Fair Start Movement

Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Scam Alert: Does the Charity You Fund Support Fair Starts in Life for All Children, or Undo Its Work?

Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.

One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim. When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide. That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.

They growth many claims hid (and sometimes promoted) undid roughly three-quarters of the reductions in carbon emissions achieved since 1990 by increased efficiency and alternative energy production.

https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/01/study-population-growth-cancelling-out-climate-change-progress/

Those lies will help lead to the death of millions in the future.

As we describe in the letter linked here, Exxon, and its claims, are a great example. They use a basic system of family policies that further vast birth inequity, a form of white supremacy, and which ensure ecocide. This means literally using children to destroy the environment they need to survive in order to create growth-based profits for a few. This means growthwashing is also a form of wokewashing, to the extent it exacerbates birth inequity by hiding more equitable solutions, like baby bonds. Such inequity is actually a vestige of historical inequity that can be traced back to slavery.

Growthwashing, as explained in the letter to Exxon, relies on hiding the fundamental baseline for cost/benefit analysis. That is what makes it especially lethal – it skews whether we owe things like climate reparations, the amount owed, and how they should be used.

The growth in the chart below – at the most fundamental level – made some rich, some poor, and ensured the climate crisis would fall hardest on those least responsible for it.

Doing so is destructive to the environment on multiple levels, as growth has undone almost three-quarters of the reduction in climate emissions attempted in recent years through things like energy transitions, ensured children are born in conditions that violate the Children’s Rights Convention (which mean they will be less able to deal with worsening climates), widened the massive gulf between rich and poor (which largely tracks along race lines), and debilitated the voices of everyday people in their democracies.

Growthwashing is one of the worst ways to exacerbate the climate crisis, and it prevents reforms that could save millions of lives.

Growthwashing does something else that is uniquely harmful. It hides the impact human rights can have on our lives when we truly understand them, and the way fairness – first and foremost in our creation – overrides conflicting rights and interests, like property rights to wealth, much of which was made by externalizing costs on future generations. Growthwashing hides that we cannot separate our values from who we should be.

Growthwashing hides what we owe to future generations, and instead it enables our quiet exploitation of them.

Growthwashing, unlike simple greenwashing, involves robbing us of our freedoms in a variety of ways, in addition to harming us through our environment. It hides our valid claim to resources for young women to plan their families in a way that can save millions of lives.

Why growthwash at all?

Businesses, and many wealth investors who also control the messaging and campaigns at nonprofits, make money from unsustainable population growth that creates lots of cheap labor, hungry consumers, and a larger tax base. They can make more money by quietly undoing with one hand the benefits to the environment they claim to be creating with the other hand.

I have sat and chatted with wealthy funders backing vegan food companies and nonprofits that made wildly misleading claims about the social and environmental benefits of the products, and who were making money on population -driven growth in markets. They knew what they were doing. I have seen national nonprofits bury research showing the harm growthwashing does, for fear of what their funders – many of whom are moving massive and unearned privilege to their rich white kids – would do if it were revealed. No only were they lying about the impacts of their philanthropy, but they were doing so in a way that harmed p oor kids to enrich their own kids through growth-based investments.

TAKE ACTION: One way to address growthwashing is by requiring the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting requirements include family policies and their impacts. Urge the Biden Administration to require this.

August 11, 2024
Ezra Klein hid growth impacts that were undoing the public benefits he claimed to further, and helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color. Take Action.
For all the good progressives’ think Klein did, by the numbers his pronatalism – urging women to have kids to grow the economy – did more harm. Klein is especially known for his promotion of veganism as a form of social justice, especially beneficial to animals. Like Vox, Klein misleads about the impact of food reforms.

Their claims do not account for the impact of growth and inequity, and inequitable growth-based policies, on farmed animals, 1) which together are doing more harm to humans and animals than dietary change is doing good, including 2) increasing demand for farmed animal products, and 3) driving deadly emissions that cause suffering to farmed and other animals.

On any given day Klein made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.

