The Hidden Realities of IVF in America | Katy Faust

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]Since the sexual revolution and the introduction of no-fault divorce in 1969, the institution of marriage in America has undergone a profound transformation.

Katy Faust, founder of children’s rights organization Them Before Us and co-author of a book by the same name, argues that marriage has changed from a permanent, child-centered union to a vehicle for adult fulfillment.

And now new reproductive technologies—from IVF to surrogacy—are making parenthood possible in ways never seen before.

For many, this is progress. But at what cost?

Faust argues that for decades, we have prioritized adult desire over a child’s fundamental right to be known, loved, and raised by their biological mother and father.

In this episode, she walks me through many complex questions: What makes something a natural right? What is the true impact of divorce on children? Why isn’t surrogacy just a neutral transaction? And for countries facing shrinking birth rates, why is IVF perhaps not the right solution?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Katy Faust, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Katy Faust:

Thanks. Really good to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, your own parents divorced when you were 10, and your mother later entered into a relationship with a woman. So, how did this whole experience shape your views and what you do now? And then at what moment did you decide to actually write about it in your blog called Ask the Bigot?

Ms. Faust:

Yes. I did not get into this at all because I had some kind of axe to grind or I felt like I had this massive deficit from my childhood. I was apolitical, not involved in the culture wars at all until about 15 years ago. And even then, like when I started writing my, at the time, anonymous blog, I did it just because I had been working with kids—20 years in youth ministry, junior high, senior high. 

I had worked at a Chinese adoption agency, so I had a lot of contact with kids who had lost both of their parents and were being raised in what I know was a redemptive situation, but still involved some loss and pain. I had three biological children of my own and an adopted child, so I had the mothering experience from that angle. And then I had all their friends in our house, and so I got to see children really up close who had all different kinds of family arrangements. 

And I had never yet met a kid who lost their mother or father and said, perfect, love it. Let’s incentivize, normalize, and promote this. Actually, the kids that suffered through a divorce or their mother left them for another man or they never knew their father, kids couldn’t talk about that without their chin quivering, without falling into a puddle. 

And so when I heard the gay marriage lobby say, kids don’t care if they have two moms or two dads, that’s when I was like, hold on. What you’re saying is kids don’t care if they’ve lost their mom or dad. Because when you see a child with two dads, you’re looking at a child who has lost their mother. And when you see a child with two mothers, you’re looking at a child who has lost their father, very often, not because of tragedy, but because of intentionality. Because the adults raising the child wanted it that way.  

So I got into this just because I thought, why isn’t anybody defending that kid? Why on the Left does all of this conversation have to do with adult rights, adult identity, adult validation? On the Left, that’s what they were saying.  On the Right, the Christians and the conservatives were talking about, this is bad for religious liberty. If we get gay marriage, we might have to bake a cake we don’t want to bake, or we might lose our 501(c)(3) status. 

I’m like, are you kidding me? This is about children being known and loved by their mom and dad and the pain that ensues when they don’t have one. So that’s why I got into this. Then in my anonymous blog, I would only mention in passing that I had a mom in a same-sex relationship because that wasn’t the central focus of what I was doing. 

When I talked about her and her partner, I would say, look, I know what it’s like to firmly believe in the natural family and fiercely love people that identify as gay and lesbian because I’ve been doing it for 30 years at the time. You know, my mom and her partner have been very stable. I mean, they actually blow the statistics out of the water as it relates to longevity in lesbian relationships. 

I knew her partner before the divorce. Their home was my home half the time after the divorce. I grew up in the community of their large, kind of lesbian network. So, this isn’t the story of a girl who is fatherless because my father, you know, I split time in his home too. I stayed connected with him afterwards. 

This is the story of a person who is very, very comfortable in the gay and lesbian world because that was a big part of my upbringing. And I got into this not because I have some kind of animus or phobia against gay people. It is that I’ve had so much close contact with kids that we need to mourn when they lose a mother and a father, not normalize it.

Mr. Jekielek:

See, many people would say that same-sex marriage being legalized was kind of the pin, perhaps, you know, gay rights being achieved.

