Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Those working in public interest often make claims, and choose definitions of things like “humane,” “green,” “child welfare,” “democratic,” “inclusive,” “legitimate” and “sustainable,” that give enough wiggle room for influential officials and funders to make money on inequity and growth driven investments, at cost to the freedom and lives of many. 

They benchmark claims for the wealthy, not the vulnerable, and many are dying as a result. Like me, their statements #leftout that they begin from a system of entitlements that do not actually protect the most vulnerable, and likely undo the good they claim to be doing. These moves hid expensive liability that could move resources and save lives.  

The statements they and I made were seriously inaccurate, skewing objective values that are based on physical thresholds in the world to benefit some at grave harm to others. The result? Wrongly enriched white kids at deadly cost to millions of black children, and the devaluation of climate loss and damage claims – often achieved  through unethical tactics – that could near trillions of dollars. There is a way to find others doing what I did, and reverse this wrong: Contrast what is said by anyone claiming to do good with facts regarding children entering the world on the day the statements were made, relative to concrete metrics like welfare, equity, capacity for democratic influence, the degradation of the ecological baseline needed to be free, levels of trust, and efficiency. This will show those making the statements undercutting what they claim to value in order to themselves benefit – often at deadly cost to those others.

This back and fourth dialogue will show many starting from a self-serving position that risks millions of human lives and countless animals. 

 

• Between 2000 and roughly 2021, as a federal attorney, as someone teaching law, as a public interest litigator, and as someone creating content for media like the New York Times and other outlets, I avoided subjects that impact United Nations assessed climate “loss and damage” liability, and in ways that protect extreme wealth made at deadly cost to others. This illegally benefited some at deadly cost to many, in violation of things like the human right to a healthy environment.

 

• I used wealth made at deadly cost to black children to promote low impact public interest work that wrongly implied the legitimacy of basic entitlements, further exacerbating risks to millions of other children. Often we focused on food law to benefit animals, because diet does not implicate positionality relative to discussions of share equity. This created an illusion of truth and value. I claimed a role in effective immigration and national security work, and victories in legal cases for animals and the environment, the impacts of which I and others knew were being undone by inequitable growth policies that violated human rights – policies from which we benefitted. Even when advised of the inaccurate nature of their claims,  many organizations and their funders have simply persisted.

 

• This constant practice of omission skews the baseline for life-saving climate reparations. It frames funding opportunities as charity, funds that are already owed in reparations, undermining the right-based dignity of those seeking the funds in ways that profoundly exacerbate inequity.

 

• The omissions I used hid the way growth undoes climate mitigation efforts, birth inequity undoes downstream equity and race reforms, ridiculous representative ratios make governments unrepresentative, and current entitlements – which an increasing number of scholars see as illegitimate – will do more harm than they do good.  Those omissions could, as the climate crisis worsens, be grounds for consumer and donor deception litigation.

 

• Animal rights and law is an area of public interest  that shows the greatest disparity between what was said, and the actual policies chosen. In many universities I taught content, like cases, statutes, and treaties, as authoritative and justly enforceable through violence, knowing such claims were based on a fallacy that served me while deriving others of their entitlements. Whatever those cases, statutes, and treaties seemed to do in terms of ensuring beneficial change, they were being undone by insufficient neonatal and child welfare systems used to grow economies, a policy many animal rights lawyers ignore because it benefits them. I had one prominent environmental / animal rights professor urge me to avoid discussions of the need for ecocentric over anthrocentric family reforms, knowing that this would mean his children benefitting – through growth-based investments and otherwise – at deadly cost to others.

 

 

 

• For the animal rights work I did, the omission hid that we did not help animals on balance, once growth and share inequity was taken into account. This created an illusion of truth and value by letting listeners assume certain entitlements, including ones antithetical to our mission. We also did this by ignoring conflicts of interests, including my own. To ensure legal systems actually protect animals would take massive reforms we never seriously attempted because we could raise funds – in what some have called off-ramp distractivism – without taking on such a massive thing. We knew donors often wear #blinders. It also let us silo off our work from unifying forms of social justice, at cost to those advocates and immediate benefit to us, and it let us ignore the way inequity-driven noncompliance with the law undoes the value of legal victories.

 

• As social justice and animal rights lawyers we inevitably decried violence, but never backed the idea of defunding the police or military because that was a form of violence that benefited us – including the way growth-based birth inequity enriches white kids at cost to children of color. We wanted the benefit of a legal system in terms of coercively obligating others to do things in a system where we held prestige and rank, but not to cover the high costs of actually empowering others with influence over that system. When it came to others’ children, we could benefit again, exploiting them for growth even at disastrous cost to animals. 

 

• There is a difference between talking about animals and positioning yourself to liberate them. Joyce Tischler did the latter, while Peter Singer, who siloed off animal rights from the social justice it needs to work, and towards consumerism that has made some former activists millionaire entrepreneurs, had three kids under a unsustainable model of inequitable growth that is killing millions.

 

 

• Animal liberation is seen by many as the idea that rescuing animals subject to cruelty is a human right because one can’t steal what cannot be property.  For decades we have ignored the corollary of that truth – that s larger form of macro animal liberation requires having and rearing children with empowering relations that liberate them, and the nonhumans with whom they will interact. 

