Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Today some children are being obscenely enriched at deadly cost to others – and fundamentally because our universal reproductive rights systems illegally violate children’s rights, including their and our right to political equity or having an effective role in one’s political system. This was never supposed to happen. One of the most basic reasons we have not solved this problem, and created an effective floor for all children coming into the world, has to do with how we assess the value and report the impacts of our work.

We may all feel like we create value and beneficial impacts in the world – but relative to what standard? Few talk about how inequitable birth positionality and the growth it has enabled for decades illegally harms the most vulnerable children, and undoes the good work for the public interest many do. We don’t talk about it because inequity and growth benefit those at the top, often those funding us. This is not about population. It’s about political equity, or having an effective voice in ones’ political system. Not the word “population” in the phrase “we should reduce population to reduce climate emissions”  but the word obligation-creating “we” in that phrase. Wealthy entities never had to pay the cost of a legitimate legal system. We should be fundamentally determined by the constituents with whom I share the nation, not their representatives

Facts: 

• Most public policy and private business models today are based on a twentieth century sleight of hand standard by world leaders, called political equity and impact fraud (or equifraud), that created a massive bubble of mostly white wealth that is today driving most interventions and policies, and is being guarded by widespread equitywashing, a form of fraud that goes beyond greenwashing and ensures a fantasy world of social justice and beneficial public interest impact. The sleight of hand involved defining things like “power” and “freedom” in terms of the coercive power of the state, and outside of the context of having to measurably empower children at birth by accounting for unjust birth positionality – intergenerationally, racially, in terms of class etc. This allowed elites at the time to assume authority and entitlements rather than birth-legitimate them – a problem that continues today. It relies on the mistaking of isolation for empowerment. 

• The equifraud standard removed children’s rights and measurable political equity for all as a check on universal reproductive rights, allowing unsustainable growth that enriched some at deadly cost to mostly women and children of color. Use of the standard amounted to an arbitrary, inequitable and unsustainable birth lottery rule. By the conditions of our birth and development, we are part of what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme system, one that did more to harm our most basic values than any of us have possibly done to further them. The standard undoes the good we do, by our own metrics, because all objective value is relative to real world thresholds – like comfortable temperatures, participatory democracy, equal opportunities in life, etc. –  that the standard ensures we overshoot and alter. Our work and value adds must be measured relative not to what others are doing, but who we should be, and that standard is defined by children’s rights, and the necessarily collective endeavor of political equity those rights seek to achieve. We are not accounting for or explaining something if we do not start from that standard of fundamental causation, and nothing is more fundamental than accounts of how we are created. Not accounting for the benefits of our birth positionality means not being part of a system of justifiable obligation.

• Our lives depends on the people around us. And that state of affairs depends on their birth and development. Our primary obligation is to children, not any document, like a treaty or constitution. At the key moment these issues were being considered, between1948 and 1968, world leaders chose to rely on a false premise (there there is national legitimacy without enough individual empowerment for humans to have avoided the crises we now experience) to make what is a collective action problem exponentially worse by isolating decision-making .

• The standard treats the average child of color as deserving fewer resources and deserving more risk. This, over the span of decades, has subverted the racial justice movements of the Twentieth Century. The historic use of the standard, which privatizes the creation of power relations by isolating women in systems of family planning and thereby guts environmental and other protections, has led to the deaths of tens of millions, but as described below those who received the benefits it created are now being asked to pay the full costs – measured at an on-balance assessment, or zero baseline, for value – of those benefits. Between 1948 and 1968 human and reproductive rights organizations were supposed to use an objective standard to limit power relations between humans, and between humans and nonhumans. They did the opposite. And if political authority is based on our inclusion of all as equals, the standard used blocked that process. Worsening political inequity was hidden behind the veil of family and reproductive autonomy, a move that undid most of the benefits of the racial justice movements, and today enable value assessments and impact claims that rely on manufactured numbers and a sleight-of-hand that takes freedom out of the context of political equity.

• The sleight of hand framed reproductive rights around the autonomy of parents rather than the political equity of parents, children and their communities. It also defined power as the threat of coercion from the state rather than any form of human influence, a move which evaded world leaders having to fundamentally legitimate benefits and entitlements that derive from birth inequity and unjust positionality. It also allowed influential entities at the top of economic systems to divide those subject to that authority and wealth into left versus right, hiding the top down power dynamic. This was the fundamental corruption of social justice – starting with the illegal privatization of power relations.