Ms. Faust:

Sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you’re, well, advocating against it. And so, how do you explain that to people who feel like their rights have finally been validated?

Ms. Faust:

First of all, you don’t know what the word rights means if you think that same-sex couples have a right to marry. When I talk about rights, I’m talking about natural rights, looking at the natural world through a system of natural law. And just because you make something a civil law doesn’t make it a natural right. You don’t have a right to marry somebody else if it means that a child loses their fundamental, natural, God-given, self-evident right to be known and loved by both their mother and father. 

So the pseudo-adult rights of gay marriage have always come at the expense of children’s fundamental, natural right to be known and loved by their mom and dad.  So I don’t think same-sex couples have a right to marry. I don’t think the Constitution says they have a right to marry either. And what I mainly object to is the fact that these adult rights always genuinely infringe on child rights. 

We know that because in the United States, over the last 11 years, since Obergefell, we have seen the systematic stripping of children’s rights to the two people responsible for their existence. We see the scrubbing of gendered terms, mother and father, from our parentage statutes. We see a direct connection between gay marriage and child commodity modification in the world of big fertility and the reproductive technology market.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re going to have to expand on that a bit for me.

Ms. Faust:

There’s a direct connection here. So, the bottom line is no, your pseudo-adult right, which is really just something that you really, just because you really, really want something, it doesn’t make it a natural right. Natural rights actually mean something, right? Those rights that are endowed by our creator, they actually have some anchoring and some ballast to them. You can’t just pull them out of the ether and say, I really want this, this is how I identify, therefore I have a right.

Mr. Jekielek:

You actually identify kind of three elements, I think, that would make something a right. So explain that to me.

Ms. Faust:

In our first book, Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement, my co-author, Stacy Manning, and I do our best to sort of dumb down the natural law understanding of what makes something a right. That book was endorsed by Professor Robert George, who is like the thought leader on natural rights—the natural rights scholars that are living. He’s at the top. 

So I’ve had a chance to read him and follow him and understand, but I don’t think that way and I don’t talk that way.  Stacy and I tried to distill what makes something a natural right in a language that most people can understand. So we created this three-rules-that-make-it-a-right test.

So the first one is if it’s a natural right, it exists pre-government. It’s not something that the government can deem or bestow on you. It’s something that pre-existed. It’s not something that anybody has to provide for you. So if you have to dig it up from the ground, bottle it, package it, ship it, and put it on the shelf, you might need it. Your life might even depend on consuming it. But it’s not necessarily a natural right. It’s a commodity. And number three, a natural right is something that is given in equal measure, something that everybody has equal access to.

So, for example, a GED [general equivalency diploma] or a PhD, right? It can vary in terms of its degree. So education is not a natural right. It can be Mar-a-Lago vs. a dorm room, they can vary in terms of distribution. So it’s not a natural right. Housing is not a natural right. You can advocate that they’re really important, that the government should even subsidize it, but don’t call it a right. But if you look at things like, how many lives do you get, Jan? How many lives do you have?

Mr. Jekielek:

Ah, one.

Ms. Faust:

Yes. I also have one, right? How many parents do you have? How many people created you?

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, two.

Ms. Faust:

Same. Okay. So you can discern a natural right by seeing that it’s given an equal distribution, the ability to speak, the ability to defend yourself. You can look at these fundamental natural rights and say, everybody has the same measure. So when you look at the three rules that make it a right test, right, nobody provides it for you, it exists pre-government, and you all have the same measure, you can see that children not only have a right to life, they have a right to the two people responsible for their existence.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think, and I’m inclined to agree with you, right? 

Ms. Faust:

I’ll ensure you do by the end of the interview. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I can see you’re going to be very convincing. It’s just, to me, it feels complicated. And I know you work in this space of surrogacy and so forth, right? But I think people would argue, for example, just because I took some sperm from a sperm bank to have a child, that doesn’t mean that that sperm is a person, right? That’s just sort of some help I’m getting. For example, I think this is how people think about it today, right?