 

 

• This account is from a leader on climate reforms in Africa:
  • An anonymous funder from the United Kingdom pledged to support Rejoice Africa Foundation with $300,000USD to do water project as charity, but not as obligations to cover the harm caused by the true costs of wealth. The wealthy funder, seeing our demands for reparation, then declined the pledge to support the water project in Uganda, as I was struggling to look for funders to pay such obligations because they allow us the dignity of living in the spirit of human rights, as equals who should not be harmed without restorative justice.
  • It was around this time that a child in a nearby village – Judith –  died of Malaria – as the disease worsened, driven by the costs of wealth and with those costs – the climate crisis, the greater breeding of mosquitoes, no prevention measures in place.
  • Immediately after a while , another wealthy funder from the USA funded a conference with $50000USD, continuing to ignore obligations. The conference did nothing for children like Judith, and very little even for the animals the funder wanted to protect. What could they show? Many wealthy funders from global north have avoided funding Rejoice Africa Foundation because they want to pay as charity not as obligation hence causing conflict of results in climate reality in avoiding climate liability. Rejoice Africa Foundation would double work a $50k grant as an obligation. But most funders are busy not accepting to fund this initiative. Rejoice Africa Foundation would like to call funders to reconsider funding this initiative and invest $50k in women and children as the primary obligation to stop climate genocide.
  • [Note: Mwesigye Robert suffered from Malaria while fundraising for $3k in February/2024. Malaria in Uganda: 100% of total children go to health facilities every day. 40% are diagnosed with Malaria and 20 % of these children would get fully treated with anti-malarial and 15 % of these would go to buy treatment from private health facilities. 5% die from complicated Malaria due to lack of adequate treatment for Malaria. Yet in global north Countries, children don’t suffer from Malaria unless they are traveling back from Africa. Wealth imbalance is the cause of this and now leading to climate genocide.]

 

• The omissions – what I #leftout while raising funds on myopic minutia – ensured continued mistakes in assumptions about policymaking that risk millions of lives, and have already contributed to many deaths. These errors – now decried by an increasing number of experts –  are exponentially skewing the baseline for compensation on many levels, reducing what wealthy nations and their citizens owe, and the priority uses for the funds. 

 

• I omitted information because it benefitted me, and those that employed or funded me, or that published my work. My claims and work became a decoy, sensational minutiae, benefitting wealthy funders by evading costly investments in future generations, ones that would impede growth. Wealth made at deadly cost to others was literally used to drown out mostly black voices, voices that could have saved human and nonhuman lives. In some cases I urged others to avoid discussions of white supremacy, when the evidence is clear that gargantuan race-wealth disparities drive daily power relations all around us. 

 

 

 

 

• One way to engage those saying half-truths is to contrast what they said they did with facts regarding children entering the world on the day the statements were made, relative to concrete metrics like welfare, equity, capacity for democratic influence, the degradation of the ecological baseline needed to be free, levels of trust, and efficiency. This will show those making the statements undercutting what they claim to value, and often show they value, for others, in order to themselves benefit – often at deadly cost to those others. This included the value of others being obligated to follow the law. 

 

• For example, one animal law funder who helped build programming at several leading laws schools made claims about benefitting animals. His underlying policy choices instead:
  • Created more demand for animal products, and thus suffering, death, and extinction, than the policies he promoted saved.
  • Did so while ensuring black children entered the world with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children, which meant they would die in greater numbers from the ecological impacts the increased demand would create.
  • Did so while making political systems less inclusive of the most vulnerable, which made them less representative, hobbling their ability to protect those he claimed to care about. This absolutely included children born into conditions of abuse and neglect, children who were treated as inputs for economic growth. 

 

 

• Elizabeth is the Founder and Executive Director of For All Animals (FAA) and for decades has overseen communications for nonprofits: She said:

• “To truly measure the impact of our efforts to protect animals and the environment, we cannot review metrics in a vacuum. It is far too easy to manipulate impact by hyper-focusing on one positive outcome or extrapolating beyond acceptable mathematical standards. This not only presents a false narrative of success, but typically ignores the negative reactive implications. Fair Start’s approach requires us to examine individual crises as part of a whole, and highlights the global impact the recognition of a basic legal right to equity could bring.

 

• We can’t fill shopping malls by cutting citizens off from being born and raised into town halls. The money that had been made by cutting many off is owed to first change the system, by elevating birth equity as the basis of all sovereignty. Self-determination, by any conception, means laws that protect the lives of beneficiaries of any political system only derive their legitimacy from the prior act of including and empowering – in a measurable way – future generations, rather than exploiting them and thereby disenfranchising and harming all of us.

 

 

• We would all rightly ostracize anyone refusing to hire persons of color, and yet we embrace those defending their wealth made at cost to millions of black lives, when it could still save countless others.  Many funders are changing their views on entitlements to avoid these deaths, and  mounting #deathdebt if they do not.

 

• We can’t control our own birth and developmental positionality, and the unique and massive benefits and costs that come with it (including initial nationality), but we can offset the harms through by choosing to be obligated to a truly equitable system that measurably empowers all. We do so by admitting what I admit here, correctly accounting for wealth made at cost to self-determination of others, and re-entitling it. This is a measurable and binary change from the current paradigm focused on what parents want to one focused what children, communities, and parents need. 

 

• Had I been asked the questions above, regarding children simultaneously entering the world as I made claims, I would have had to reveal failings in my and others’ assumptions. That would have prompted the beginnings of beneficial change.

 

 

• The longer we wait, the more innocents will die. All justice starts with human rights and the dignity of expecting, in equity, the power you and your children are owed. Humans can only constitute the future through and accurate language of obligation and the creation of just power relations. It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as, and act under an obligation of, being ruled by persons who will parent and the children they will have, rather than by those at the top, officials, wealthy families, celebrities, etc., who hide the mistake above, and who should only have influence to the extent the creation of others ensures measurable equity and the equal offset of their power.

 

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