The Fair Start Movement arose from a growing body of undisputed research that traces the climate and political crises we all face to a very specific mistake, made decades ago, in reproductive rights policy making.
Because we collectively used a false assessment and reporting standard disconnected from accurate measures of ecological and social harm, we never assured children birth and development conditions consistent with their rights. This allowed enough inequitable growth to degrade our ecologies and disenfranchise the average voter, leading to environmental catastrophe and the concentration of power in a few.
Fact: As we show in this work re-published Stanford University, violating children’s rights, and assuming children of color deserved a fraction of the resources and exponentially more risk did more harm to all of our values – like moderate temperatures, food security, and representative government – than any of our philanthropic efforts did good.
The fix? All must admit that truth, and now back a universally preemptive and restorative standard that treats the old standard as illegal, and reallocates resources into equity-based family reforms that encourage parenting delay, readiness, and child entitlements inverse to their parents wealth.
More specifically, we are bringing legal actions before states attorneys generals in the United States urging key target organizations making claims of beneficial impact to disclose how they were accounting for children entering the world in their claims for the last three years.
We believe that contrasting claims with the facts of declining infant and maternal health will show continued use of the illegal standard, which in many cases will give rise to legal liability for inaccurate claims leading to the deaths of millions. There is no universe in which 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.
We should not let those who benefitted from the illegal standard escape justice.
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That hides the fact that the organization for decades has violated most of its mission parameters by relying on unsustainable and inequitable growth models that are killing millions while enriching those behind the organization.
The Fair Start Movement begins with the fact that wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights because for decades nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into conditions compliant with children’s rights. Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive. People, rather than documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. We have an overriding or preemptive right to take the wealth that was stolen by using extractive growth to override children’s rights, and use the wealth instead to fund family reforms, or the constituting of a just future.
Many entities in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using the same fraudulent impact assessment and reporting standards, ignoring how children entering the world without what they need undoes sustainable development impacts, that drove the crisis. They are hiding their liability for the death of millions.
All climate reparations must be based on measurable and collective self-determination. There are no values outside of that system, given climatological impacts on infants.
Moreover, language matters, and we cannot be free or contextually self-determining without constitutive communications that reflect our most fundamental obligations to others – starting with children that would enter the world. There is no such thing as an inclusive, representative, and hence legitimate legal system without those communications.
The TTT campaign allows everyone to relate their experiences to the reality of the most vulnerable, children entering the world, impacting vulnerable animals, in the actual first creation of unjust power relations, rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful. All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base.
Fair Start is pursuing legal action to ensure a three year omission disclosure requirement of how formerly undisclosed growth impacts 1) compounded children’s rights violations relative to an actual baseline of harm, 2) increasingly degraded ecosystems, and 3)ensured massive political disenfranchisement.
We have a right to know what entities are doing to the physical capacity for all to self-determine and be free, so those entities can be held accountable.
Take action
Pew Trust lead Susan K. Urahn should admit that not prioritizing a fair start in life for all kids did more harm to the Trusts’ missions than the Trusts did to further them.
Anyone claiming to add value to the world must disclose how they were accounting for child entry factored in their value assessment. Were they measuring, assessing and reporting public interest impacts / 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 – and now, at high risk of dying in the climate crisis?
How much of the claimed beneficial impact by the Trusts has been undone in the last three years through growth?
Contact Urahan and urge her to act now and Tell the Truth.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation.
All forms of violence, from domestic brutality, to mass shooters, to war crimes – all derive from top-down political systems that originate in the coercion of the vulnerable by the powerful, rather than the inclusion and empowerment of children into legitimate democracies.
National legitimacy derives from and is contingent upon including in a measurable way subjects as free and equal constituents, so that they have the capacity to choose who has influence over them, and legal institutions have the capacity to represent its constituents.
Reorienting from being obligated top-down to instead empowering from the bottom-up also holds promise to reduce violence by rejecting any legitimate representative authority of the state to use it to block constitutive reparations, or to otherwise role model illegitimate violence for those around us
The fix?