Ms. Faust:

The sperm is not a person. The person that results from that sperm has rights. And when we look at the surveys and the studies of children created through donor sperm, which is really bought and sold sperm, over 80 per cent of them want to meet or know the person that gave them life. They don’t consider that just genetic material. They would say, that’s my biological father. Why? 

Because it is their biological father. And there’s something that the two people who made the child give to the child that even sweet, loving, social parents can’t give them. No contract is going to be able to fill that gap, right? Even a social father will not be able to provide everything to the child that they may want to know from their biological father. So this is a natural right. It’s non-substitutable, it’s inflexible. And the problem is that’s a wrecking ball for pretty much everybody: single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile. Everybody’s going to have to conform to that fundamental child right. And that just means adults have to do hard things on behalf of kids.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. So, Them Before Us, I mean, a very, very compelling name. And, you know, it reminded me of something that Scott Atlas told me about years back when I first met him. And he said, you know, during COVID, that our society used children as shields for adults. And when I first heard it, I kind of struggled with that for a moment. What do you mean exactly? And, you know, maybe explain to me, how do you decide what is it that’s really for the child? Because I don’t think that’s obvious for many of us.

Ms. Faust:

So I think that Dr. Atlas is exactly right. Most of us saw that completely on display during COVID. And what does it mean for children to be human shields? It is offloading the hard onto the shoulders of the young. That’s what it was. Children were not generally at risk of COVID deaths unless they were immunocompromised. But we used them; we deprived them of being able to see adult faces, to see their words forming. Young children watching adults speak is actually a huge part of language development, and there’s a short window for kids to be able to pull in those linguistic lessons between the ages of one and three.

And for a couple of years, they did not get to see people talking. And there’s a possibility that that generation is not going to be able to recoup that lost developmental advantage. We starved them of in-person contact, peer relationships. Generally, children especially don’t learn online, and we did it all to supposedly save Grandma. Grandma needed protection, but it wasn’t the job of the young to protect Grandma; it was the responsibility of the adults to protect Grandma. 

And this is actually, like, you can see this, I would say, most starkly in the world of marriage and family, where we have been offloading the hard onto children in just about every sector. Whether you’re talking about no-fault divorce, where the adults refuse to do hard things on behalf of the child. And instead, they burden the child with lifelong loss.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, again, you’ll have to break that down for me. Why no-fault? But we can put a pin in that as well if you want and just continue.

Ms. Faust:

Let’s hit the high level, right? In terms of no-fault divorce, instead of the adults working it out, they saddle the child with split homes, split lives, and in 50 per cent of cases, split personalities because the child literally has to become a different person on the drive from dad’s house to mom’s house. For those that are dealing with infertility, solve that through a donor. What they’re doing is they’re saying, you know, our desire to be pregnant is more important than the child’s right to be known and loved by their mother or father.

I just tweeted a couple of days ago a story of two men who said, we didn’t want to go the adoption route because we really wanted a child who was biologically related to us. So they recognize that it’s important for them to have a biologically related child, but the cost is the child losing a relationship with their biological mother, right? Somebody’s going to do the hard thing in all these situations. It will either be the adults in their struggling marriage, dealing with infertility, with their same-sex attraction, or it will be the children. 

And for the longest time, we have said, hey, kids, you do the hard thing on our behalf. And kids have allowed it because they can’t fight back. They don’t write books. They don’t do interviews. They can’t lobby. They can’t file amicus briefs. They have to deal with whatever it is the adults decide they have to live with. And for a long time, we have said, your development, your needs, your safety are going to be the price for us to live as we please.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, you could also argue that the way that society responded, the way that we responded during COVID or accepted, you know, at least the decisions, is reflective of that shift in thinking.

Ms. Faust:

I agree. I think that there was probably a time—I don’t know if I was alive for it—where there was a little more understanding that the adults needed to sacrifice for children. But somewhere between the pill and the sexual revolution and the kickoff of no-fault divorce, which led to gay marriage, which is pushing towards polygamy in terms of the legal overhaul of the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known.

