Children First or Adults First? - Katy Faust
Katy Faust, founder of global children's rights organisation Them Before Us, joins the Beyond Gender hosts to argue that when law and culture place adult desire at the centre of debates about surrogacy, donor conception and divorce, it is children who absorb the losses. As Ireland continues to implement its new assisted reproduction legislation and navigate family law reform, Faust's framework offers a searching counterpoint to narratives that treat new family structures as automatically progressive.
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, a children's rights organisation with a genuinely global reach. Her own story is neither sensational nor ideological in origin: her parents divorced when she was ten, and her mother later built a life with a female partner. That experience, by her own account a manageable one, nonetheless drew her attention to a question she found few people willing to ask honestly — what do children actually need, and who is prepared to prioritise those needs when they conflict with what adults want? In this conversation with Stella O'Malley and co-hosts Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, Faust develops her central argument: that marriage law and parenting law are inseparable. When societies redefine what marriage means, she contends, they are simultaneously redefining what parenthood means. The implications stretch beyond any single family configuration to encompass surrogacy arrangements, donor conception, and the legal frameworks that determine who counts as a child's parent. Faust has made this case before the UN and to foreign parliaments, and she brings that accumulated precision to the conversation. What gives her argument its particular texture is her focus on loss. Children conceived through sperm or egg donation, or carried by a surrogate for another family, grow up with a gap where a biological parent should be. That gap, Faust argues, does not disappear because the adults involved are loving or well-intentioned. Her concern is not with the character of any individual parent but with the structure of the arrangements themselves, and with a culture that has grown reluctant to name the cost to children when adult fulfilment is treated as the overriding value. Ireland offers a pointed backdrop for this discussion. The Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Act, signed into law in 2024, finally gave Ireland a legislative framework for surrogacy and donor conception — making it one of the last European countries to put such a framework in place. The ongoing questions about how the rights of donor-conceived people to know their biological origins are balanced against other interests maps closely onto the territory Faust covers. Irish families, Irish clinics, and Irish courts are now working through exactly the tensions she describes. For Stella O'Malley, hearing Faust as a psychotherapist practising in Ireland adds another layer. Much of what O'Malley encounters in her clinical work involves adults and young people attempting to make sense of family structures built around adult needs, and finding that the emotional architecture does not always hold. Faust's insistence that children are not as resilient as adults often need to believe carries clinical as well as political weight. This is not a comfortable episode, and it is not intended to be. It asks whether Ireland, having moved quickly to embrace progressive family law in recent decades, has kept adequate space open for the question of what children, rather than adults, actually require from the structures built around them.
