What is Fair Start's Tell the Truth Campaign?
After World War Two nations should have derived their authority and entitlements to wealth from empowering their citizens through equitable birth and development conditions. Instead nations privatized family planning, and removed objective environmental and other values from the process. They focused on arbitrary measures like gross domestic product which hid the relational values like political equity.
The resulting system could not sustain itself for a few decades before the growth, disenfranchisement, and inequity it caused triggered the climate crisis, the degradation of democratic systems, massive racial injustice, etc.
Much of the public interest work done over the last several decades has been easily undone by inequitable growth, premised on the constant assumption that the form of social organization being practiced was legitimate. But that growth easily put more animals in factory farms and pollution into the environment than nonprofits were taking out, it was also enriching some - often the families of those funding these organizations - at deadly cost to vulnerable children, and mostly children of color.
We are now at a crossroads between an inclusive system of deliberate protection and empowerment of all children using a preemptive, equitized standard, and the inequitable, commercialized standard designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others that caused today’s massive inequality, and the degradation of our environments and ecologies.
We achieve the former by pivoting the international reproductive rights regime to a collective system of planning that ensures no child is born beneath a threshold of empowering birth and development conditions, which such conditions are funded by the extreme wealth that was already made at cost to these children. We can’t know who we should be, in terms of having and raising children, outside of a collective discourse. If it takes a village to raise a child it takes a village to plan for one.
One hurdle is that the extreme wealth made at cost to children is now funding a phalanx of academics, media, lawyers, fundraisers, and nonprofits engaged in sensational micro-level interventions designed to distract from macro-level reforms that bend the arc of who we are, creating a fantasy world of progress that is easily being undone every day by birth inequity.
The Tell the Truth campaign determines which standard one is using, uses equity-washing litigation against key targets refusing equity in order to set the standard, and to initiate accurately measured full birth-equity reparations. We can accept preemption, or allow many children to die because we choose to never pay the costs of our wealth.
It is physically impossible to be democratically empowered - or truly self-determining - without this pivot. The Tell the Truth campaign is a constitutive discourse. It urges us all to admit benefitting at deadly cost to others based - fundamentally - on birth inequity.
We then derive our obligation to follow the law on governments actually empowering children equitably as they enter the world, treating our obligation to them as primary. We can choose to actually be part of a legitimate system that benefits all - rather than just improving our own position in a legitimate system.
The Tell the Truth campaign determines who is who in this process.