That we used to think was the institution, the building block of society, exactly because it required a lifelong commitment from those two adults and it benefited society and it wasn’t just a vehicle of your personal fulfillment.

And then somewhere, you know, adding in the mix of reproductive technologies that allowed you to customize children in a laboratory, somewhere in the middle of that cultural, legal, technological space, we decided that kids existed for us and that they should bend to what we want instead of understanding that we exist for them and need to sacrifice for kids.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s also, you know, the questions about why we have such low birth rates, right, in Western liberal democracies, right? This feels very central in a way. I hadn’t thought about it from this perspective.

Ms. Faust:

It’s all connected, right? Because what do no-fault divorce, reproductive technologies, the overhaul of the institution of marriage, the customization of children in a laboratory—what do they all have in common? It is, I govern this child. I decide whether they live or die, whether they know their mother or their father, whether they live in one stable home. I decide. They exist for me. 

And when you have a kids exist for me mentality, well, of course, you’re going to put off or completely forsake having your own children. Children infringe on your life, especially in those first years. It does take away the time that you can travel, discover yourself, go to all the yoga classes, and make partner in the law firm. Yes, children will make a claim on your time and your resources.

Mr. Jekielek:

And hopefully, a significant one. I mean, one would hope, right?

Ms. Faust:

That’s right. If you’re doing it right, they’re going to get, especially in those early years, a lot of your time and attention and resources. But of course, like everything that matters in life, like everything that is meaningful, the short-term debt reaps a long-term harvest. Here I am with a 16-year-old, 18-year-old, 20-year-old, and 23-year-old, and the benefits, the joy, the fruit, the meaning is just almost unbearable sometimes because they’re so wonderful. But it did take a lot of investment and sowing, you know, in those early years.

Mr. Jekielek:

And one of them is adopted.

Ms. Faust:

Yes, our youngest. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell me about that. 

Ms. Faust:

He had a really difficult beginning because he had not been parented for two years. He had been starved in every way a child can be starved in terms of food, touch, connection, discipline, guidance, and structure. So when he came to us, in some ways, he didn’t know how to be human, and emotionally, you know, he missed the window where children learn to trust and attach. And that’s not something that you can just get later on when you’re two or six or 12. If you miss those fundamental years where children are wired to have a parent, especially a mother, immediately respond when you’re cold or tired or hungry or wet.

I’ll give you an example. I used to work for a Chinese adoption agency. And the first time I ever visited a Chinese orphanage, I walked in, and I had been translating the physical exam forms of a lot of the Chinese orphans that had been matched with couples at our agency. And I would translate—I mean, I could almost do it blindfolded because there were systems. They all had similar schedules. You know, I knew exactly what foods were happening when and when their nails were being clipped and all of that because it was so regimented.

The first time I ever walked into a room, it was probably a room of three-to-six-month-olds, and they were all head-to-toe, three per crib. It was a U-shape you could walk through, and all the babies were quiet. I was probably 23 at the time. I thought, this is incredible. They got all the kids to sleep at the same time, just like the schedule says.

But as I walked through, the babies’ eyes were mostly open and looking around, but they weren’t crying. And I was like, what a staff! I mean, these guys know how to meet the children’s needs so well that nobody’s crying. So then I picked one of the babies up, and she didn’t really make eye contact. She was kind of like, you know, very disconnected. I looked at her and I was like, hi, baby, hi.

After a minute or two, she kind of registered, and she started to do these baby noises, this, ooh, ooh, ooh. And it was just the sweetest thing, especially for a woman that didn’t have children. I just thought, this is amazing. So I held her and snuggled her for about 10 minutes. When I put her down, she wailed. I picked her up and I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, it’s not that the kids aren’t crying because they’re on a schedule. But they don’t know what connection is like. So I held that girl for two hours. I didn’t pick up any other kid. Then when I put her down, I had to run out because I couldn’t handle her crying. 

So, what is going on when a child doesn’t have a mother or is not properly attached? They actually don’t understand. They don’t know how to calibrate their emotions. When there is a non-response to tired, hungry, and wet, they stop trying. They turn off their emotions. They no longer cry because they’ve learned nobody will come. So, our son had two years of that, and it took a long time to do our best to be responsive to the needs that he did reveal to get him to the place where he was more emotionally connected and stabilized.

