Under this new approach Congress would have no authority to reject your legislation, or better yet to reject a more radical version of it that ensures true equity, not nominal equality. This is an argument that transcends reliance on written constitutions or even international law.
This is the argument: Nations are not magically constituted in the past, but either constituting inclusive democracies or not, depending on the laws and policies that surround having children. If those laws and policies ensure minimum levels of welfare in the birth and development, at least begin to ensure equality of opportunity, restore the climate and biodiversity using ecocentric approaches, and treat the addition of each new person to our nation as inverse to the absolute self-determination of people already here, those laws and policies are constituting legitimate societies.
If we wish to maximize relative self-determination, where else would we find that value but family reforms? There is nowhere else.
An easy proxy for all of this might be the Children’s Rights Convention – and pegging family planning to it to ensure birth and development conditions consistent with it. We can also think of it in terms of a new vision of Roe v. Wade.
If nations do not do this, they are constituting something other than democracy.
This new model – where we take human rights and their ability to limit governmental authority – could present a difficult choice. It will mean abandoning the privacy model of family planning based on the Cairo Consensus as a failure that helped ensure the climate crisis and massive inequity, though it was the model we all relied upon. And it’s a pro-growth model many of your wealthiest funders made a lot of money on.
The alternative would be for everyday citizens, like the our members, to simply wait for Congress to mitigate the climate crisis, and protect and ensure the development of the children who will comprise our future, while watching Congress operate in total attenuation from its constituents, and amid widening inequity that empowers some at cost to others.
Free people would not be willing to do that. We are not willing to do that.
There is an argument that he has no such authority, an argument that transcends reliance on written constitutions or even international law.
This is the argument: Nations are not magically constituted in the past, but either constituting inclusive democracies or not, depending on the laws and policies that surround having children. If those laws and policies ensure minimum levels of welfare, at least begin to ensure equality of opportunity, restore the climate and biodiversity using ecocentric approaches, and treat the addition of each new person as inverse to absolute self-determination, they are constituting legitimate societies.
If we wish to maximize relative self-determination, where else would we find that value but family reforms? There is nowhere else.
An easy proxy for all of this might be the Children’s Rights Convention – and pegging family planning to it to ensure birth and development conditions consistent with it
If nations do not do this, they are constituting something other than democracy.
Moreover, these truly constitutive laws and policies must override all conflicting interests, at least if we take freedom and democracy seriously. They come first. And we certainly imagine people like Judge Kacsmaryk value freedom, and value the people who died fighting in the name of it.
In the case of contraceptive access the application of such primary laws and policies is clear. We need universal access, and courts have no authority to prevent it.
This new model – where we take human rights and their ability to limit governmental authority seriously – could present a difficult choice for your organizations. It will mean abandoning the privacy model of family planning based on the Cairo Consensus as a failure that helped ensure the climate crisis and massive inequity, though it was the model we all long relied upon. That model also – by ensuring growth – made some of your key funders (and we know one of them well) a lot of money.
But the upside would be a better vision of and argument for reproductive freedom, and one that does not rely on a system of government that long ago undercut it’s own authority to rule. And if we choose the override model, there are incremental ways short of all out revolution to guarantee that we constitute legitimate – by which we mean simply inclusive – democracies.
The alternative would be for everyday citizens, like the our members, to simply wait for courts and Congress to mitigate the climate crisis, and protect and ensure the development of the children who will comprise our future, while watching Congress operate in total attenuation from its constituents, and amid widening inequity that empowers some at cost to others.
Free people would not be willing to do that. We are not willing to do that.
Dear Ayesha Imam, Norma Torres, and Annie Leonard,
We write with great admiration for what you have done for the environment. But our generations made mistakes that fundamentally led to the climate crisis and vast inequity we see today. We treated the act of having children as more personal to the parents than interpersonal for the children who would be born, and the communities they would comprise. Instead, we should have used child equity – ecosocial equity – as a standard for our family policies.
Please consider changing your approach to family policies, and embracing something at least approaching Fair Start in your programming, including a vision of future families that can rewild the Earth.
Scan the headlines of news today and you will see stories about celebrities hard working while also having kids.
These stories are not news, if we assume news should be about what really impacts readers’ lives.
Instead it’s content to carry advertising. In normal circumstances this is fairly benign stuff. But the world we live in today does not reflect normal circumstances. Media highlighting families – reinforcing different choices – without reporting the impact on our environment and communities is imposing costs – on at least five levels including exacerbating the crisis and expanding vast inequity – on you and your children.
Thinking along these lines might ensure a fuller form of DEIJ, not just for us but for the majority of persons (human and nonhuman) – those who will live in the future. One way to bring this all into action would be by focusing funding on bottom up grassroots movements that are decentralized and operate around a central organizing principle of maximizing capacity for consent by all, putting freedom over property.