Fair Start supporters have interacted with funders and plant-based food investors who wanted to make money on inequity and growth, even when it harmed animals and future generations on balance, and interacted with former animal rights activists who were now invested in or otherwise benefitting from inequitable growth-based markets.

They were willing to greenwash to further veganism, even at cost to animals. They were herding the well intentioned towards buying their products, in the middle of a climate catastrophe.

TAKE ACTION: Urge Klein to admit these facts, stop leaning on women to have kids, and to pay the climate reparations and death debt he owes given his positionality, and which his children – when they become adults – will inherit if he does not.

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.
1. Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be.
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood.
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections.
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning.
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections.
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies.
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.
August 10, 2024
A Handful of Wealthy Men like John T. Raymond Made Fortunes Driving the Climate Crisis. Engaging Him and Others Could Save Millions of Lives.

Today children are being born in a way that harms their environment and deprives them of the resources they need to deal with that as well as crushing social inequity, a fact that reverses the impacts claimed by almost anyone claiming to do good.

And fossil fuel heirs, like John T. Raymond, are making it worse.

Can we take back the wealth, and by what nonviolent means? In1948 the legitimacy of nations to protect wealth and property rights of those who benefited most from the political systems was made contingent on nations complying with human rights that empower their subjects, the subjects from whom all legal authority derives.

With a billion deaths forecast from the climate crisis, its clear nations have failed to comply – fundamentally because they flouted human rights in the laws and policies surrounding child welfare, exploiting children for economic growth rather than investing in them heavily to make them self-determining citizens in functional democracies – measurable on simple equity metrics.

Nations have no legitimate authority to defend concentrations of wealth and power built at deadly cost to others when demands are made to use portions of the wealth and power to save the lives they threaten.

This is new news to many because universal paradigms around child welfare ignore the obvious fact that justice would begin with children’s rights. Why? Wealthy families and governments at the United Nations in 1968 treated the act of having children as more personal to the parents than interpersonal for the children and the communities they comprise. They did it to avoid having to cover the high costs of ensuring future children’s rights as the basis for reproductive rights and to make money on the growth that a lack of protection would ensure.

That not only set environmental catastrophe in motion, but in ensured the mostly white, rich children of investors benefitting at deadly cost to millions of black children. It also prevented changing things through democratic processes – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – because each person’s share was reduced and their capacity for impact diluted. And even in the last few decades, when the crisis was unfolding, those families funded dishonest charities to lie about what was going on.

Why is this not commonly understood? In part because concentrations of wealth and power used the money to fund charities that greenwashed, creating a false sense of progress.

The animal rights movement in the United States was one of the worst sectors, in this regard – with organizations lying about animal liberation that was being undone by growth from which they were profiting. Many now working with the Fair Start Movement, under reassure from their employers, omitted crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit. This helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.

This is a level of disgusting cynicism justifying direct action.

Because your share equity in a democracy – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes – is the basis of legitimacy and any obligation to follow the law (including laws that protect wealth made at deadly cost to others), some are moving to preempt law and policies that interfere with family planning reparations/incentives/entitlements for young women, inverse to wealth and income, that ensure they only have children at a time, place and with resources that offset all the harm the externalization of the wealth’s true costs caused.

Whether individuals back that ask and admit their own greenwashing and benefitting at deadly cost to others, or not, is a litmus test for which side of this fight they are on. Knowing and acting on that is the most just and effective work anyone can do.

To start with legitimacy, or the inclusion of all as political equals in a measurable way, is to be free. Work to free you and your children by peacefully engaging those harming you.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to back democracy, and share equity as the first and overriding human right.

TAKE ACTION: John T, Raymond is one of many men who are holding fortunes made at deadly cost to others. Urge him to admit all of the above, and use his wealth to save lives.

August 9, 2024
Two Reasons Freedom Loving Americans Will Target Concentrations of Wealth and Power to Pay Their Share of Ensuring a Fair Start in Life for All Kids.

