By Esther Afolaranmi, Zahara Nabakooza, and Mwesigye Robert

Author Bios:

Esther Afolaranmi is an attorney, humanitarian, researcher, and writer. She is co-executive director of the Fair Start Movement and founder and executive director of Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation, a registered NGO in Nigeria that targets the needs of the vulnerable and underprivileged.

Zahara Nabakooza is a passionate advocate for children’s rights and climate action, dedicated to creating a safer and more sustainable future for young people. As the founder of the Huruma Foundation, she leads initiatives focused on child welfare, education, and protection, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to thrive. Driven by the urgent need for climate justice, she engages in awareness campaigns, sustainability programs, and policy advocacy to address the impact of environmental challenges on vulnerable communities. Through advocacy and collaboration, she works toward a world where every child grows up in a safe and healthy environment.

Mwesigye Robert is the founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation. He is focused on human and nonhuman climate mitigation and adaptation strategies and is passionate about investing in women and children to save future generations from the climate crisis.

Attempts to center birth equity as the foundation of governance, social policy, and advocacy face strong resistance. Funders and institutions often favor population-focused narratives over equity, avoiding campaigns that expose flaws in unsustainable GDP-based growth models. Legal and political legitimacy rests on children’s rights, guaranteeing future generations’ meaningful self-empowerment. Adults have a collective duty to ensure no child is born into conditions that undermine self-determination. Asserting this baseline as collective self-defense demands accountability for systemic harms, including scrutiny of nonprofits’ social or environmental impact claims. This approach is not anti-natalist; it is pro-birth justice, ensuring children are born into empowering, equitable, and sustainable conditions.

Inequitable growth entrenches disenfranchisement and concentrates wealth, weakening democracy and enabling oligarchic control. Elites commodify essential public goods—like a healthy environment and social trust—turning them into market products rather than rights. Children, particularly those of color, are treated as economic inputs rather than citizens. This dual-layered fraud—equity and impact—precludes justice by controlling who defines legitimacy.

The Hidden Costs of Growth and Co-opted Activism

Concentrated wealth funds academics, nonprofits, companies, and foundations that uphold exclusionary standards, shielding benefactors from accountability and perpetuating systemic racial injustice. Funders exploit activists’ aspirations for recognition, steering reform toward safe, visible projects (e.g., plant-based foods, endangered species protection) that protect elite interests while diffusing meaningful change. 

Beyond humans, birth inequity cascades to nonhuman life. Many animal protection organizations—and their wealthy funders—often overlook systemic inequities that harm far more animals than their initiatives can alleviate. Decades of messaging celebrate micro victories while obscuring macro harms. Funders often benefit from unearned, birth-based wealth while portraying themselves as saviors, discouraging activists from pursuing structural reform. Focus is placed on population-level outcomes rather than the subject-level ‘we’ defined by binding standards, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, recognizing that rigorous equity is financially and politically untenable. Decades of inequitable growth placed more animals in factory farms and more pollution into the environment than nonprofits’ initiatives removed, often enriching funders’ families at deadly cost to vulnerable children, especially children of color.

A future in which well-funded animal protection organizations stop claiming victories while supporting harmful policies depends on recognizing that no child is worth more than another. In this vision, human and nonhuman justice begin to converge, valuing each individual’s equal share of influence over outcomes that affect them—freedom through empowerment. The birthright to equitable conditions becomes the fundamental norm, or grundnorm, of legal legitimacy. Realizing this requires a truth-and-reconciliation process that exposes exploitative gains and replaces them with inclusive, empowering systems for all children and nonhuman life.

The current system denies foundational protections to newborns, ecosystems, and nonhuman species by treating childbirth as parental autonomy rather than equity and justice. A child born into a flood-prone slum or conflict zone during a worsening climate crisis enters a world with no safeguards, invisible to GDP-driven economic models. Meanwhile, corporations tout “social impact” while polluting the environment and lobbying against regulation. This is equity and impact fraud: manipulating metrics to conceal harm and justify policies that exacerbate inequality and contribute to environmental collapse. Humanity has, as economist Partha Dasgupta puts it, “mismanaged its global portfolio of assets.”

Equitywashing, Freedom, and Birth Positionality

Between 1948 and 1968, governments privatized reproductive rights, entrenching inequality, violating children’s birthrights, and accelerating the climate crisis. After World War II, nations could have anchored authority and entitlements in the empowerment of children at birth, but instead, they privatized family planning and removed objective environmental and social values from governance. Modern legal and economic systems were designed to entrench power, not justice. 

