Children First or Adults First? - Katy Faust
8 January 2026
With Katy Faust
law-and-policy
When adult desire is reframed as adult right, someone absorbs the cost — and Katy Faust argues it is almost always children. As founder of the global children's rights organisation Them Before Us, she traces a consistent pattern across divorce, donor conception, and surrogacy: legal redefinitions of marriage cascade into redefinitions of parenthood, and institutions have repeatedly privileged adult accounts over the evidence that children themselves later provide. Her conversation with Beyond Gender maps how a culture organised around adult fulfilment erodes the child-centred framework that justice actually requires.
Katy Faust came to children's rights through personal experience rather than ideology. Her parents divorced when she was ten, and her mother later formed a same-sex partnership. By her own account the arrangement worked well for her, yet it gave her an unusually direct window onto what children silently carry when the adults around them restructure their lives. That personal vantage point eventually led her to found Them Before Us, a global organisation dedicated to keeping children's interests at the centre of debates about family law, reproduction, and parenthood. She has since spoken at the United Nations, presented to foreign parliaments, and submitted amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court. The argument she advances in this conversation is structural: marriage law and parenting law are not separate domains. When a society redefines marriage, it simultaneously redefines what a parent is and what a child is owed. That linkage is rarely made explicit in public debate, where questions about adult relationships and questions about children's welfare tend to be treated as distinct tracks. Faust insists they are not, and that ignoring the connection has compounding consequences. Her case draws on evidence from adoption, youth ministry, and the testimony of adults who were conceived through sperm donation or carried by surrogates. Across these different contexts she identifies a consistent pattern: children separated from a biological mother or father — whether through divorce, anonymous donation, or commercial arrangement — tend to experience that separation as a meaningful loss, even when the households around them are loving and stable. The loss is not always acute, but it is rarely absent. What connects this to the broader questions the podcast explores is the cultural logic Faust is critiquing. In each domain she examines, the same move is made: adult desire is reframed as adult right, and children's interests are treated as secondary concerns that sufficiently compassionate provision can compensate for. This is not a marginal feature of contemporary family ideology; it is close to its operating principle. And it is the same logic, she argues, that allows interventions on children's bodies to be framed primarily in terms of parental and patient autonomy rather than long-term child welfare. The episode raises a question that recurs across much of this podcast's territory: who gets to define what is good for a child, and on what evidence? Faust's answer is that children themselves — through their later testimony and through data gathered from those who have lived inside various family configurations — provide the most reliable guide we have. Legal, medical, and regulatory institutions have repeatedly privileged adult accounts and adult priorities over that evidence. Understanding how that displacement happens, and what it would take to reverse it, is among the more important analytical tasks of this cultural moment.
