language/requirement and shifting to language such as ‘equitable families’ which is more about restorative justice vs. quantity and quotas.
● It is important to highlight Carter’s positionality: He acknowledges his multiple levels of privilege as a white cisgender man born into wealth. Also, because he is childfree, he does not carry the embodied knowledge and challenges that parents face every day. The impact of his positionality is that he is unable to fully comprehend, reflect on, and represent communities most negatively affected by inequitable systems – Black, brown, indigenous, and other nonwhite people in the universal reforms Fair Start proposes.
In response to Carter’s awareness of his positionality, he has disclosed this: “While not a parent I developed an interest in reproductive ethics while working for the federal government, and did the base research and fundraising that led to the publication of his book, Justice as a Fair Start in Life, and much of the modeling, campaigns, and messaging of Fair Start.” Carter believes even the childfree are obligated to constitute just societies because the norms that create them foist costs on some to benefit others, and to orient from such norms and systems (as opposed to striking back at unjust power and going to prison, for example) is to endorse and support that inequity.
Response from the Fair Start Movement leadership and Board:
The Board and Executive Directors are grateful to Breeze for her work, and will be implementing her recommendations for the most part, though the recommendation on altering our messaging on family size presents the greatest challenges to our work and is discussed at the end.
We acknowledge the Eurocentric nature of the work and modeling, the continued process of colonization, and are in the process of looking for alternative models as you suggest, including Indigenous and Afrofuturism Methodologies, Ontologies, and Cyclical Systems which can be promoted as preferable alternatives to the atomizing and self-determination based Eurocentric human-rights model we use now. We are looking at those focused collectively on human duties and obligations, ones that would not have created the crises that beset us now. We have begun to make progress in this regard, assessing group circle organizational models. To the extent Fair Start can defeat colonization using its own atomizing premises, without harming the alternative mode, we will continue to promote it separately. This is especially crucial because starting from individual rights as building blocks can protect the vulnerable from group dominance, as in the context of FGM, other anti-patriarchy advocacy, or extreme child abuse of the youngest of children, for example and we are keen to ensure that – to empower while never disempowering – here in the context of existential justice that creates oppression ending empathy in children via improved birth and development conditions.
We will attempt to use Plantationocene where possible, other than where it would cause reader confusion or where impossible to convey particular meaning. We appreciate the thickness of the concept in capturing the oppression and inequity in something largely caused by colonizing forces.
We acknowledge the need to increase the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and other non-white racialized women and other gender minorities at the forefront, equitably redistributing resources to them as leaders in this movement, and prioritizing their decision making-power. We decline to remove white leadership currently in place and may preserve other white leadership including self-identifying males in a minority position going forward, because we want this message to come from a diverse set of voices, but with express statements of positionality – as you have included – that make clear the power dynamics at play. In this regard we will highlight Carter’s role and positionality, as you have begun to do. We will be altering Board membership as part of this process.
We understand the importance of removal of “smaller families” language/requirement and shifting to language such as ‘equitable families’ which is more about restorative justice vs. quantity and quotas. We have long wanted to abandon quantitative thinking in favor of purely qualitative approaches can imply equity between generations and the “just savings” requirement that entails direction for family choices. Equity can imply sustainable or regenerative family policies because it can imply one’s equal share of political systems (including decolonized forms of organization). And it can conceivably imply children-rights otherwise necessitated by a “smaller family” requirement if we abandon nuclear and other atomizing forms of families in favor of collective models. But as you have agreed, there are regional differences in how the changes in modeling we promote might be applied, and regions that think and word these issues exclusively in terms of population and the inherent dangers of exponential growth linked to family size, and we do not want to exclude those differences. We also have to achieve our deontological goal of creating a first principle that all could truly practice universally, here and forever, and one which triggers property rights-override for things like climate reparations, and as consumption rises such a rule becomes impossible without some visions of sustainable family sizes. We do however think we can achieve this by focusing on high consumption white families, like the Baldwins, and will focus there.
Carter and FSM leadership hold the dismantling of oppression of all beings as a core tenant of FSM’s mission, and decolonization and total liberation as the move to consensual relations between all sentient beings, now and in the future. We admit that many of us were beneficiaries of the ecosocially unjust family models Fair Start attacks, the ones many rich white men exploit to enrich themselves and their children at harm to others. They do so, benefiting from ecocidal growth, the acceptance of free markets in the absence of participatory democracy, and extreme birth inequity, things many decolonization organizations do not challenge. As such, FSM continues to purposefully platform BIPOC and PGM activists across the globe in order to elevate their voices in the movement for liberation and to bolster their regional projects through FSM’s platform.
Here Florence tells some of her story, and hints at a better future – one that is possible if we can all focus on what will best define the future: Liberating young women around the world.
Now listen to Florence:
Florence Blondel on liberating women.
Multiple studies have shown that choosing smaller families easily has the most impact on environmental crises like climate change. From Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown, to previous studies on climate change, population size has been shown to be the primary driver of the climate crisis That’s also the case for the downstream impacts of climate change like ocean acidification, and for other forms of ecocide, like the loss of biodiversity / mass extinction of other species. Thus, sustainable family planning is the most significant act that we can take to reduce our impact.
Our current family planning systems provide no minimum standard of wellbeing for future children, allowing children to be born into failing state systems because their parents cannot care for them. That exacerbates inequity, and ensures rich kids stay rich and poor kids stay poor. The most effective way to improve child welfare and equity, at the same time, is through a cooperative family planning model pegged to the standard of a fair start in life for every child.