Reason One: Extreme concentrations of wealth and power were made at cost to your, and your kids’, freedom – as well as our national security.

How? That money was made mostly through unsustainable growth policies that filled the world with dangerous people in order to make money on them, people who came from dysfunctional homes and never got what they needed growing up because we never had to assure their rights as children. More people, who did not trust one another, meant bigger government and less of a say for each.

Those at the top could back policies that made a lot of people, and made money off then, because they never had to invest children’s rights and empowering birth and development conditions. They were making consumers, workers, and taxpayers for Amazon, Inc. and the politicians they bought, not citizens who trust each other – for town halls and main street.

A nation is not some abstract idea – it is first and foremost the quantity and quality of those in it. And free people will only follow laws in systems in which they were empowered with political control, with a meaningful voice in making the laws. Many disregard the authority of politicians for the same good reason they disregard the authority of bosses in large companies – because those at the top represent so many, and with such different interests, they do not and cannot really represent you.

Why is your right to bear arms – your freedom to own a gun – threatened? Mass shootings mean the average American cannot be trusted with guns. Where did these shooters come from? If you cant trust those around you with guns why would you trust them with your democracy?

Why does the average American have a vote that is pretty much worthless, diluted by growth? Why is your access to places like national parks so regulated and threatened, as you wait hours in line? Where does immigration originate from?

If we can do these things, we can be a people with a certain idea of America, of certain unalienable rights, to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle us. But we cannot be a nation, conceived in liberty, without a land in which nature thrives.

Laws of Nature, Not a State of Nature – American Greatness.

Those at the border do not fall from the sky – and the best research treats growth as the key driver of threats to national security. These same growth policies have been used abroad to create those coming to the United States. Billions were made by creating billions of people, who now threaten our future – and your kids’ future – at home and abroad.

Many in the generations that came before died to defend democracy – town halls where we trusted one another. They did not die to ensure economic growth for a nation of consumers in shopping malls, run by far off boards and bureaucrats who leech the wealth.

To the extent wealth made can be used to rebuild democracy – long run – by funding responsible parenting, we deserve to take and use it as such. Doing so is defending freedom – just in a more complex way than we are used to. For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders. We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them.

Need a more concrete reason to act?

Reason Two: One of those costs is horrific child neglect and abuse, and we can end it.

Guess who really suffers from growth policies based on not ensuring good homes for all kids? Five children die, often tortured to death, and the hands of their parents in the United States each day,

Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States. This is likely an underestimate because many cases are unreported. In 2021, 1,820 children died of abuse and neglect in the United States.

Children living in poverty experience more abuse and neglect. Experiencing poverty can place a lot of stress on families, which may increase the risk for child abuse and neglect. Rates of child abuse and neglect are five times higher for children in families with low socioeconomic status compared to families with a higher socioeconomic status.

Child maltreatment is costly. In the United States, the total lifetime economic burden associated with child abuse and neglect was about $592 billion in 2018.5 This economic burden rivals the cost of other high-profile public health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes.

Photo by JPagetRF Photos/BigStock

No child should be born to parents who are not ready to do a good job. And we can ensure that, through things like financial incentives that pay would-be parents to wait, and show readiness. It works – and we know where those who should fund it live. Why would we not make the wealthy, who benefitted from poor family planning policies and growth, not pay to end it? Why should kids suffer to enrich a few? Halting the torture of children justifies action.

Again, this works. Some funders are moving away from dysfunctional charity, and towards fair start freedom. Others can be urged to do the same.

TAKE ACTION: There is a move before the United Nations to make national sovereignty and authority fully contingent on making each citizen a sovereign, or self-determining, using measurable outcomes. This is the core of freedom and democracy, and it would authorize targeting concentrations of extreme wealth for the freedom they took from us, and our kids. Back that move by sharing the link above, and demanding the UN act.

August 7, 2024
If Your Parents Have Money, They Made It at Deadly Cost to Other Children. Avoid the Death Debt You Will Inherit.