• A necessary condition of being free is being empowered, with measurable political equity for each person, but because of the sleight of hand our political and legal systems block that condition from being fulfilled as we are created. Humans living in democracy are supposed to offset each other’s influence equally (to be self-determining rather than other-determining), but that’s impossible if there’s no threshold of empowerment for children as they enter the world, and there’s no threshold if the act of having a child is treated by the law as more exclusively an act of self determination of the parents than determination of a child’s, and a community’s, future. The standard works by discounting the freedom that future people deserve in order comprise legitimate societies. Use of the standard thus involves wealth made at cost to objective values used to drown out the voices of those who are trying to prevent that very thing.

• The basic obligation to follow the law in a political system derives from being empowered. Again, the standard blocks that because birth inequity makes it impossible to empower children, relative to the thresholds required for intergenerational justice. It is physically impossible to constitute obligatory relations – to control who has power over you – without reforming this. Where else would legally empowering relations come from? The rule of law begins by meaningfully including those subject to it through the language we use, not in ancient documents like treaties and constitutions. The value and impact claims we make situate and orient us in our political system and they indicate our choice to omit or to include the correct accounting for how we benefit and cost others relative to our draw in the exclusionary birth lottery.

• If it’s taboo to talk about the right to have children, that taboo has a lot more to do with those at the top avoiding political equity as a primary and  an overriding value that with protecting the vulnerable. The equifraud that taboo prevents our addressing has slowly, over decades, commercialized democracies. The power disparity that every would-be parent has had over their future children and future generations for decades is now being reflected in macro level inequity, and the continued inversion of justice. Measurable political equity is a necessary condition of being free, but the privatization of reproductive rights in the Twentieth Century made assuring that equity impossible. The fix, as described below, is to require it as preemptive standard today, implemented through fundable birth equity standards.

•  Much of the violence in the world today can be logically traced to the illegitimate use of violence by the state, illegitimate because without actual or on balance empowerment governments cannot be representative. Those using the standard often do not see their position as furthering violence because that violence is indirect, often used to defend the privileged positions rather than proactively by the state.

• Today the wealth bubble funds a huge swath of professionals including lawyers, academics, reporters and editors, professional fundraisers, etc. that use the omissive standard to create a fantasy world of social justice and public interest impacts, with omissive valuations and impact reporting focusing on micro, downstream interventions that each day are undone upstream by the macro of birth-inequity based growth.

• Can we change course? Yes. While there are grassroots and corporate certification moves, the fundamental change comes from law. It’s illegal to assess value (usually in a cost/benefit matrix) and report impacts by omitting key facts and values, using the sleight of hand regarding what it means to be free, and manufacturing numbers in order to benefit at disenfranchising and deadly costs to others, mostly children of color. Instead, there is a legitimate and inclusive version of doing public interest work that orients around freedom as deriving from empowerment. 

• There is a preemptive legal claim against use of the standard, for fraud by omission (political equity and impact fraud).  Humans constitute nations through the accurate language of obligation. The claim assesses that X said Y, while in fact when factoring in children entering the world relative to their rights and equity, Z is true. Run that test – using ChatGPT for example – on the average public interest impact claim today and you will see a fantasy world where hidden and daily maternal/infant deaths drive wealth to a few. 

• For years Fair Start activists have seen nonprofits that use the equifraud standard and the wealthy funders driving them take extreme measures to evade liability, including retaliating against whistleblowers in their organizations. For many, if they can get the benefit of their birth positionality, the systems that use that ongoing injustice to make money, and the appearance of doing good, they will do it until forced not to. They will evade fundamental causation to hide liability. But again, because use of the equifraud standard, for decades, has led to the deaths of millions as the climate crisis and decline of democracy accelerates there are strong reasons to use our legal systems to end equifraud. Many have argued that if a social justice challenge to elites arises, they will devise a fake version of it – a decoy. The idea of parents being liberated to harm their future children is exemplary.

• The most glaring examples involved the animal law and liberation movement of recent decades, which largely failed because it embraced a macro form of human and animal propertyhood while raising funding on micro examples of liberation, not even trying to account for animals’ lived experience in the birth-creation of their actual relations with humans, micro-successes that were easily being undone by the upstream macro growth. Many who used veganism to monetize animal rights assume the authorities and entitlements that drive – at the most fundamental and effective level – the oppression of animals, and assume and benefit from arcs of population growth and decline that will kill many outside of their immediate circles and echo chambers.

• Inequitable growth has put more animals and children in conditions of abuse, neglect and suffering than any organization has been able to save, and that’s before we factor in compounding factors like the climate crisis, and the decline of democracy. 

