In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders evaded future children’s interests and political equity as a basis for reproductive rights, mostly likely because it would have required heavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions.
Leaders on the left and the right conflated by defining power very narrowly – as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence, so one would be free to terminate pregnancies, only to now die in a heat wave because one had no influence over climate policy, and could not afford air conditioning.
Read the story of what occurred here.
The lack of investment directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth, did good because the outcomes today involve projections of millions dying in the climate crisis.
Those efforts would have also inevitably treated children of color as deserving a fraction of the resources and exponentially more risk, meaning that today billions of persons are at extreme risk from a climate crisis they had little to no role in causing.
We know that this did more harm than good because evading children’s interests brought them into conditions that not only violated their rights, but thereby degraded – through things like extreme heat – the capacity of their ecologies to support what all children need. That inequitable growth simultaneously disenfranchised the average voter, seeding vast political inequity and blocking their ability to halt what was unfolding.
There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc.
It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy.
Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. The omission of information on child entry conditions hides liability – and rights to self-defensive reparations – for deadly climate harm to millions of children of color who are born with a tiny fraction of the wealth of white funders’ kids.
The fix?
As described in detail below, an effective solution if to use measurable standards for true social justice and ecological restoration to ensure accurate climate reparations pegged to the self-determination of each child entering the world. Because the creation of one’s positionality relative to others and ecologies is legally preemptive, it enables drastic action to recover reparations.
Humans need law primarily to protect the vulnerable amongst us, so there is no law, or obligation to do what others say, in a system that starts with punching down on the most vulnerable. And if our oppression comes in our creation through a status quo that does not ensure minimum levels of welfare for kids at entry, it then seems impossible to see and remove without an objective touchstone – like offset, or zero, baselines –that change the status quo.
