Photo by Marwan Ahmed

simultaneously empowering them with equitable shares in democracy. When this requirement is not met, the use of violence breeds further violence. Evidence suggests that failing to ensure all children a measurable, fair start in life, along with birth and development conditions consistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment, has caused more harm to social justice goals, including individual freedom, than any efforts to advance them.

Why? Our collective violation of children’s right to a fair start in life, and the assumption that children of color deserve fewer resources, combined with the assumption that children of color face far greater risks, has done more to harm our values and missions than any effort has done to advance them. This is because unchecked growth is degrading the planet’s ecological capacity to ensure infant health, which remains the first and only accurate measure of value.

From Political Empowerment to Commercial Exploitation

After 1948, world leaders began conflating the act of having children and the choice not to have them under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than recognizing that having children requires political equity for the child.

This obscured the true nature of freedom by privatizing the creation of political relationships. It led to the measurement, assessment, and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards designed to detach individuals from their birth and development contexts, ensuring that children of color were treated as less deserving and placing them at increased risk. This was a linguistic cover-up for birthright white supremacy and a massive death debt, enforced through a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation. It concealed the essential need for nations to invest equitably in every child simply to maintain basic authority over citizens to be truly “representative.”

Leaders merged these concepts by defining power solely as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence. In practice, this meant one could be free to terminate a pregnancy without law enforcement interference, yet later die in a heat wave because they had no influence over climate policy and could not afford air conditioning. At its core, family law was used to gradually undermine all other civil rights reforms, training us to see ourselves and our bodies out of context. Ask anyone who claims to be doing good to account for the ongoing entry of children into the world, and the persistent violation of children’s rights becomes clear.

This reality stems from a gradual shift from political empowerment to commercial exploitation. Genuine self-determination requires political influence to be offset equally, relative to zero. But if the creation of children and political relations is private, we never see that happening.

This means the wealth we see in the world today was built at the cost of children’s rights. For decades, nations have illegally evaded their obligation to bring children into conditions consistent with their rights. Anything that starts with less is inherently oppressive and non-inclusive. People, not documents, constitute nations as they are born, raised, and emancipated. We have an overriding, preemptive right to reclaim the wealth stolen by using growth to override children’s rights—and to redirect that wealth to fund family reforms and create a just future.

But we don’t talk about this because it means admitting how civil rights have been subverted through family inequity—treating children of color as deserving only a fraction of what white children receive, and assuming they should bear the worst impacts of the climate crisis. The wealth visible today carries massive debt because we violated children’s rights to create it, bringing children into the world as means and not rights-bearing ends.

Our language conceals this by failing to acknowledge how the birth of children impacts all of our work. It blocks our ability to derive obligations to uphold the law, all the way back to measurably empowering people. It means we value things by taking self-determination out of context. One solution is to legally require disclosures that contrast claims about values with the actual

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