Nandita Bajaj leads the entity Population Balance.

According to the Population Balance website: 

We inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet.

We are proud to be the first and only organization globally that uses an anti-oppression lens to draw connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot, and offer resilient, life-affirming pathways to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals.

That is not accurate. Bajaj and the organization use the same fundamental standard – birth inequity – that caused the polycrisis. 

Their claims use the same degraded and commercialized version of freedom, rather than measurable political equity, that enriches some children at deadly cost to others. 

Yes pronatalism – urging women to have children – is bad.

But what fundamentally drives pronatalism are concentrations of wealth and power that were able to exploit growth for decades – and able to do so because of the same reproductive rights model Bajaj backs and that Fair Start was designed to replace, one in which there is no requirement to ensure children are measurably empowered.

Opposing pronatalism in word without changing the entitlement structure can do more harm than good. 

A Twentieth Century power grab by elites used the “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity for all. This blocked the measurable empowerment of each child – the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of being free – and ensured unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentration of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment.

Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.    

There are a legion of professionals ensuring the white supremacy of this wealth bubble – lawyers, academics (many of whom do not account for birth positionality and thus lose neutrality in their work), reporters/editors, campaigners, and paid fundraisers – who create a fantasy world of legitimacy and social justice progress with performative, micro-level  and downstream interventions easily undone by inequitable, disenfranchising, and upstream growth. These professionals protect and expand mostly white wealth by omitting the countervailing impacts of children entering the world in conditions that violate the children’s rights and disenfranchise them, impacts that contradict the value assessments and public interest impacts the professionals claim. They want the benefits of the privileged birth positionality system, including using it to appear to engage in public interest work and the furthering of key values, without acknowledging and mitigating the costs of that system to these values.

 

 

Fair Start activists worked with Bajaj for some time.

During that time, and now, she and the organization have rejected birth-equity based reforms, and framed the threat around human population rather than political inequity – a move that panders to funders keen to avoid questions of white supremacy and birth equity liability, and that deprives those most impacted by the climate crisis of the equity reparations they deserve.

In fact, Population Balance removed Fair Start modeling, which shows that it is illegal to treat children of color as deserving less than white children, from their podcast. Their work does not change the fundamental entitlement structure that caused the climate crisis, and is akin to performative equitywashing. 

It’s not about population – humans are not numbers.

 

 

The issue is political equity. Bajaj provides a convenient offramp to avoid dealing with what we owe future generations, especially children of color.

“There’s a hard truth we can’t keep avoiding. In the fight for climate justice and birth equity, the path is not always clean. Sometimes, the very systems meant to support this work pull organizations into spaces that raise real legal and ethical concerns. The pressure to secure funding can quietly shift the focus from justice to survival and in doing so, it can reinforce the same power imbalances we are trying to dismantle”

– Mwesigye Robert

Take action: 

Contact Bajaj at nandita.bajaj@populationbalance.org and ask her to disclose how they account, and have been accounting, for the costs of children entering the world relative to a legitimate standard that empowers children to be part of a system of political self-determination. 

Our Tell the Truth and Act campaign is simple: We admit not ensuring all children a fair start in life did more to harm our values than we did to further them, and we commit to changing that.

Fair Start activists are eager to debate Bajaj publicly on her modeling. Urge her to accept the offer.

 

Fact:

If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.

Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.