The climate crisis is already killing millions, and is forecast to quickly escalate. Women and children are some of the most likely to die.

Future generations will die in heat waves because of what we – or more specifically older generations – did.

At base, the crisis was caused because our political systems allowed some to accumulate wealth without accounting for the costs that wealth was imposing on the environment and future generations, and also the costs of investing enough in birth, development, and emancipatory conditions for all children that would have protected them even in the face of ecological disaster.

Many would say the wealth was made illegally, in violation of established children’s rights and the right to a healthy environment. Many in the Fair Start Movement have worked for scammy animal rights or environmental charities that were being funded by wealthy families that wanted to hide these facts.

These charities literally started by backing illegal, cost-shifting entitlements in the industries they claimed to oppose because to question those would mean questioning the entitlements of their funders. Instead, they chose less effective campaigns that were being undone by growth. That was a huge mistake,

And they succeeded in hiding the facts and the shifting of wealth – enough to threaten a billion deaths by the end of the century. Anyone claiming to create a benefit is quietly undoing their work and furthering illegitimate and non-inclusive political systems by not first ensuring share equity for children entering the world, which means an equal and influential capacity for all to self-determine the social and ecological influences others have over other them.

Here is how to fix what went wrong. Wealth is owed for the costs it placed on others, and if it is taken to fund young women to plan their families in a way that avoids the harm – and would save millions of lives, it can be taken by all means effective.

As children of wealthy parents, you can help move the funds and avoid carrying the death debt your parents would leave you with.

As things get worse you will be targeted for what your parents did. Don’t fall into that trap.

Why all means effective? Moving money, made illegally, to save millions of lives, morally overrides property rights.

Also, it’s physically impossible to have a legally obligating “we” – the one that expressly or impliedly precedes all legitimate national constitutions, without measurable birth equity, but rich families, corrupt officials, and religious interests worked together – between 1948 and 1968 – to hide this fact and make us think that national sovereignty and entitlements to wealth are magically inherent, rather than having to derive from the measurable sovereignty or self-determination of its subjects.

The only way to ensure share equity is to entitle would-be parents to only bring children into the world above a certain threshold of planned conditions measurable on eight metrics, and given that wealth was made at deadly climate costs to future generations, that wealth must be used to ensure the conditions.

TAKE ACTION: Urge your parents 1) to admit the facts above, and 2) to only fund work that prioritizes share equity override – the right to be measurably empowered before any other right, which will actually protect the most numerous and vulnerable victims of the mistakes prior generations made.

August 7, 2024
Don’t Get Scammed by Charities. Without Prioritizing Fair Starts in Life for All Kids They Are Undoing Their Impacts.

Looking closely at at public statements many charities make you will find false and misleading information. The unsustainable growth most never mention is easily undoing the benefit of the impacts claimed, and is accelerating the climate crisis in a way that is killing millions.

This is impact fraud.

Many make the claims because the people funding them rely on growth-driven investments. Greenwashing and growthwashing lawsuits are being filed against the worst of charities.

How wrong are the statements they make? Try three-quarters of the climate mitigation efforts undone by the growth many wealthy funders benefited from at deadly cost to others – and that study was conducted before AI models anticipated new-level heat waves. Let’s not undo what we claim to do with growth that hurts the future – mostly for children of color with no means to fight the growing heat.

What is the fix? As described by Ms. Magazine:

It’s simple = take the costs of our wealth and incentivize women having of children only at a time, place and with resources that offset the costs. There are special savings accounts, and debt recognitions, that make this a reality. That halts growth, and compensates those most harmed.

Can you back our efforts by using your money to reverse the universal paradigm – the lie – of parental autonomy towards concrete and well-enforced rules that ensure child equity? Can you give $1000 today to change the universal rule of who we should become as communities – from exploitative to investive?

Give here.

The changes we seek at the UN are underway on the ground in Uganda.

August 6, 2024
Basic Fact/Value Checking the United Nations Population Fund. Take Action regarding Dr. Natalia Kanem.

