Sufficient funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention (“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 – through birth, development, and emancipation – is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, compounding impacts simultaneously.
We can ensure that funding by using the extreme wealth in the world today to fund reparative justice, wealth 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. 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.
This is, in essence, the fraudulent withholding of reparations using a historically racist and unsustainable model – not benchmarked to actual harm – that illegally bypasses children’s rights as the basis for reproductive intergenerational justice. This is an arbitrary model that simply assumes children of color are worth less in terms of the birth and development conditions they deserve. That assumption will now condemn millions of children, mostly of color, to death as the climate crisis intensifies. Fair Start outs those using the fraudulent standard, which is inherently omissive, by simply asking targets to account for the entry of children into the world relative to things like the Convention when making impact claims and to adjust their claims accordingly.
The results are often shocking, with many public interest organizations having spent more on lavish travel, events and other performative things than on furthering their mission. Fair Start assists communities impacted by the fraud to seek claw-back reparations.
We can even focus on the harm from the fraud itself as a trimtab lever, and linguistic model, for larger systemic change and the physical constituting of legitimate relations through accurate language of obligation and the changes in behavior that follow it. The funds from this process can then fund changes in the existing sexual health and reproductive rights field that would treat mothers and infants as the priority class among vulnerable entities under civil rights laws.
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.
