We can’t truly call ourselves civilized if we don’t protect our most vulnerable. The Fair Start Movement gives current and future children the advocates they need to get the life they deserve.

• Anne Green, PhD
  Former Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
  Executive Director, One Step for Animals

Would it be wrong for a young woman with little wealth or income intending to become a mother to demand birth equity resources – resources that simply ensure a level playing field for her child and offset the climate harms the child would experience – from a wealthy family that externalized the deadly environmental and social costs of its wealth upon the child she wished to have? What if that family exploited that birth inequity and growth to not only harm her future child, but ensure that child would be likely to work for little money for the wealthy family and their children? What if the young woman were black, and whose child would have 9/10th less wealth than white kids because they would be black, and the white family she asked could afford to share by choosing to have fewer children?

Here are the benefits of such a new way of thinking of families: 

• The billions who would get a fair chance in life rather than be born, work for the wealthy, and die – all in poverty.

• The countless animals who would not suffer and die in the deadliest phases of the Anthropocene because of such a move.

• And the billions whose voices would actually matter in functional democracies because of her bravery.

• And the wealthy that are already giving along these lines of paying back future generations, out of obligation, thus marginalizing the greedy who do not give.

 

 

For all of the reasons given above, many reasonable people would consider the young mother taking peaceful action to achieve birth equity for her future child, and setting an example that others might embrace to protect all future children the height of working towards freedom and justice. Free people will follow rules that start by limiting the influence others have over them. The process of her seeking birth equity would be, in that sense, liberating. 

 

 

She can leave the money with the wealthy family, knowing it was made at cost to others, or move it and save lives.

Those on whom she would make the demands – who would choose preventable deaths – seem tiny and worthy of targeting relative to all of that. Her move to demand is a move towards knowing her and many other children, under a test laid out by one of the leading political philosophers in the world, will live free.

TAKE ACTION TO MAKE SUCH ACTIONS MORE FEASIBLE: URGE THE UNITED NATIONS TO RECOGNIZE THE RIGHT TO A FAIR START IN LIFE. 

You can also give to efforts on the ground to make this change a reality.