Even under liberal interpretations, abortion is framed as individual autonomy, ignoring systemic context. A woman may terminate a pregnancy but later die in a climate-driven heatwave due to lack of resources, political influence, and social support. Her vulnerability reflects a system treating people as economic inputs rather than rights-bearing individuals. Fundamental causation is existential—her exclusion at birth was the root injustice behind all she experienced. The continued use of this standard causes more harm than good, overshooting ecological, political, and social thresholds essential for human and animal well-being.

This “exclusionary valuation standard” prioritizes short-term gains for current stakeholders while disregarding the long-term interests of future generations, ecosystems, and non-human life. Legal frameworks reinforce this by treating birth as a private matter, detached from considerations of justice, sustainability, and governance. Every birth reshapes society, redistributes power, and defines future democratic participation. A core feature of equity and impact fraud is the illusion of freedom. Political theory ascribes true freedom to equal participation in self-governance. When freedom depends on birth positionality—the time, place, and conditions of one’s birth—it becomes a fiction. Privatizing childbirth reduces the freedom to make personal choices while concealing deeper power imbalances.

Cost-benefit models built on arbitrary metrics constitute equity fraud: value and impact are misrepresented to benefit a privileged few while externalizing harm to children of color, nonhuman life, and future generations. Many public-interest actors, while claiming reform, shield funders by omitting how growth and siloed justice frameworks hinder real progress. Claimed benefits are undone by the same growth pressures funders exploit, resulting in the commercialization of birth, democracy, and justice itself.

Rebuilding Legitimacy and the Legal Case for Birth Equity

Equitywashing misrepresents harm and delays reforms needed to protect the most vulnerable. Charities, nonprofits, foundations, and wealthy funders preserve elite advantage while degrading collective freedom.

Freedom is impossible without political equality and constitutive communication—the shared frameworks through which societies define justice and distribute power. As political theorists Debra Satz and Stuart White observe, “a society enjoys ‘equality’ when its social relations are free of unaccountable power, stigma or grovelling.” Equitywashing corrodes this relational foundation, preserving unaccountable power while pretending to advance justice. Political equality is relational; it cannot be reduced to material distribution alone, but rather depends on the quality of participatory interaction. Without this relational equality—when birth positionality determines life trajectory—freedom is an illusion. By treating childbirth as parental autonomy rather than child equity, systems obscure structural harms that exclude future generations from protection and justice.

To restore legitimacy, legal and political systems must adopt a binding norm: the equitable distribution of birth conditions. Reproductive justice should be treated not merely as a private or health matter but as a constitutional obligation, centering duties to future generations and redefining freedom as a shared, public commitment. Only then can people be truly free to shape the world they inherit.

This principle extends to the legal and moral case for what can reasonably be called “fair start” reforms. True fairness depends not only on outcomes—such as who is hired or represented—but on origins: who is positioned from birth to exercise power and self-determination. A climate goal framed as permissible emissions or object-level interventions assumes a legitimate political system. Without equity at the subject level—the collective “we” empowered to prevent harm—such goals are hollow.

Decades of unsustainable growth and inequitable wealth accumulation have created a moral and legal debt. Many children, particularly those of color, were born into systems that diminished their agency, while others benefited from unearned privileges. Governments and legal systems cannot claim legitimacy unless they are actually empowered by the people they govern. Preemptive legal standards—such as recognizing equity fraud and enforcing children’s rights at birth—are necessary to prevent political disenfranchisement and protect infants, future generations, and nonhuman life.

Evaluation must begin from a neutral baseline, measuring harm and designing remedies that restore victims to full political and social empowerment. Claims of progress or “impact” are invalid if they ignore these conditions. Justice demands accountability for historical and ongoing harms, requiring truth and reconciliation grounded in fact-checking, fraud verification, and enforceable standards. Only by centering equity in both origins and outcomes can society ensure that all children are born with the conditions needed for self-determination—and that future generations inherit a genuinely free and legitimate system.

The Legal and Moral Case for “Fair Start” Reforms

Reversing this fraud requires the widespread adoption of “fair start” reforms—legal and cultural changes that prioritize child equity, ecological sustainability, and democratic legitimacy in birth and family policy. These reforms include:

• Recognizing children as future rights-holders with enforceable claims at birth.
• Conditioning procreation on fundamental equity and sustainability standards.
• Redistributing resources from the top down to fund equitable starts.
• Connecting reproductive freedom with political and constitutive freedom.

