Children First or Adults First? - Katy Faust
8 January 2026
With Katy Faust
Global
Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us, argues that marriage law and parenting law are inseparable — and that when adult interests drive debates about surrogacy, donor conception, and divorce, children bear the cost. Her case carries direct relevance to UK surrogacy law reform proposals, HFEA policy on donor-conceived people, and the Children Act 1989's promise that the child's welfare is paramount.
Katy Faust founded Them Before Us in 2018, having begun writing anonymously in 2012 on why marriage is a question of justice for children rather than adults. She has since submitted amicus briefs to the US Supreme Court, spoken at the United Nations, and addressed foreign parliaments — making her one of the more distinctive international voices insisting that children's rights must be the starting point in family law, not a consideration added at the margins once adult interests have been accommodated. The episode's central argument is that marriage law and parenting law cannot be disentangled. When a society redefines who counts as a spouse, it simultaneously redefines who counts as a parent — and those redefinitions tend to be shaped by adult preferences rather than by children's developmental needs. Faust draws on her background in adoption and youth ministry to move the discussion beyond abstraction, grounding it in the testimony of children and adults who grew up without a mother or a father and carried that loss into adulthood. Her analysis has particular purchase in the United Kingdom. The Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission published joint recommendations on surrogacy reform in 2023, proposing that intended parents be recognised as legal parents from birth — a significant departure from the existing framework, under which the birth mother retains parental status until a parental order is granted by a court. Critics of that proposal, including a number of donor-conceived adults, have argued that it further subordinates the child's interest in knowing their biological origins to the commissioning adults' desire for seamless legal parenthood. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has separately faced longstanding calls to strengthen donor-conceived people's access to identifying information about their genetic parents. On divorce, Faust's argument connects to a substantial body of longitudinal research — much of it referenced in UK family court guidance — indicating that children generally fare better when both biological parents remain actively involved in their upbringing. The Children Act 1989 enshrines the principle that the child's welfare is the court's paramount consideration, yet Faust's contention is that this principle is honoured more in rhetoric than in practice whenever adult relationship choices are treated as entirely beyond scrutiny. What unifies the three subject areas the episode addresses — divorce, surrogacy, and donor conception — is Faust's insistence that adult fulfilment has quietly displaced children's interests as the organising principle of family policy. That displacement rarely arrives as a declared intention; it accumulates through individual court rulings, legislative amendments, and professional guidance, each of which treats adult autonomy as the presumptive good. For those tracking the UK's evolving approach to these questions, Faust offers a framework for identifying where that displacement is occurring and what evidence exists to push back against it.