Take wealth from the top and use it to fund women having any child they wish to have in safe conditions where the child is actually empowered in a measurable way.
That’s the most just and effective use of your money – starting in the upstream who we should be, not just the less effective downstream of what we do.
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Fact: More animals are suffering and dying because of growth, our failure to develop empathy in children, climate change and other related factors, than the ASPCA is saving with their current suite of interventions.
Urge their lead to include Fair Start reforms in their programming.
Why Fair Start?
Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment,is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, simultaneously.
We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today that was made by not paying the costs of avoiding climate, autocratic and other harms to future generations. The legitimate and reparative standard – being fair – will save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars.
This is not a choice, but an obligation.
Every entity in the United States is and should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc. But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine in reproductive rights, child welfare and family law – was a horrific mistake killing many. Infants should not pay the price of our mistakes, and world leaders should not be able to evade facing the lies and failures that fundamentally caused the climate crisis.
Being fundamentally illegitimate, or non-inclusive, seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of short-sighted policy. As described below, the solution involves a defiance, truth and reconciliation process, akin to anti-apartheid movements, where we all admit we benefitted at cost to others based on injustice, and we turn to now honor our obligations to the victims through legal, organizational and grassroots reforms.
The Key Barrier: Deadly Omissions
However there are entities now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive and fraudulent messaging that hides their liability and the entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.
As described below Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by these entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises – as these things accelerate. Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save lives.
If those Fair Start engages truly value the things (like biodiversity) they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of constitution and obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.
Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good. In many cases they will have spent more on lavish travel and events, or other incidentals, than actually furthering their mission.
Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.
This hid the overriding nature of the upstream creation of power relations behind the downstream subject area of population, and conflated a false view of bodily autonomy, one based on inequity and a capacity to harm others, with true autonomy or measurable self-determination through positioning in one’s democracy.
The former would enable a woman to terminate her pregnancy only to die months later in a heat wave because she was born with the inherited wealth inequity that comes with being black, could not afford air conditioning, and had little influence over her political system to challenge all of that.
Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and in avant-garde movements like animal rights and liberation. But by simultaneously individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination. It treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others.
This created a fictitious baseline for cost and benefit analysis and national legitimacy in which we never first account for our own positionality, situating our autonomy with regard to the need for others to have equitable shares in democracy, and relative to key, real world markers like ecological carrying capacities or resources for early childhood development guaranteed by the Children’s Rights Convention. This has fundamentally driven and exacerbated the climate crisis by exploiting rather than including and measurable empowering, children as they entered the world. The claims of public benefit that arise from it maintain a fantasy world that enriches mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color.
These wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – a form of entitlement and impact, or equity fraud – that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systems ensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates. Fraud is intentionally benefitting at harm to others based on misinformation, including omissions. If you ask the right questions, those engaged in it become obvious: They start by assuming entitlements that contradict the impact they claim, and by enabling the industries they claim to fight.
Ensuring Truth and Justice for All: Zero Baseline Accounting
That baseline represents an objective and inclusive valuation of freedom, one that includes the key perspective of full context, including impacts on the most vulnerable. Focusing there, on things like what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black Birth Equity, accounts for the creation of power disparities in birth, development, and emancipation.
We are asking these and other officials to then 2) contrast these impacts with current and historic (ten years back, as a minimum but in many cases with disclosures needed to 2003) sustainability, legitimate entitlement and authority, equity and other public benefit claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable and fraudulent family entitlements, used by prominent leaders and organizations within their jurisdictions. This tracking enables preemptive reparations, structured to prevent harm to future generations and to ensure their right to self-determine. The effort is being launched in tandem with filings before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACPHR), setting demands for reparations that can be carried by activists in the United States whose children are also dying from the crisis.