This process must also account for the rights and protection of nonhuman life and ecosystems, ensuring that reparations and reforms measurably empower all beings affected by inequitable systems. Fairness is not simply about smaller populations or numerical outcomes; it requires qualitative equity—empowering children as they enter the world and accounting for their relationships with others. Each child must have measurable empowerment that derives political authority and access to a minimum threshold of resources, treating children of color as equally valuable in terms of rights and opportunity. Systems that fail to meet this standard perpetuate political equity fraud, deadly disenfranchisement, and systemic injustice.

Emerging technologies, including AI systems trained to detect racial and structural inequities, can support enforcement at the subject level—evaluating real empowerment rather than relying solely on object-level metrics such as emissions, policy ratios, or population counts. Combined with universal frameworks and crowdsourced oversight, these tools can advance political and climate reparations while holding institutions accountable.

No child should be valued more than another; this principle underpins the concept of one person, one vote. Justice cannot start with injustice. Reforms must ensure that children—and future generations—are genuinely empowered and that wealth and governance systems do not perpetuate inequity or harm.

We are at a crossroads: between a collective system that ensures all children are born with empowering conditions, funded by the extreme wealth already made at deadly cost, and the inequitable, commercialized system that caused today’s massive inequality and ecological degradation.

Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations

Decades of public interest work promoted a false narrative of progress, hiding how some children were enriched while others suffered and died amid worsening crises. Micro-level gains were erased at the macro level. Ending equity and impact fraud demands a fundamental shift in our understanding of justice, economics, and governance, starting with a truth-and-reconciliation process grounded in fact-checking, fraud verification, and an enforceable zero-tolerance approach:

• Public acknowledgment of the exclusionary standard and its harms.
• Data reforms that include future generations in impact assessments.
• Legal recognition of birth equity as a constitutional baseline.
• Reparative transfers to address generational and ecological theft.

This isn’t simply theoretical—it confronts the historical context behind how we define value and impact. Value claims reveal whether we seek fair improvement within a just system or are trying to legitimize an unjust one. The process requires acknowledging harm and engaging in collective dialogue to ensure all children are born into conditions that respect their rights and empower them to thrive.

There is a preemptive legal basis: governments cannot unilaterally define freedom or legitimacy when they exclude those they claim to represent. Omitting children’s birth conditions relative to rights constitutes preemptive fraud. Organizations that reject the illegal standard can fundraise legitimately by exposing the harm caused—and concealed—by those who exploit birth inequities. This framework supports ongoing resistance against identifiable actors who harm the most vulnerable, centering human dignity and treating all as ends, not means.

We must move beyond liberal legal fictions toward a jurisprudence that recognizes that constitutive freedom begins at birth. A society that ignores how its people enter the world cannot claim to be free, lawful, or legitimate. Under this process, all authority and entitlements must be acknowledged as deriving from—and contingent upon—political and child equity. Such authority is impossible without a norm requiring equal offsets in the capacity to influence outcomes, measured against neutral baselines.

Freedom Must Be Born

Is this anti-natalist? No. It is pro-birth justice. “Fair start” reform ensures children are born into empowering, equitable, and sustainable conditions. After World War II, nations should have derived authority and entitlements to wealth from empowering their citizens through equitable birth and development conditions. Instead, family planning was privatized, and environmental and social values were removed from the governance process. The resulting system could not sustain itself before inequitable growth triggered the climate crisis, degraded democracy, and worsened racial injustice. Much of the public interest work of recent decades was undone by inequitable growth, putting more animals in factory farms and pollution into the environment than nonprofits mitigated, while enriching funders at a deadly cost to vulnerable children, particularly children of color.

We are at a crossroads between an inclusive system that deliberately protects and empowers all children through preemptive, equitable standards and the inequitable, commercialized system designed to enrich some at deadly cost to others. We achieve the former by pivoting the international reproductive rights regime toward collective planning that ensures no child is born beneath a threshold of empowering birth and development conditions, funded by wealth already made at a cost to these children.

Is this too idealistic? What’s truly unrealistic is expecting stable societies or livable climates without first securing children’s rights. Reproductive freedom must be reframed—not just as a private right, but as a public responsibility with generational consequences. True freedom encompasses the right of future generations to live in just and sustainable societies.

There can be no rule of law without equity at life’s origin: no environmental, climate, or racial justice without child equity. No legitimate government can exist without participatory standards that begin at birth. By ending equity and impact fraud, legal and political systems can finally align authority, wealth, and social obligations with measurable empowerment. Only by centering children’s rights and equitable birth conditions can we build a world in which all people—present and future—are truly free to shape the societies and environments they inherit. Freedom must be born.