Mr. Jekielek:

You use a lot of anecdotes when I look at your writing and conversations and so forth. And so, for example, in this situation, did you write and try to understand, like, the scientific basis for what you encountered when you talk? I want to kind of understand that part because a lot of the time people will think, hey, wait a second, that sounds like a profound moment, but does it actually represent the broader reality?

Ms. Faust:

When I first started writing on my anonymous blog, I was angry. I was angry that, especially, the gay marriage lobby was normalizing mother loss and father loss. So I started writing, hey, kids need a mom and dad. That’s why we have to oppose gay marriage. And people would challenge me in the comments. And they’d say, oh, kids need a mom and dad, do they? Is that why you’re railing against no-fault divorce, where a vast majority of kids will lose contact with their non-custodial father? 

And I went, I really haven’t done a lot of reading about no-fault divorce. Or I would talk about how harmful it is for two lesbians to make a fatherless baby, that the child would never know their father through sperm donation. And in the comments, people would say, but you don’t care if heterosexual couples use sperm donors. And I thought, that’s a good point. I guess those kids may struggle too. 

So it was actually a mercy that I had this anonymous blog for the first couple years, where I would spend two hours or three hours writing some post that seven people would read, because I had a lot that I had to work out. And thankfully, I could do it in relative obscurity. So, that when I was ultimately outed by a powerful gay blogger who doxed members of my church to try to get me to shut up, and then the ensuing years of kind of independently advocating and speaking on behalf of kids, it did allow me to put together not just the anecdotes, not just the stories, but a pretty robust social science case, using the highest level of statistics that we’ve got, agreement from sociologists on the Left and the Right. 

It relates to the importance of a child’s mother and father in a permanent, married union. So we can absolutely lead with that story. Humanizing the genuine victim, which is always the child, is a major part of what we do at Them Before Us. But if you want stats, I will very politely smack you with stats until you’ve had enough.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about no-fault divorce, because I don’t even really understand how it works now. I know a little bit about how family court is often kind of weaponized for the benefit of lawyers.

Ms. Faust:

Sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’ve done a number of episodes on that. It’s actually pretty shocking. What is no-fault divorce? How is that different from how it used to work? Why is it a problem?

Ms. Faust:

There have always been reasons to exit a marriage. Both civil law and religious law would make accommodations and say it makes sense for this marriage to end right now because of what religious authorities would call extreme cruelty, which we would say is abuse. Adultery has always been reasons for religious authorities to say this marriage can end. We’ve had something similar in the civil world where typically you could file for a divorce if the other party was at fault, right? They were at fault for breaking their marriage vows. 

Typically, what were the faults that were recognized? Adultery, addiction, abuse, abandonment. So they really have forsaken their promise. And as a result, the innocent spouse could then divorce them and receive reward, social reward, social support, maybe alimony, maybe custody, maybe keeping the family home. What did the at-fault divorce system do? It incentivized good behavior. Because if you..

Mr. Jekielek:

You became a kind of a pariah if you were the one at fault.

Ms. Faust:

And maybe had to pay a lot of money, yes. So starting in 1969, when Reagan was governor of California, he was the first person to pass a no-fault divorce. Divorce law because he himself had been in a situation where he wanted to exit a marriage, but nobody had been at fault. So typically, what those adults would have to do is lie and say, well, she committed adultery or he’s been abusing me. And they’re like, that’s not really fair, is it? Because I don’t want to demonize my spouse and say that he’s an adulterer. We just really feel like this chapter of our lives is over and we’d like to move on.

So, as go almost all overhauls of the social fabric, it was smuggled in under what sounded like empathetic, justifiable situations. But the result was a massive spike in the divorce rate. You know, so that the kids that grew up in the 80s and the 90s, some of them had more divorced parents with divorced friends than married friends. And when you make the exit so easy, a lot of adults are going to take it because marriage is hard.

