Putting Children First

Katy Faust never imagined she would find herself on the front line of today’s most contentious cultural debates. Her journey began unexpectedly in 2012, when the same-sex marriage debate reached her home state of Washington.

“I was … a stay-at-home mom and a pastor’s wife, and I was not interested in wading into the culture war waters,” Faust said. “But what tipped the scales for me was something I noticed in the gay marriage debate that came to my state: It was never about what was best for kids.”

To Faust, that framing ignored a painful truth. Her personal and professional experiences, particularly in youth ministry and as a former assistant director at the world’s largest Chinese adoption agency, shaped her deep convictions about child welfare.

“A child being raised by two moms is a child who has lost their father,” she asserted. “A child being raised by two dads is a child who has lost their mother.”

From that conviction came Them Before Us, a nonprofit founded on the principle that – with regard to marriage, family, and reproduction – children’s rights to their biological mothers and fathers must take precedence over adults’ desires.

Identifying the threats

Faust has since become vocal in cultural and policy spaces, challenging societal issues she sees as sacrificing children’s needs on the altar of adults’ fulfillment. She regularly contributes to conservative outlets, speaks internationally, and lobbies policymakers on what she describes as three core threats to children’s rights. She categorizes those threats as cultural, technological, and legal.

She explained, “The cultural threat is the normalization of absent mothers or fathers. You have this culturally prominent narrative: Biology doesn’t matter in marriage, and it is only love that makes a family.”

Faust is equally concerned with the technological threats posed by IVF, sperm and egg donation, and surrogacy.

“These days, we have a way of creating children in a laboratory that allows us to cut children off from one or both biological parents at the moment of conception,” she said. “‘Big Fertility’ is not our friend regarding child protection.”

The legal landscape, she argued, has only made matters worse: States are actively redefining parenthood, removing the words mother and father from parental law, and relaxing the screening and background checks necessary for protecting children in foster care as well as those placed for adoption.

Fighting Goliaths

Through Them Before Us, Faust and her team step into legislative battles few others are willing to fight, often educating lawmakers who are unaware of what they are truly voting on.

 “We had a situation,” she said, “where our executive director drove to speak to the Tennessee governor’s staff to try to convince him to veto the Fertility Treatment and Contraceptive Protection Act, which protects IVF practices that result in mass discarding of embryos. Unfortunately, we could not convince him, but his staff was horrified when they heard what was actually in the bill.”

Even when she and her team can’t prevent legislation from passing, Faust believes that raising awareness is critical because the future hinges on ordinary people recognizing the cost of ignoring children’s needs.

“We need people in this fight. We are going up against not one Goliath, but hundreds of Goliaths. You are not going to be able to build a nation that thrives upon the backs of broken children,” she said. “We are making broken children in the name of bowing down to adult sexual identity and adult sexual desire.”