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 legally cognisable rights to their biological origins and to both a mother and a father — rights routinely subordinated to adult interests in contemporary family law. Her work has direct bearing on European debates about surrogacy regulation, donor conception, and the legal architecture that determines who counts as a parent. She treats the tension between adult autonomy and children's welfare not as a values dispute but as a measurable injustice with documented consequences.
Katy Faust is the founder and president of Them Before Us, an organisation that places children's interests at the centre of debates about marriage, divorce, surrogacy, and donor conception. She has testified before legislatures, presented at the United Nations, and filed amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court. Her concern is both personal and professional: her parents divorced when she was ten, and her mother later formed a same-sex partnership. She has reflected candidly on what that arrangement cost her, even when it functioned well by most external measures, and that experience informs more than a decade of written and advocacy work. The central argument Faust develops is that marriage law and parenthood law are structurally linked. When legislatures redefine marriage, they create pressure to expand who legally qualifies as a parent, and in doing so they can sever the presumption that a child is entitled to a relationship with both biological parents. This is not merely philosophical. Legal systems across many jurisdictions have been forced to navigate exactly these tensions as same-sex marriage, assisted reproduction, and commercial surrogacy have expanded simultaneously — with courts frequently resolving conflicts in ways that prioritise the intentions of adult parties over the documented developmental interests of children. On donor conception and surrogacy, a growing body of research documents that donor-conceived individuals frequently experience a strong drive to know their genetic origins, and that being denied this knowledge carries measurable psychological costs. Several European countries have responded to this evidence by abolishing anonymous gamete donation — Sweden did so as early as 1985, with the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and others following — but the legal frameworks governing surrogacy across Europe remain highly inconsistent. Faust argues that adult demand continues to be the primary driver of policy, and that the child's interest in stable, known origins is treated as secondary where it is considered at all. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly been asked to adjudicate tensions between the rights of adults in same-sex or assisted-reproduction arrangements and the rights of children to legal identity, family life, and access to their origins. Its case law has evolved cautiously, often acknowledging children's interests in principle while deferring to state discretion in practice. Faust's framework — treating children's rights as prior rather than derivative — provides a lens through which to scrutinise both that case law and the national legislation it sits alongside. The broader relevance for gender-critical debate lies in the pattern Faust identifies: a tendency within progressive legal reform to treat adult preferences as the organising principle of family law, with children's interests accommodated only where they do not conflict. That structural priority — adults first, children second — is precisely what critics raise in debates about the medicalisation of gender-dysphoric youth. Her work offers a comparative framework, drawn from family law rather than medicine, that illuminates how that pattern operates and at what documented cost.