Simply put, we are asking officials to assess public benefit impact claims from the accurate baseline for self-determination, relative to real world markers, rather than from the fictitious baseline that assumes black lives are worth less and uses omission to hide white wealth as a driver of the deaths of countless children of color.
This fraudulent standard of entitlement, impact, and legitimacy allows many to benefit at deadly cost to others by claiming beneficial public impacts that are actually being undone each day.
What are the metrics and moves – different facets of the threshold for self, as opposed to other, determination – exemplified in action here?
Funding would-be mothers delay, readiness and safe locating so that no child is born beneath a concrete line of what their rights guarantee them, without abuse or neglect, and what trust-based (democratic) communities require including not exploiting children’s positionality. Read more here.
Restoring, not mitigating, climate emissions to natural levels. Read more here.
Taking the exact resources needed to ensure equality of opportunity for children of color, competitive with white kids. Read more here.
Conditioning political and economic authority on their moving towards truly representative ratios between officials and their constituents, and recognizing the need for those in positions of influence to carry the risk of any violence not doing so creates. Read more here.
Benchmarking efficiency to equity measures around the high capacity for humans through equitable development and empowerment, rather than the exploitation that created a climate crisis killing millions of innocents. Read more here.
Equity Fraud
The failed models have used a fictitious baseline and false premise that hid the upstream antecedent language that entailed the creation of power relations, often behind downstream subjects like population, environment, animal rights, human rights, etc. To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and to do so because of shared obligations, not because a bunch of white men with guns (or money backed by guns) are forcing you to. This moves from the bottom upwards – governance contingent on the measurable emancipation of youth – not inherently authorized top down.
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems never really created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate or the unity of value we find in mutual self-determination. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial ever-increasing overall demand by treating children as means rather than ends, ensuring dismal standards for child development, education and critical thinking. This slowly converted democratic relations into commercial ones.
This violated children’s rights by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens, and in systems where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness, while wealthier families benefited from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to – through unsustainable growth – kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a value failure.
Those who use the latter are choosing that the least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its greatest cost, with no justification, increasing climate deaths by millions and costs by trillions.
The Fundamental Fix
However, the disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
Again, to constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base, rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. Covering these child development costs as an obligation liberates more than oppresses.
But this true control of who has influence over us requires measuring from zero. And that would be impossible without the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the changing of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. We thus ask all to admit benefit at deadly cost to others, and to back reparations.
Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? As shown above this “truth and reconciliation” process of removing birth apartheid requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Instead of funding those thresholds, those engaged in equity fraud have continued to assume exponential (and very deadly) wealth and resilience disparities are natural – that their and their children’s birthright privileges are just a given – when calculating things like permissible climate emissions.
Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables liberation from this nonsense. It simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.
Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create. Again, if those Fair Start chooses to engage truly value the things they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic systems of obligation, and to include the things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
And yet governments and big business are working together to try to push more women to have kids in order to create cheap labor, more consumers, and dumbed-down taxpayers. Fair Start is fighting back, and taking the money they stole to make sure families work for families, not governments and business.
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.
Our obligations to fund that accounting come before anything we do because it ensures fundamental justice; it creates the inclusive and empowering “we” that comes before the things we do. Without this we can’t choose who has influence, and control, over us. We can’t be free.
Today most children born will end up relatively poor, working for wealthy families who made their money ruining our environment and never having to invest in an equal opportunity for all kids.
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.
Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.
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.
Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.
This transfer of wealth made at deadly costs is alsorequired by law, through things like the Children’s Rights Convention and under the Right to a Healthy Environment. All law must first be interpreted to assure legitimacy, or the measurable inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, so that truly representative governance is possible. In other words, the threshold or border, of empowering development, overrides the authority represented by national borders because it is needed to legitimate such law.
But there are specific barriers blocking this work.
There are wealthy families and other concentrations of power in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis who benefitted from unsustainable reproductive rights models. These models used a false premise (that having children is more personal than interpersonal)to avoid the overriding need to ensure measurable empowerment of each citizen, or to first account for our vast generational, racial and other inequitable positionalities in reforming legal systems.