• There are those doing better and avoiding equifraud, organizations that account for the way growth undoes social justice, especially because of birth inequity. But they can’t really compete with organizations that ignore or exploit that factor and improve their position in an illegitimate system (by their own values) rather than legitimate that system. Organizations trying to legitimize the system through the fundamental truth and reconciliation of prioritizing birth equity thus have legal claims, often in the area of unfair competition, civil rights and constitutional law, to block the use of the equifraud standard by those organizations that use it to compete unfairly. Preemptively fair competition is how the vulnerable give their kids a chance, rather than using the existing legal system to dilute and disenfranchise. 

• There is a preemptive right to be measurably empowered, and our laws cannot be interpreted in a way that excludes persons from that process through birth and development. In this case, if we’re interpreting a consumer protection or unfair competition statute for what people have to disclose about their value assessments and impacts, courts can’t interpret those laws in a way that disenfranchises the people that are subject to them because courts’ basic authority relies on empowering those persons. That argument isn’t new, but it was never applied in the context of ” it takes a village to plan for a child” as a preemptive standard, because it was blocked by a colonial and patriarchal system where men (aided by corrupt lawyers) generally see autonomy as disconnected from the social relations that actually enable it. That system is the basis of equity/ legitimacywashing. 

• Organizations like Truthalliance.global have claims for civil rights violations of the most basic right – the right to be empowered – or the active and deadly disembedding of a person from their political system and efficacy in it. This action is derived from the preemptive meaning of the word “we” in the preamble of the Constitution and any other use of collective references to obligation in legal instruments. Those collective references have to mean “one person, one effective vote: – which means measurable political equity. There is no such thing as freedom out of the context if political equity, and governments can’t hide what it means to empower their subjects to avoid liability for the polycrisis they caused. 

• Fair Start recently received light finding to bring the first action for this against Coca-Cola for its  illegal discounting and concealment with fraudulent omissions related to sale of its products. The equifraud involves measuring a variety of harms, to our ecologies, democracies and legal systems, economic communities premised on equal opportunity, etc. from high and arbitrary numbers rather than the only fair and just measure: from zero. of We all have a choice to be part of a movement ending equifraud, or the system that is continuing it. We all have a choice to be primarily obligated to the most vulnerable, infants and animals, who we protect with the thresholds described above which ensure we all become free or self-determining, or primarily obligated to those at the top who are enriched when we don’t use the thresholds. 

• Take action. Fair Start Movement and Truth Alliance raise money for this telling of the truth process, and the use of the massive and growing death debt owed by wealthy entities as a lever for change. Measurable birth and thus political equity is the preemptive standard for all legal systems, and it sets a legal roadmap for fundamental truth and reconciliation: Saying out loud what we owe future generations for the polycrisis, and using the most just and effective means of paying it. In many cases this will mean ensuring the adult children of those who benefitted from the polycrisis inherit their parents’ death debt.

• This is the most just and effective work one can do, assuming one asks the right questions, based on the facts above. As the death toll from climate/inequity grows, those entities that want to legitimately account for full costs of their benefits cannot compete against those who do not, and governments must enjoin the use of a standard that allows the latter to externalize at the most fundamental level – reproductive rights regimes and systems of intergenerational justice, really as a form of comprehensive civil rights and physical “constitutionalism” that goes well beyond topical, divisive, and downstream DEIJ, ESG, etc. interventions. The first constitutional cause of action is to enjoin the use of a standard that disenfranchises. In that split, one is either part of a system of obligation, or not, and we deserve as much protection as we extend to the most vulnerable. 

• In the book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the author described a similar phenomenon, but did not account for birth inequity, the physical constitution of nations, or nonhuman liberation, and did not provide a practical test and method for solving the problem.  

• The core discourse to engage in the solution:  “_______’s claimed value add does not account for political inequity, which is caused by our all treating children of color as deserving of less than white children, something that has for decades slowly disenfranchised at risk communities. That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes that are undoing our claimed value add to the world, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent. Use of any standard that ignores political equity means actively harming others, while slowly disenfranchising persons of color. Choose the Equity/Fair Start standard instead. Freedom is universal democratic empowerment, not exploiting arbitrary but massive differences in birth positionality and empowerment.” One is either part of a system of mutual obligation, or not, and asking these questions helps determine where others stand.

• Justice means not benefiting at deadly cost to others and not doing so starts by accounting for birth positionality. It would be physically impossible to be self-determining in any literal sense without the reforms above, and the discourse of getting all children over the line that enables them.