Those same black children will die by the millions in the climate crisis, while many white children get richer and richer. We can change that by taking birth equity seriously.
No child’s life is worth the life of another. The climate and related crises we face today were largely driven by the absence of any child equity and empowerment standards in near-universal reproductive rights regimes dating back to 1948.
The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity as the overriding value behind political legitimacy. They were evading its ability to override existing entitlements. But by avoiding equity, they seeded racist inequity, unsustainable growth that would trigger the climate crisis, and the development of fundamentally illegitimate political systems that never measurably empowered their subjects enough to gain representative capacity and authority.
This created a fake, top-down version of social justice based on hollow legal institutions and laws that never derived from any legitimating authority, but rather hid the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and emancipation. It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families.
There were two standards for justice: The real – measured at a zero baseline using concrete markers for assessing self versus other determination, and the decoy – which centered on an illusion of bodily autonomy, one conflated with the capacity to harm others. If after 1948 national legitimacy and authority were contingent on inverting the flow of authority from government to the governed, this move represents the height of colonization because it assumed claims to authority and wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation.
Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today. It has an exponentially greater impact than most other interventions, many of which are being undone as children enter the world without the things they need.
Ask anyone claiming to do good in the world how children being born without what they need undid the claimed benefit. Current policies have increased overall child abuse and neglect – including child torture and death, undone most of the efforts to mitigate climate change, degraded democracy and increased racial and other deadly inequities.
Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we.” Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.
TAKE ACTIONS: 1) Donate here to enable Fair Start to ensure equity is made the center of all law, 2) sign here to say you think Fair Start overrides barriers – like claims to wealth that could instead be used to ensure birth equity, and 3) urge any charity you support – regardless of the issue – to admit not prioritizing funded fair starts in life for all kids did more harm to their missions than they did good.