The United Nations Population Fund describes themselves as:

UNFPA is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency. Our mission is to deliver a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.

We promote gender equality and empower women, girls and young people to take control of their bodies and their futures. We work with partners in more than 150 countries to provide access to a wide range of sexual and reproductive health services. Our goal is ending unmet need for family planning, preventable maternal death, and gender-based violence and harmful practices including child marriage and female genital mutilation by 2030.

Our motto is:

“Ensuring rights and choices for all.”

This is inaccurate, and hides the agency’s role in refusing to entitle future children with the rights they are promised under the Children’s Rights Convention, and backing an unsustainable growth model that enabled large and environmentally destructive families in the past, families that violated the rights of would-be families today to have any children in safe conditions.

Given the United Nations own predictions of hundreds of millions of climate deaths, the UNFPA’s refusal to limit procreative autonomy with children’s rights did more harm to their claimed values than they did good.

Test the UNFPA and their lead Dr. Natalia Kanem’s commitment to their claim. Will she and other leaders there admit the extreme wealth in the world today was made by not having to pay the costs of protecting the environment, and investing in the equity of each child? Do they back moving that wealth as entitled reparations to young women to plan their families in a way that does not lace such costs on others?

If they will not take these steps, they are protecting wealth, including the wealth of discrete key targets carrying massive death debt, rather than women and children.

The UNFPA is still using a fundamental family planning and human rights model that prioritizes the contradiction-in-terms of procreative autonomy/isolation, rather than entitling democratic birth, developmental, and emancipatory share equity.

Share equity: Nothing has a greater impact, addressing not just lowering emissions to self-determination standard – lower emissions than the failed welfare standards that were based on the economic growth models that caused the crisis, but ensuring women and children the resources they need to be resilient in the crisis, including a greater voice in governance through models that avoid growth-based democratic vote dilution, or share inequity.

This change is the main subject of a recent filing before the United Nations Human Rights Council, following in the line of the Council’s recent recognition of a right to a healthy environment, and arguing that the right to have children (Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), should have always been interpreted around the value of share equity rather than the contradiction-in-terms of procreative autonomy.

What’s better than the UNFPA?

The Rejoice Africa Foundation care group modeling ensures a move towards share equity thinking by bringing family planning out of a paradigm in which would-be parents are left in atomizing isolation, and into a collective setting where all can collectively assess the impact of having children on the future. Share equity – as the anchor value – requires each subject in a political system to have an equal and influential role (share) in deciding the rules under which they live, thus maintaining the capacity to limit the influence others have over them.

The climate crisis, in which the same growth that degraded our atmosphere also diluted our vote in the democracies that should have prevented it, is exemplary of shared inequity. Having children, unlike terminating a pregnancy, is more other-determining for the children born and the communities they comprise than self-determining for the parents. The Rejoice Africa Foundation care group modeling captures this reality, and uses collective planning (including more effective demands for climate reparations) to protect future generations.

TAKE ACTION: Contact Kanem and urge her to embrace equity over isolation.

August 2, 2024
Why Add Fair Start to Your Work? Why Tell the Truth That the Good We Claimed to Do Has Been Undone Because We Ignored Children’s Rights as They Entered the World?

Free persons will make their obligation to follow the laws of their nation contingent on a universal system of empowerment that tends to unite our values. But the chance to do so – and save millions of lives – is not something we ever talk about. Below are two moves you can make to change that.

We formed Fair Start because many of our members, in prior public statements about our work and successes, omitted facts that would have revealed that our claims were inaccurate, with the progress being undone by other factors. These were factors from which we were fundamentally benefiting at deadly cost to others, and our omissions hid life-saving entitlements. I personally omitted these facts – enriching myself, and other white families, at deadly cost to many black children.

Many others are doing the same.