Many nonprofits raised billions of dollars over the last several decades claiming to have protected various ecosystems, saved animals from factory farms, hauled children out of dangerous conditions, or improved human rights and democracy.
Businesses sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising their green, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and other claims.
Fair Start reforms work by taking the wealth made through unsustainable growth – which externalized costs on the most vulnerable – and using that wealth to invest in equitable family planning that creates smaller, more equitable and biodiverse communities where each person is empowered with an effective voice in their democracy.
None of those claims told the whole story, and they almost always omitted a crucial fact.
Those claims hid the fact that those making the claim maintained policies simultaneously increasing demand in a way that was undoing the claims, and ensuring ongoing and unsustainable population growth. That growth – the whole time – was reversing the beneficial impacts underlying the claims being made, growth that was enriching leadership at the entities described above, and exacerbating the climate crisis – reversing roughly 3/4ths of the climate emissions reductions the world was attempting.
The climate crisis will cause extreme suffering and death to the vulnerable many nonprofits and others claimed to be protecting.
The claims almost always left out the fact that the claimants’ family and population growth policies were putting more animals in factory farms and other horrible places, ensuring more children were born and raised in conditions of suffering and deprivation, and ensuring each person had less of an effective voice in their political systems – the systems that might have otherwise prevented the crisis. The claims at the same time hid the need for fundamental family reforms that, through family planning incentives/entitlements, could have saved millions of lives.
These claims all hid the impacts of what one Nobel laureate called a pyramid scheme of unsustainable but profitable overpopulation in rich, industrialized and high climate emissions nations, growth all of these entities knew was simultaneously undoing the majority of climate change and other environmental protection efforts, and ensuring dangerous and destabilizing vast inequity between rich and poor. The claims hid the fact that the entities described above – or really their senior leadership – chose self-serving family policies that were undoing the claims by increasing demand for ecocidal, but profitable, production and pollution.
And the wave of deadly climate emissions that flowed directly from the population growth and expanding inequity these claims routinely omitted and covered up will now help ensure the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
Why cover up these growth-based or fundamental impacts? The family reforms that would prevent them, when correctly researched and assessed, ensure all children a fair start in life by overriding current property rights to ensure that all children get enough of what they need in order to physically compromise legitimate democracies cable of actually and fairly assigning property rights. Fair starts come first.
If justice and systems of justice (that obligate us) start with fairness to all, how do we get there without fair starts in life for all kids? We do not. Being free means being obligated only to follow laws which begin by empowering each person, to be relatively self-determining, in a measurable way.
These lies disempower us at the most fundamental level.
That growth has also been converting the freedom of functional democracies comprised of citizens who were born and raised with what the Children’s Rights Convention promises them into a system of overcrowded shopping malls filled with people born and raised in conditions that fell well below the Convention standards and who are all the while destroying their own ecosystems.
I’ve sat with uber-wealthy funders who were making money on growth through things like their plant-based investments, growth which was doing more harm to animals than the nonprofits, media and businesses they funded were doing good through their low-impact campaigns, and these funders simply decided to continue what they were doing. I’ve sat with foundation managers given the position by their wealthy parents who refuse to fund campaigns that simply urge conversations about birth equity. I’ve seen tenured professors at leading law schools choose to promote funding for family models that undercut everything they proclaimed to value because those models gave their kids – their rich, white kids – underserved head starts and massive privileges in life.
We can reverse this process by moving the wealth that was made at cost to others into programs like the Seeds for the Future campaign, a process of reforesting the land, and creating savings accounts for kids in a way that pays them back for what we did, and sets a norm of smaller and more equitable families as the first human right and obligation.
We can also target those, like Lee Raymond, as well as his son John T. Raymond, who both converted our freedom – in nature and functional town halls – into their wealth, to return the costs they foisted on others to give back the costs and, do so by all means effective.
There is a subtle a mistake in our thinking and work that is exacerbating the climate, inequity and other crises we all face today.
To ensure justice and freedom for all, our thinking and work would have to start with family planning policies that create birth and development conditions for all children consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention.
It externalized the costs of the extreme wealth we see today, against the most fundamental baseline for true cost / benefit analysis. Many have tried to hide that baseline, because its use in assessing the climate reparations described below would mean wealthy families and nations would have to pay substantial amounts.
Climate reparations are a chance to reverse this mistake and ensure Convention compliance through climate restoration and birth-equity family planning entitlements, which pay that specific percentage wealth made – through growth and otherwise – by externalizing costs against a baseline of ecosocial child development consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention.
We cannot be inclusive without this change. We are otherwise not empathetic enough, giving kids what they need under the Convention, to constitute legitimate communities. And as such, we are never actually limiting the power others have over us. We should not be forced to live in a world impacted by children who did not get what they needed growing up just because wealthy investors want to use them as cheap labor and hungry consumers. That is oppression on all levels, and free people will target those behind this process to end the it, and to limit the power others – those with whom we share the world – have over us. They power up, bottom up.
Engage in the #WholeTruth campaign to urge leaders, nonprofits and businesses to tell the truth about their approach to families, and the impact it has and will have on whatever they claimed to do, or will do.
Call in (rather than out) those who refused to invest enough in family planning that complies with the Children’s Convention, including the climate restoration and birth equity in envisions. That refusal signifies not being sufficiently other-regarding to constitute just communities that actually empower, and thereby liberate, us all.
Test people and institutions to see whether they are fundamentally unjust and a threat to freedom: Will they sign a letter to the the Climate Conference of the Parties urging them to support fair starts in life over growth-based profits?
