Gabriel Fernandez was tortured and killed by his parents because the United States treats the act of having children as more personal and private than interpersonal, and subject to obligations like emotional readiness that protect those with the most at stake – future children. That’s an obvious mistake.
But it’s not a mistake. The privacy model was developed by wealthy elites in the 20th Century who 1) did not want to invest in all children but preferred to privilege their own, and 2) knew that ensuring child welfare in family planning would limit the population growth that creates great returns on investment.
Gabriel is not alone – 5 children die at the hands of their parents in the United States each week.
THERE IS ONE FUNDAMEMTAL CAUSE – OUR FAMILY POLICIES.
TAKE ACTION: The New York Times is complicit if upholding the privacy, over parental readiness, model. Urge Jessica Grose, @JessGrose, to write about these issues and save children like Gabriel.
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.
That consensus is the fundamental source of most animal suffering and death. This is irrefutable.
A specific example of the scam is when civil society organizations knowingly undo the progress they are claiming in fundraising and other materials with outdated growth-based family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy.
And even when shown the undoing, many groups have continued on course, opting for downstream “distractivism” projects and upstream growth policies that will continue to undo the claimed progress in their campaigns. That makes the messaging in those campaigns misleading, as on balance the work does not help animals or other categories of subjects, human or nonhuman.
Many are fighting back against that, and for true freedom. And those who benefitted from unsustainable growth policies that did nothing to level the playing field between rich and poor kids know they are in trouble, now coming up with outlandish claims and a fake “underpopulation” crisis to decoy us away from justice.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s 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.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will feel obligated to follow the law, including laws that create property rights, when they are empowered.
Please consider the dozens of ways to adopt Fair Start modeling, rather than the Cairo Consensus, as the base of your work and please take part in the #thewholetruth campaign, which allows groups to publicly explain the impact of family policies on their work.
A specific example of this is when civil society groups knowingly undo claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel Laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s 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.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
A specific example of this is when civil society organizations knowingly undo claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel Laureate – grow economies that benefitted a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s 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.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly and in a way that measurably empowers people. Acts of mass violence may be driven in part because we have failed to empower people.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
Right now most political systems around the world base their family policies on a lie, that the act of having children should be based on parental autonomy, what parents want, rather than child equity, or what children need. Decades ago rich world leaders created this lie in order to avoid paying their fare share to collectively invest in children – through things like planning incentives – and to ensure them what things like the Children’s Rights Convention promises. They preferred to exploit the unsustainable growth that not investing created, and the growth-based economics that created the climate crisis.
Faced with this reality, and the fact that the New York Times rose to influence upon that unsustainable growth, its lead – Joe Khan – simply wants more growth. On balance, the outlet’s reporting (much of which should be labeled as opinion) pushes women to have more kids, irrespective of the conditions in which they are born, in order to enrich people at the top of the economic pyramid who – per one Nobel Laureate – rely on growth to make money through investment.
If you wanted to do the most good in this world, and to change the arc of our future to ensure the freedom and democracy things like the Children’s Convention could create, you would target Kahn and other concentrations of influence (online or in person) to admit the truth of what they do, and support changing course. Freedom is impossible without fairness because we have no way to consent to the influence of other people, and to bring that liberty we can focus on these concentrations to pay what they owe, what they took by imposing the costs of their power on our freedom.
This is something you can do.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Joe Khan at @nycscribe, or engage him in person, to admit that he’s harming children and the environment by supporting unsustainable growth that benefits a few.
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.
A specific example of this is when civil society organizations knowingly undoing claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempower most people in order to – per one Nobel laureate – grow economies that benefit a few at cost to freedom and democracy. And even when shown the undoing, some groups have continued on course, opting for growth policies that will continue to undo claimed progress.
Many are fighting back against that, and for true freedom. And those who benefitted from unsustainable growth policies that did nothing to level the playing field between rich and poor kids know they are in trouble, now coming up with outlandish claims and a fake “underpopulation” crisis to decoy us away from justice.
This scam hides something called the “constitutive fallacy,” basing one’s 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.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. It’s not possible to do, and for those relations to create obligations between people they must be created fairly.
Resolving the fallacy allows each of us – individually – to orient from a just position, rather than knowingly being part of systems in which some benefit by placing costs on others.
Truly free people will feel obligated to follow the law, including laws that create property rights, when they are empowered. They will limit and decentralize the power others have over them, including via reallocating property rights, by actually using resources at the top of the economic pyramid in the act of constituting systems in which they are empowered. This can be done universally through a simple change in employment benefits that ensures discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages, or more acutely, targeting the heads of companies like Exxon, as well as leadership at the United Nations, who use their massive influence to preserve unjust systems that heap costs on others.
Faced with these facts Bryan’s reaction is to double-down, and simply push women to have more kids to further build the unsustainable pyramid schemes that prop up Bryan, Elon Musk and others like them. He makes four obvious mistakes in his opinion piece (framed as an article) which show the fundamental cause of the crises we face today.
He conflates economies with democracies: Per Bryan, “Declining population growth really does pose existential challenges to America, and without more children, the country really does face a future that is less innovative, less wealthy, and less vibrant.” The ideal of the United States is democracy, but inequity, growth and ecocide has degraded that ideal, and traded it for the gross domestic product (probably preference-based utility) that is the base value from which Walsh operates. He’s talking about an America of crowded shopping malls, not town halls in biodiverse nature where people are actually free. That freedom is a value we can test and measure with a simple inversion test. That inversion test – which Bryan’s proposal fails – has survived five positive peer-reviews. Bryan, conversely, has no expertise in population ethics, and his opinions conflict with leaders in this space.
Bryan undercuts all of the values he purports to promote: Per Bryan, “[t]he progressive agenda should be about empowering people to live the lives they desire, to pursue their own path to happiness, and children can and should be part of that. Conservatives are right that a baby bust without end threatens America’s future…” Nowhere does he promote minimum levels of welfare for children, equal opportunities in life for children, restoration of nature and climate restoration, or democracy where citizens actually have influence on systems of governance. These are the basic values that comprise a good life. The United States, like most nations, has used family planning policies throughout the past several decades that treated the act of having children as a matter of parental autonomy, rather than ecosocial child equity (children have the most at stake when it comes to having kids), rather than acting in compliance with the values that underlie the Children’s Rights Convention – which is the standard by which we judge whether we are actually creating democracy. Byran’s writing reflects these mistakes.
People like Bryan Walsh can be useful in this regard, and targeting him and other powerful people publicly to show truth can save millions of lives.
Bryan is using his position to impose costs on others, relative to a democratic baseline. We can make examples of people like Bryan, ensuring they account for their role in the crises we face today, and taking from them the relative wealth and power future generations deserve as we physically constitute true democracies though climate restoration funded by birth equity redistributions of wealth. Bryan only has to address the points above in his work, or to agree to publicly debate them, in order to actually free people. He just have to tell the truth. And while the average citizen does not have the power of a Vox editor, they have the capacity to be activists, and approach Bryan and confront him simply as a citizen who is harming others.
TAKE ACTION: In his article Bryan accepts that “very real suffering that will be unavoidable thanks to warming, especially in poorer countries.”: He is willing to accept the suffering of others – especially children in the global south, while protecting his own children from that suffering, and rather than taking simple steps to prevent it.
Think about that as you engage Bryan in person or online – https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-walsh-9881b0/, in a peaceful and lawful way, to admit his mistakes, and to pay for the benefits he and his family received in a system that was imposing costs – ecologically and socially – on others. Use him as a fulcrum to bend the arc of our species away from exploiting children for economic growth, and towards justice.