Omitting positionality, and its costs for others

These omissions hid the full impact of our positionality, climatologically and otherwise, in contradiction of the values we all live (like evading deadly heat waves, being counted as an influential equal in politics, wanting at least the choice to have children in safe conditions, etc.) – including the value of self-determination. They also delayed and minimized climate reparations, skewing the baseline used to determine them. At base, the omissions hid that we were benefiting from coercive and obligatory legal systems the protected current entitlements without paying the correlative costs: Ensuring, at birth, children’s rights to political equity.

These omissions hid an obvious error in our thinking about what it means to be free, for nations to be sovereign and legitimate, and the role that laws around the world governing families play in this. The error combined with the climate crisis will mean the death of millions, many of whom could be saved if we admit and reverse the mistake.

Freedom or autonomy to do what you want always follows and flows from the freedom or autonomy of being physically included as an equal in your democracy. Simply as a matter of logic, who we should be comes first, and it derives – and should derive – from our creation and development, relative to others and our environment. Adults with human rights – our first and inescapable obligations to others – would first have had rights as children, rights which would have also defined the reproductive rights that should have guide our creation, so that we are not born into conditions and with power relations that functionally disabled the rights. This is not altruism, but a commitment to being truly free by first limiting who has influence over you, and the amount of influence they have, through family reforms that ensure children enter the world and are raised in conditions consistent with their joining communities of free persons.

Those who accumulated wealth because of a misplaced sense of freedom – freedom from environmental regulations, from being a responsible parent, from the requirement to not take what you did not earn – were just harming others, benefiting by placing the true costs on others. They were acting in a way that determined the lives of others using birth positionality and ecological impacts, not in a free, or relatively self-determining, way. They owe those costs to the future children they harmed.

Equity, or a share of control, as the first move towards freedom

Fair Start means children being born and raised with real equity – where each person eventually can offset the influence of others in a measurable way, and control through rulemaking who has influence or power over them. The first entitlements in any political system belong to would-be parents, not government or the wealthy. They belong to those plan families around child equity using seven concrete metrics based on values we all live day to day. The rules of creation are unique because the values become inextricable in the act, including the value of subjective choice.

The entitlements – structured around antiracism and decolonization – enable parents delaying having kids until they are truly ready, as well as having and raising those kids at a time, in a place, and with resources where those children can truly self-determine and thus legitimate the nations they form. As such we all have more of a right and responsibility to enforce those primary entitlements than the government, or any group, has to deny them.

Obligation to follow the law is conditional on being empowered through birth and developmental positionality. Dare anyone to logically explain to you how we get to a fair system with an unfair start – without the equity of an equal and influential role in making the fundamental rules that limit the influence we have over each other. We get to true reproductive autonomy – in the fullest sense where women who can terminate pregnancies don’t later die in anthropogenic heat waves – via birth equity for future children, without which autonomy becomes impossible.

Starting in 2004 I helped raise millions for animal charities by claiming to use the U.S. legal system to save the lives of animals. The statements I made carried deadly omissions, making them inaccurate. The focus on low impact micro victories hid that progress was being undone – and in deadly ways – on a macro level that was taking infinitely more animals than I was saving. Often we siloed off the issue of nonhuman rights because it was easier to raise money, avoid complexity, and evade additional controversy. Often we avoided the issue of birth equity because leaders did not want to examine their own children’s unearned privileges, or because they had quietly given up on their professed causes while retaining their positions and salaries. The combined impact of those silos, across the spectrum of public interest work, led us to the word in which we live today.

In truth that legal system – like almost all around the world – offered no real protection to nonhumans or the future children that will determine animals’ lives, because it did not financially entitle would-be parents to plan well, in an equitable way that will not harm both the children and the nonhumans. The system, like many others, was on balance – at a macro level – eradicating animals and exacerbating the climate crisis for the most vulnerable humans in what is accurately described as racist ecocide. Through my omissions I hid the error described above and the claims many have to reparations.

This, along with the withdrawal of litigation meant to begin to reverse the error described above, helped many wealthy funders backing those and other organizations evade or reduce liability for the climate crisis. I hid how the legal system was undermining its own legitimacy – acting like a one-sided social contract, robbing future children of their rights to minimum levels of welfare, equality of opportunity, and safe and natural environment, and an equal and influential voice in governance while obligating them to follow laws that protected property rights, for example.