My husband and I have been married for 28 years, and we just had our anniversary, and I was like, help me put together our anniversary post. And I said, what’s the hardest part of our marriage so far? And he’s like, 2017, 2018. And I was like, that’s right. I call those the warring years, you know, where we just fought a lot. And the only time that we weren’t fighting is when we were playing cribbage or rummy, and that was it. 

And so everybody goes through those hard seasons. And when there’s an easy exit, sometimes you take it. Now, the problem with that is children are harmed by divorce. We can measure it in terms of their physical bodies, their emotional health, their academic performance, and their own future relationships. When a child’s parents divorce, it is going to impact all of those areas of their life.

There was a study done in 2017 that studied the telomeres. That’s the end caps of the chromosomes of children that are responsible for health and longevity. Children who lost their father to death, incarceration, or divorce had shorter telomeres. So they were sicker. In the future, they had more chronic illnesses when they grew up. They had a shorter lifespan. Divorce impacts a child’s physical body. 

It also means they are much more hesitant to form their own relationships in the future. They have lower marriage rates. The ones that do get married have higher rates of divorce themselves. You can see it in their test scores. Children whose parents divorce have lower test scores. They’re less likely to graduate.There was a massive study using CDC data of 5 million children last summer that came out that showed that. There’s a 35 to 55 per cent increased risk of early death in children whose parents divorce. 

Divorce is an adverse childhood experience [ACE] that often leads to other ACEs. So we were way too casual about divorce. We barely blinked, but a whole generation of children are paying for it. And from the legal perspective, that was the original redefinition of marriage. 

Historically, marriage has had three characteristics: permanence, complementarity, and monogamy. It was supposed to last till death do you part. It was supposed to involve husband and wife, and it was supposed to forsake all others. No-fault divorce did away with permanence and said, this really isn’t about an institution good for kids. This is just a vehicle of adult fulfillment. When you stop being happy, it can stop being a marriage. 

Well, same-sex couples said, well, if this is just a vehicle of adult happiness, if it’s not an institution, if it doesn’t have to do with kids, being married to somebody of the same sex is what makes me happy. On that ground and others, we passed same-sex marriage. And now polygamists are gunning for the same thing. 

Because if marriage is really just a vehicle of adult fulfillment, if it’s just about adults being happy, a lot of adults are really happy being in a relationship with three other people. So we’re slowly deconstructing this critical institution for kids. And it began with no-fault divorce.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and not just for kids, but I’ve seen a great many studies and discussed them on this show that explain how families are kind of the fundamental units of society writ large. So it’s beyond just for children, because when we’re talking about children, we’re really talking about the adults of the future, right?

Ms. Faust:

That’s right. And I will say, you know, I don’t say family is the building block of society. I would say natural marriage is because the word family has been so adulterated to mean anything that an adult wants and any way an adult wants to arrange their life, even if it means cutting a child’s mother or father out, that’s not going to provide the same foundation as a child being raised by their married mother and father in a permanent union. So I often say I’m not a family activist, I’m a child activist. I’m there to defend their rights, even if some adult concept of family isn’t able to be achieved.

Mr. Jekielek:

What about two parents, same-sex vs. single parenting?

Ms. Faust:

The best way to think about this is: children benefit from their own mother and father for three specific reasons. There is something that only those two adults do for children that no other adults can do. And when you understand that foundation, then you can really easily understand the challenge with no-fault divorce, with single mothers by choice, with same-sex parented situations, with polygamous unions. 

So, what are those foundations, those non-negotiables of the human child? What is it that their two parents do for them that no other adults can do? Three things. Number one, a child’s own mother and father grant them something that they crave, and that is their biological identity. It’s very hard for children to answer the question, who am I, if they first can’t answer the question, whose child am I? 

Now, this is the very reason why we’ve seen a drastic shift in adoption practice here in the United States. Back in the Baby Scoop Era of the ’60s and ’70s, and even early ’80s, most adoptions in this country were closed. There was no contact with, knowledge of, or identifying information about the birth mother. And, you know, these adoptive parents were told, you don’t even need to tell your kid they’re adopted. They’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter. 