TAKE ACTION: The most effective change we can make involves family reforms. Take an action now.
Wealth was built by externalizing costs on freedom, by being able to consume the nonhuman world, and benefit from the growth not having to invest equally in children allowed.
Older generations of wealthy people often either have trouble understanding this, or simply do not care. Their adult children, who benefitted from more aware systems of education, are different. They have more at stake in the future, understand that large and consumptive families are not sustainable, and can often see their unearned privileges.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Ireland Baldwin online, or find and engage her in person, to publicly admit these truths, and adopt Fair Start family reforms that invest in freedom. She owes us, and the future, the change such a good use of her influence would bring.
If you wanted to be free from the power of others, you might migrate towards nations where you had more social mobility, where government was democratically elected, and where the rule of law – preventing things like arbitrary violence – operated. That would be liberating, but only relative to the nation from which you emigrated.
The move would not free you from the man-made climate crisis, the way your social positioning in that nation was determined by the resources you had at birth and in your development, or the way your vote is diluted by the size of the democracy itself. Relative to the ideal of freedom, your physical move might not be liberating at all.
Our thinking, when it comes to freedom, is clouded by what is called the “constitutive fallacy,” or basing your obligation to follow the law on coercive top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Resolving the fallacy allows us to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
This work can feel oppressive because it seems to impinge on our autonomy – the freedom to have as many children we like, in any conditions, irrespective of what they need and the impact on the nonhuman world. That sense of autonomy is an illusion because the private sphere of our family lives is not private at all, but shaping the public life of the future and it may very well be that freedom is an impossibility without fairness in creation, given that fairness is the base prerequisite for justice and liberty.
The idea that having and raising children is a personal or private matter to be left to the parent was not designed to protect; it was designed to eliminate the obligations of the wealthy, and the governments they influence, to collectively invest in the children they could instead exploit as labor, and to avoid drastic reductions in the arc of population growth that was creating massive returns on investments.
Recently Fair Start added an addendum to this letter. Read it here.
Open Letter to Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi Regarding India’s Human Rights Obligations in Developing New Family and Population Policies sent January 29th, 2023
This is the key thing to know: India should consider itself bound by international human rights and obligations to future generations when devising a new policy, which it needs desperately. The best human-rights based guidelines for that policy are described in filings now before the United Nations, and which treat Article 16 of the International Bill of Human Rights as the most basic norm – or grundnorm – around which all family and population policy must orient.
We, the undersigned are writing to urge you to bring your legislation in line with international human rights obligations to future generations, an opportunity signaled by Dr. Natalia Kanem of the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) via her bold statement on World Population Day that equality is not about counting people but making sure people count. India can use international law, the binding sources rather than the flawed Cairo Consensus, to guide its family policy reforms to ensure every child a fair start in life.
Fair Start as the First and Overriding Human Right
All forms of political obligation begin with a list of norms, or human rights, that attempt to objectively limit the subjectivity of democracy. The order of these lists – from the International Bill of Human Rights to India’s constitution, show why the Cairo Consensus, which was driven by elites who did not want to invest in children but rather exploit population growth for profit, ensured an unsustainable population explosion, massive inequality, and the climate crisis, is a failure.
The first norm that must begin any set of human rights is the right to have children, accounting for the people themselves, and that norm – despite what Cairo intended – cannot be subjective to the parents but must be based on the fair and objective needs of children, as outlined in the Children’s Rights Convention. To give parents unlimited power over their future children is a form of property in persons. Many charities, funded by wealthy persons more interested in protecting their wealth than doing good, push distracting campaigns that do little good in the face of things like massive inequity and a climate crisis set to kill millions.
They are hiding something 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 and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Truly free people will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually constituting systems in which they are empowered.
This means changes in the actual practice of India’s family and population changes can happen bottom-up, through class struggle that seeks to invest more in planning for the future of families at the bottom of India’s economic demographic.
An example of the fallacy involves what’s been called the #famscam, in which several civil society organizations were outed by a whistleblower in 2023 for violating ethics rules and knowingly undoing claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempowered most people in order to – per one Nobel Laureate – grow economies that benefitted a few at cost to freedom and democracy.
We urge you to continue your bold actions, and to take a clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning to address rising global inequality – including gender inequity and the climate crisis. Governments, NGOs, and major foundations are failing women, children and future generations. Without a universal effort to implement equitable and sustainable family planning programs, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), FP2030 commitment, and Human Development Index benchmarks cannot be achieved, and human rights will continue to erode.
And they will do so in a world where the climate crisis continues to unfold more quickly than expected, leaving the dead in its wake.