The deadly costs of what is not said

I benefited from hiding the true nature of what I was doing: Fundamentally placing deadly costs on children that undid what I was claiming to do for animals, both socially and ecologically, children like Anthony Avalos who was tortured to death by his caregivers, and Mbabazi Judith, who died in eastern Uganda of the malaria the climate crisis is making more deadly. The system from which I benefitted systematically disenfranchised and treated them as economic inputs – as means, rather than as empowered ends comprising democracies.

Theirs and millions of children’s deaths derived – fundamentally – from a system that benefits me and others by protecting current entitlements, allowing us to determine the lives of others, rather than ensuring the primary parental entitlements that help constitute free nations. It could have been any of us that died in this way, and justice starts with being empathetic enough to avoid these situations by exploiting others as means as they enter the world. Equity does not conflict with autonomy if we ensure it precedes it between birth and emancipation, but the human brain struggles with time frames this large, and many have taken advantage of this fact.

Take Action:

Some are beginning to fix this deadly problem with two simple moves: 1) Making the same admission we make here and urging others to do likewise, moving towards the truth and the language of dynamic and conditional political obligation. Find specific and public statements they have made, and engage them.

Then 2) urge them to begin modeling the changes above, including giving equitable, family planning entitlements as climate reparations, and as our primary obligation even before taxes, to ensure governance and obligation actually flow from the governed. Engage the adult children and employees of those who should be modeling this change the most, and understand what’s at stake.

Freedom, or self-determination, by definition first flows from the restoration of nature (a baseline defined by the relative absence of human influence) achieved via delayed parenting, which is entitled through birth and developmental equity funding pegged inverse to wealth. This is owed as the first and overriding human right, and it allows each to be relatively free at the most fundamental level from the ecological and social influence of others – and thus capable of constituting a system of legitimate governance.

This process does not need violence because unlike our current system it is politically inclusive, or constitutive. All rules should be fair, and that which determines our creation is the first rule. That rule contains an inescapable logic: That if government truly derives from the governed, young women would have justification to obtain funds for life-saving equitable family planning entitlements – to give all kids a fair start in life – and actually constitute legitimate nations and become a “we,” more than the state would have to use violence to keep that wealth where it is.

For example, here we would want a United States Senator to alter and complete legislation for “baby bonds.” In reality, all of his authority is premised on the change because without it he’s not really representing democratically empowered citizens. The same could be said of courts’ authority to judge the legality of protests to constitute a better future. To ignore these limits is to focus on the symbolic, and not the real. The United Nations could easily (and really should) say so and make the first move in taking human rights seriously. There is no inclusive “we” from which to coercively assign property or other rights without this primary process.

This is social change through role modeling. It can actually help evade acts of mass violence – long run – from the many who feel disempowered. It can do so by revealing those who truly benefitted from the political process, and how to reverse it peacefully.

All of this is not a matter of academics or research. It’s just a factual history and a action commitment to not being obligated to follow the laws of nations that do not empower all members in an equitable and measurable way.

Join the Fair Start Tell the Truth and Act Campaign with the two moves above and bend the arc of our species towards a better future.

April 23, 2024
The Mother of Animal Law on Fair Start as the Core of Protecting Animals

Joyce Tischler is rightly regarded by many as key to the flourishing of modern animal law as an area of study, practice, and discipline.

She has this to say about Fair Start, and the idea of getting ahead of the threats animals face by changing our basic family systems:

“I have seen the projection that there will be approximately 9.8 billion human beings on Earth in 2050, followed by the question: how will we feed all of those people? That’s a simplistic question. If our planet is to remain habitable, we need to ask different questions, and develop family planning that limits or reduces the number of humans, in a thoughtful and compassionate way. Fair Start is asking the right questions and developing innovative answers.”

February 25, 2024