These wealthy families and other entities are now funding charities, media, politicians and academics who silo social justice issues away from birth equity, and use omissive messaging – entitlement and impact, or equity, fraud that hides their liability as well as illegal macro entitlement systemsensuring the death of millions as the climate crisis accelerates.They are obvious because they start by enabling the industries they claim to fight.
Funding would-be mothers delay, readiness and safe locating so that no child is born beneath a concrete line of what their rights guarantee them, without abuse or neglect, and what trust-based (democratic) communities require. Read more here.
Restoring, not mitigating, climate emissions to natural levels. Read more here.
Taking the exact resources needed to ensure equality of opportunity for children of color, competitive with white kids. Read more here.
Conditioning political and economic authority on their moving towards truly representative ratios between officials and their constituents, and recognizing the need for those in positions of influence to carry the risk of any violence not doing so creates. Read more here.
Benchmarking efficiency to equity measures that would not have created a climate crisis killing millions of innocents. Read more here.
We are asking these and other officials to then 2) contrast these impacts with current and historic (ten years back, as a minimum)sustainability and equity claims, and the use of fundamentally unsustainable and fraudulent family entitlements, used by prominent leaders and organizations within their jurisdictions. This tracking enables preemptive reparations, structured to prevent harm to future generations and to ensure their right to self-determine.
The failed models used a fictitious baseline and false premise that hid the upstream antecedent language that entailed the creation of power relations, often behind downstream subjects like population, environment, animal rights, human rights, etc. To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society. This moves from the bottom upwards – governance contingent on in emancipation of youth – not inherently authorized top down .
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems never really created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by treating children as means rather than ends, ensuring dismal standards for child development, education and critical thinking. This slowly converted democratic relations into commercial ones.
This violated children’s rights by treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens, and in systems where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness, while wealthier families benefited from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to – through unsustainable growth – kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a value failure.
Those who use the latter are choosing that the least responsible for the climate crisis suffer its greatest cost, with no justification, increasing climate deaths by millions and costs by trillions.
The Fundamental Fix
However, the disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
Again, to constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base, rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. Covering these child development costs as an obligation liberates more than oppresses.
But this true control of who has influence over us requires measuring from zero. And that would be impossible without the admission of the specific harm we have caused and the changing of our obligation from those in power instead towards infants and animals. We thus ask all to admit benefit at deadly cost to others, and to back reparations.
Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? As shown above this “truth and reconciliation” process of removing birth apartheid requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if persons are not created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice focuseson thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Instead of funding those thresholds, those engaged in equity fraud have continued to assumeexponential (andvery deadly) wealth and resilience disparities are natural – that their and their children’s birthright privileges are just a given – when calculating things like permissible climate emissions.
Fair Start’s action before the United Nations enables liberation from this nonsense. It simply asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy.
Every entity in the United States should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc. But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine there – was a horrific mistake. It seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of illegitimate policy and that creation was simply art of something humans do rather than a matter of fundamental legitimacy.
But it is one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
Meatless Mondays, the brainchild of Sid Lerner, have been a big hit:
“Inspired by the meat reduction campaigns of World War I and II, Sid conceived of and launched Meatless Monday with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2003. The simple concept of “cutting out meat one day per week” was clear, memorable, and easy to understand and encouraged participants to take small steps towards lifestyle changes. Meatless Monday materials, resources, and programming were made free to the public and could be easily customized for any organization, community or individual.”
Those involved in the Fair Start Movement assisted charities funded by Lerner and his family to promote dietary change as a way to benefit animals, the environment, and human health.
The problem: Upstream inequitable family policies, which are used to enable unsustainable growth, have done more harm to human health and animal rights than downstream efforts like dietary reforms have done good.
Matless Mondays are great, but if we want a better future, they have to be combined with Fairness Fridays.