Just and sustainable family planning centers on human rights and accounts for the needs of women, children and future generations – something that current family planning programs across the globe fail to do. Family planning that is just and sustainable:
● Ensures equitable access to family planning and education
● Ensures equitable entitlements at birth and moves towards using fiscal and other policies to ensure that all children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the Children’s Rights Convention
● Ensures every child is born with a fair start with sufficient resource
● Reflects the disparity of ecological impacts between wealthy nations and less wealthy ones, and allocates responsibility proportionally, including calling for the waiving of property claims where appropriate to account for the costs externalized – relative to the Children’s Convention – in the creation of concentrations of wealth
These resources empower individuals and families and enable communities and governments to sustainably and equitably invest more in each child and their future while upholding reproductive rights.
However, current political, religious, economic, and cultural pressures to increase births and obstruct family planning programs are driving our biggest global crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. The growing human population, with 8 billion alive today, is already too much for earth to sustainably and ecologically support.
Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, contributes to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.
The Right to Found a Family
Current family planning programs and policies demonstrate clearly the UN’s misinterpretation of the right to found a family under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 16 should have been exercised in a way that protects all generations – from the middle of the 20th Century to those in 2050 – equally. The United Nations also should have interpreted Article 16 as being consistent with other human rights obligations, such as the Children’s Rights Convention, FP2030, as well as the SDGs.
Because they see the conditions being created today, 40 percent of young people have expressed concerns about exercising their right to plan a family. A robust application of Article 16 could allay those concerns. Instead, the United Nations succumbed to member state pressures to promote and coerce large, unsustainable families and increase population growth rates in the 20th century.
Children’s Rights and Intergenerational Justice
The misreading of Article 16 enabled pro-growth economic and pronatalist pressures to directly undermine the UN’s clear commitment to the rights of children, sustainable development, and intergenerational justice. As things stand, young and future generations face the prospect of significant reversals in human rights.
Mountains of evidence show that because of population-driven environmental threats, children born today and tomorrow will live “an unprecedented life”, facing “conditions older generations have never experienced.” The most recent report from UNICEF indicates that almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children face an “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution. The inequities created by unsustainable growth policies also gravely impact the estimated 356 million children living in extreme poverty worldwide.
Just and Sustainable Family Planning
The global community has failed to promote or support family reproductive decisions that lead to healthy and sustainable ecosystems and equitable prosperity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The best way to compensate current and future generations for this failure would be to reinterpret Article 16 as stated above and create an equitable balance of resources. Equitable distribution would ensure that children are born into just conditions including entitlements and a global vision that puts them first – with a fair start to a path forward.
Governments and community institutions must make sustainable, equitable investments in current and future families. They must be required to educate would-be parents about the benefits of delayed parenthood, birth spacing, and smaller families – including those with no children. These investments would create greater family financial stability, better social and emotional outcomes, higher standards of living, women’s empowerment, greater investment in each child, and would result in a more sustainable planet.
A declaration by the The Prime Minister would be a powerful step toward dispelling the myths that underpin pronatalism and challenging the reluctance to address unsustainable population growth. Such a statement would elevate discussions around the needs and wellbeing of existing and future generations.
Such a declaration also would highlight the urgency of substantial investment in comprehensive and equitable family planning programs. These programs not only realize individual rights but also advance the legitimate goal of creating equitable and sustainable birth conditions.
The United Nations has been criticized for not intervening to protect human rights in other contexts. This negligence has already resulted in calamitous consequences for the planet and the human species. It is therefore imperative that the Prime Minister call on governments, NGOs, and major foundations to promote equitable and sustainable family planning to ensure intergenerational justice and achieve true liberation for all people, starting with women and children.
How? He embraced anthropocentric population growth over the true liberation of animals, something only possible through rewilding and Fair Start family policies that require parental readiness, redistribution of wealth for child equity, and a default of smaller families.
Moreover, his approach has bred a generation of “distractivists” who pretend to help animals by selling vegan food products to a growing population, while even pushing for more growth, that on balance is at war with animals. They are using their wealth and power profit by imposing costs on others, disempowering the majority, and in a way that exacerbates acts of violence that are hitting innocent rather than those responsible for pushing unjust systems.
Singer committed the “constitutive fallacy,” or basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower and liberate people – in terms of their actual relations – and in a measurable way, enabling them to physically constitute – under the Children’s Convention – legitimate power relations between people from whose authority things like written constitutions must derive.
Urge Singer to embrace Fair Start reforms, or a comparably effective approach, here.
The first measure of doing good is not welfare or utility, it is consent, and whether we are constituting – physically – just and liberating societies. Singer, given his position, has the capacity to tell the truth and help change family policies in a way that could save millions of lives. Doing the most good means targeting concentrations of influence, like Singer, and using them to bend the arc of growth towards justice.
