The Fair Start Movement offers a transformative approach to building a just, sustainable, and equitable world by focusing on equitable opportunities at birth. Why would we tolerate family systems that treat children of color as worth a tiny fraction of the wealth of white children, and deserving of exponentially more risk of dying in the climate crisis? Our research shows altering reproductive rights systems to ensure children’s rights could save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars, and that there is no legitimate system of valuation that does not start with reparative ecologies benchmarked to infant health and political equity.
From an FSM activist: “A friend and I consistently debate environmentalism. He was born to a wealthy family, enlarged that wealth by holding real estate, the value of which increased because of growth-based demand in California. That wealth – made at horrific environmental cost to mostly children of color – allows him not to work, and to elevate his own children’s choices in life even as other children are born into early deaths. That wealth allows him to travel – even enjoying access to private surf locations local surfers can never afford.”
Climate change and inequality are interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action. This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it.
Fair Start activists came together because in the nonprofits in which we have previously worked, our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, was doing more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. And in many cases those organizations went out of their way to hide this. Liability for this will be litigated soon in various fora, including climate tribunals in Africa.
Key Question: “What are you doing to ensure children are born into conditions that don’t undo the benefits of the work you’re doing?” Visual: Infographic showing wealth inequality and its cascading effects (education, health, housing, and climate vulnerability).
Addressing the root causes of inequality and environmental degradation is essential to breaking cycles of systemic harm. The unfairness of the birth lottery robbed us of not only legitimacy, but freedom. There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable.
Inequality and climate change create cascading challenges for children, impacting their health, safety, and development. One of our grassroots partners in Africa lost a 300k pledge when the funder saw the organization calling for birth equity reparations. Charity and inequity yes, fairness not so much.
Our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, did more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. We all benefited from this, to one degree or another.
Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.
By ensuring just conditions at birth, we can address root causes of inequality, build resilience, and protect future generations. It’s irrefutable that the authority to govern derives from the governed – from each person having an equitable share or slice of political influence. But family policies have quietly broken the link, degrading democracy at a literally existential level as massive, birth-based disparities in influence grow and the average voice is diluted, drowned out in the crowd.
Fair Start’s intersectional and proactive strategies deliver impactful, scalable solutions for systemic change. Why we need it?
World leaders moved after 1948 to conflate the act of having and not having children under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than treating the former as requiring political equity for the child. This hid the nature of freedom, and the equity each has in their political system, by privatizing the creation of political relations. And it led to the measuring, assessing and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards meant to take oneself out of one’s birth and development context, ensuring children of color were treated as deserving less and placing them at increased risk. This was the hiding, linguistically, of birthright white supremacy and massive death debt with a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation, hiding the need for nations to invest equitably in each child just to have basic authority over citizens – to be “representative.”
This is how we get to a world where leaders can say we are underpopulated, when we have exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity, degraded that capacity, disenfranchised the majority of citizens, and ensured the deaths of millions as temperatures rise.
A few moves we are making:
Tell the Truth Campaign: Litigation to set new standards for environmental and equity disclosures. We can legally require disclosures contrasting claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alters that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs.
Celebrity Role Model Outreach: Engaging celebrities to advocate for the Fair Start model.
Fair Start Justice and Law Reform: Policy changes addressing intergenerational wealth inequality and climate migration.
Fair Start Climate Litigation: Redefining constitutional freedoms to include equitable birth conditions. The work will include unfair competition cases requiring disclosure of how growth undid claimed impacts, and interventions to litigation defrauding victims of climate reparations. Why do we need this? One of our activists was urged to withdraw litigation that would have set accurate measures for climate harm to children, rather than using the “fox guarding the henhouse” measures governments under pressure from the wealthy have created.
Prevent Child Abuse Before It Starts: Legislative reforms to reduce abuse and neglect through Fair Start Orders.
Fair Start Equity-Based AI Reforms: Ensuring AI development includes measurable equity-based family planning standards.
Fair Start Reparations: Projects like the Fertility Delay Fund and climate reparations pilot programs.
Microfinance for Family Planning: Interest-free loans to support equitable family planning.
Fairness Protests: Peaceful actions demanding climate reparations from major polluters.
The Tell the Truth and Act Campaign sets a new standard for accountability, fostering systemic change and equity for future generations. We need fair start, and Fairness Fridays, because while donors loved Meatless Mondays, the inequitable growth driving vegan food sales did much more harm than dietary change good. We have seen “animal rights” funders choosing growth-based food reforms that did more harm to animals than they were doing good, and just to make money, while holding themselves out as animal saviors to the public.