What’s that? Fairness Fridays is a commitment to give an hour, one day a week, to backing Fair Start universal equity reforms that move wealth made from unsustainable and inequitable growth into the hands of would-be parents to maximize equity in future generations:
Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect and free all of us. It is also required by law, in things like the Children’s Rights Convention and under the Right to a Healthy Environment.
The disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. But this requires, and would be impossible without, the admission of the specific harm we have caused and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power towards infants and animals. Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
The wealthy families and governments driving these regimes were avoiding measurable democratic equity as the overriding value behind political legitimacy, and 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.
By isolating women in the family planning process and ignoring child equity, wealthy families have for decades ensured inherited poverty, or commercially exploitative rather than legitimate and inclusive relations. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” That condition derived fundamentally from the use of illegal family entitlements that undermined all civil rights and created a generational apartheid that Fair Start and others is now dismantling with women’s networks in the United States and Europe engaged in reparations recovery and preemptive self-defense.
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 wealth that should instead have gone through a process of familial legitimation. Not doing so cannibalized freedom, taking from us what we are owed in democracy and trying to sell it back in commerce. The difference between self-determination relative to zero baseline markers, and exploitation, is what these families owe in reparations. Without fair starts in life, there is no capacity to form organizations of persons capable of representative governance, via the measurable self-determination of its constituents. Family planning reparations enable this process, and given that wealth was already taken and the benefits already consumed, it is owed as share equity (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) for each child.
Here are questions for anyone claiming to do good in the world today: How can we assure justice without improving the conditions in which children are born and develop, given the intergenerational justice requirements of minimum thresholds for all children? How do we become free without honoring the rights of others, especially the future majority? If you value some outcome, who will cover the child inequity and entry costs to that outcome – growth undoing climate mitigation, for example – and evade more of it? Is the entity doing more harm than good by ignoring entry without equity? What formula do they use to assess damages in climate, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. cases? How do they define the term power in the context of being free from power? Who is their intended audience?
The families and concentrations of wealth and power driving the fundamentally unfair systems have never created value, relative to an objective standard like a healthy climate. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, violating children’s rights and treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefiting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies where the average vote was actually being diluted to uselessness. A system of fundamental entitlements likely to kill millions of innocent persons is generally considered a failure.
The disparity between what we think and say, and the reality of what we do to children and animals relative to objective measures, opens a doorway to legitimacy and freedom.
To constitute, as in national constitutions, means to be obligated. Our debt to children is a chance to actually constitute a just society, and from the base rather than under the standards of those who act as if they are above us. But this requires, and would be impossible without, the admission of the specific harm we have caused and linguistically inverting our obligation from those in power towards infants and animals. Where else would liberating / obligatory relations come from? This requires reprioritizing wealth to incentivize and entitle would-be mothers so that no child is born beneath a measurable threshold of self-determination.
National legitimacy derives from and is contingent upon including in a measurable way subjects as free and equal constituents, so that they have the capacity to choose who has influence over them, and legal institutions have the capacity to represent its constituents. Reorienting from being obligated top-down to empowering from the bottom-up also holds promise to reduce violence by rejecting any legitimate representative authority of the state to use it to block reparations, or to otherwise role model illegitimate violence those around us.
There is now an action before the United Nations that redefines what it means to constitute a just nation where subjects are empowered enough in the creation of actual relations, through birth, development and emancipation, to move from being treated as subjects to being included as constituents, and obligated to follow laws only because they have the measurable capacity to control the legal system. Those who do not back ensuring all children a fair start in life logically fall outside of any system of collective obligation, and protection.
Every entity in the United States should be forced to comply with civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring, housing, education, etc. But not extending protections to infants who would suffer the consequences of historic injustice – maintaining the separate but equal doctrine there – was a horrific mistake. It seeded in our brains the idea that our birth and developmental positionality was organic, rather than the result of illegitimate policy. But it is one that we can fix with universally preemptive standards for fair starts in life. Antiracism requires removing a system of birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation
