Problem:

The human and reproductive rights regimes instituted in 1948 included no minimum and concretely measurable standards of welfare, equity, or freedom for future children, a mistake that ensured vast inequality and growth leading to the climate and other crises we see today. Reproductive autonomy centered on self-determination, but only for parents, not children and the communities they would impact and comprise.

Not ensuring child equity involved assuming a contradictory premise – non-empowerment – for the legitimacy of government. This made social justice interventions largely performative – not tied to the creation at birth of actual power relations. Good evidence of this involves projected death rates in the climate crisis.

This extended a form of historic reparations fraud that undercut the civil rights movement and resulted in the exploiting of positionality and future children for growth rather than including and empowering each child. The mistake – conflating the zeroing out of entitlements to ensure self-determination and equity, instead with some detached notion of bodily autonomy – is now undoing much of the good philanthropy has done to date. This fact is evident if we assess beneficial impact claims against the impacts of children entering the world, relative to children’s rights standards, on the day the claims are made.

Solution:

Fair Start is instituting a preemptive human right to a fair start in life, using children’s rights standards, to supplant the current inequitable and unsustainable human and reproductive rights regimes. We are using those standards, and zero baseline accounting around accepted standards of intergenerational justice, to assess climate reparations as family planning entitlements, inverse to wealth. The entitlements encourage collective family planning, parenting delay, readiness, and equity.

Because the legitimacy and authority of governance derives from its subjects, such a preemptive right is already inherent and practicable, and Fair Start is moving at the linguistic (with truth and reconciliation admissions), legal (e.g., preempting all damage assessment impact child welfare matters), organizational (via certification) and grassroots levels (via women’s defense collectives) to secure reparations for the accounting to assure no child is born beneath a line of minimum standards of welfare, equity, or freedom.

That line is the border between power and freedom that precedes national borders on map. Children deserve the self-determination or freedom that is required for legitimate governance – persons positioned to organize and free and equals, not the reparations scam that cause the crisis. We are all obligated to first constitute, not to any constitution that is merely derivative and conditional.