Children First or Adults First? - Katy Faust
8 January 2026
With Katy Faust
Global
Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us, argues that children hold a prior claim in law — one routinely subordinated to adult desires in debates about surrogacy, donor conception and divorce. With Ireland's Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Act 2024 now creating a statutory framework for surrogacy and donor conception for the first time, her case that law must ask 'what do children need?' rather than 'what do adults want?' is directly relevant to Irish family policy. The episode examines why redefining marriage also redefines parenthood, and who ultimately pays the price.
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, an organisation that places children's rights at the centre of debates normally framed around adult choices. She has worked in adoption and youth ministry, began writing on marriage and family in 2012, and has since addressed the United Nations and presented to foreign parliaments. Her starting point is personal: her parents divorced when she was ten, and her mother subsequently formed a relationship with a woman. She is candid that her own upbringing was a loving one, but she argues that her experience deepened rather than diminished her understanding of what children genuinely need from family structure. Her core argument is that children have a legitimate interest in being known by, and where possible raised by, both a biological mother and a biological father. When law redefines marriage it also, she contends, inevitably redefines parenthood — and that redefinition is rarely shaped around children's interests. Divorce, donor conception and commercial surrogacy each involve an adult decision that severs or deliberately pre-empts a child's bond with one biological parent. Faust argues that while adults may experience these arrangements as liberating or family-building, children who lose a mother or a father carry the weight of that absence across their lives. This framing bears directly on Irish law. The Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Act 2024 created the first statutory framework for surrogacy and donor conception in the state. The Act gives donor-conceived people the right to identifying information about their donor at eighteen. That is a significant reform, but Faust's analysis poses a prior question: whether the deliberate creation of a child without access to one biological parent is reconcilable with children's rights principles at all, regardless of what records may later be disclosed. The link she draws between marriage law and parenthood law also has clear Irish resonance. Following the 2015 marriage equality referendum, the Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 extended guardianship and parental rights to same-sex couples and to those who conceive through assisted reproduction. Ireland also has the Children First Act 2015, which placed child safeguarding obligations on a statutory footing. Faust's argument is not directed at any particular family form but at the principle that wherever law treats children as outcomes of adult arrangements rather than as rights-bearing persons with prior claims, the child's perspective is being made secondary. Beyond specific legislative questions, Faust draws on her work in adoption and on the broader social science evidence to argue that children who are separated from a biological parent tend, on average, to carry measurable costs across health, education and emotional wellbeing. She is careful not to claim that every non-traditional family fails; her argument is that public policy should be calibrated around what children as a population need, rather than being designed primarily to validate what adults choose. The episode connects to a concern that runs through the gender-critical conversation more broadly: that when institutions frame questions around adult identity and adult fulfilment, the costs borne by children are rendered invisible. Faust extends that concern beyond gender medicine into family law, offering a framework that asks consistently whose interests the law is actually serving.