Well, it turns out those kids struggled with what psychologists call genealogical bewilderment. This idea of, I don’t know who I am. Like there’s something about my physical self that I can’t put this together. I look in the mirror and I don’t know what I’m looking at. And so we changed adoption in this country to the point where now, 95 per cent of adoptions in the United States are open. They have some degree of knowledge, connection with, and relationship to their first family. Because social workers and the adoptees themselves said, I need things from those two people that I can’t get from even a loving mother and father.

So, for example, our son, I know that it was God’s will that he be placed in our home. It was so obvious that he was the one that belonged in our family, but I can’t fully compensate for everything that he’s lost. There are some things, some answers that he will not be able to get from my husband and I. Hopefully, he gets love, connection, protection, inheritance, our name, full inclusion in our family. 

But there are some things that he won’t get unless he’s talking to his genetic mother and father. And both adoptees and donor-conceived people would say those things really matter to them, especially as it relates to understanding themselves. So that’s number one, biological identity. Father and mother are statistically the safest adults in a child’s life, the most connected adults in a child’s life, and the most invested adults in a child’s life as it relates to money, time, and resources.

On the flip side, unrelated adults always increase the risk of abuse and neglect for both women and men. So if we really believe children deserve to be safe and loved, then we will ensure that they are raised permanently by their genetic mother and father in the same home. And then third, when a child is raised by the two people who made them, they will automatically get the perfect gender balance in the home 100 per cent of the time. They will get a male parent and a female parent.

Men and women are different, and those differences matter most, not on the Supreme Court, not on a publicly held board. They matter most when it comes to child-rearing. A child needs a parent that shows them who they’re becoming when they grow up and who they should seek as a partner when they grow up. They need a parent who talks to them in complicated language like he talks to everyone else. They need a parent who simplifies her language so that the baby can understand everything they’re saying. They need one parent that is going to maximize their gross motor skills by swinging a hammer and climbing a tree and swinging a baseball bat and hitting a ball. They need one parent that maximizes their fine motor skills as it relates to tying their shoes and buttoning their buttons and coloring and cutting. These two adults, these two halves of humanity, maximize child development.

So that’s the proper understanding of what makes wholeness for a child. That’s why those two adults, why that should be the one family structure that we endorse, incentivize, and promote in this country. So after you understand that, then you can say, well, what about single parents? Well, what about same-sex parents? Well, what about the couple down the street? What about the couple that’s using a sperm donor? Once you understand the foundations of the human child, that is the framework to understand all other forms of alternative families.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because we’re not in a perfect world, and there will be many examples where that, you know, kind of make this the ideal, incentivize this as the ideal. And then, of course, there will be all sorts of deviations from that because that’s life.

Ms. Faust:

It is the ideal, period. Sociologically, anthropologically, biologically, in terms of natural law, it is the ideal, period. It is the framework that will set a child on the strongest possibility of a life of thriving. There’s no statistical or research case to be made otherwise. We just won’t admit that it’s the ideal, usually because we don’t want to offend adults. We are in a fallen world, and sometimes kids won’t have that through tragedy.

We have had generations of children who lost their fathers to war. Children used to routinely lose their mothers through childbirth. But generally, today, we’re not seeing tragedy-based losses for kids. Most kids today lose their mother or father because adult desire was prioritized above their rights.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, when you say, period, this is, you know, these things are reality, period, I’m wondering, has anyone ever said to you, hey, you just have these strong Christian values, which you clearly do, even just from our conversation. And you’re just kind of building your worldview and matching these statistics to fit that.

Ms. Faust:

This is very common for me in interviews. I had a 40-minute conversation with a New York Times reporter, I guess it was three weeks ago. And it was everything we’ve just been talking about: natural law, the studies, divorce, same-sex parenting, critiquing the no different studies of the same-sex parenting world. She said, but really, this is just about religion for you, isn’t it? 

I said, I haven’t brought up religion. You’re the one that brought religion up. She goes, but this is just a Christian crusade, isn’t it? And I’m like, I understand why you need to frame it that way. I understand why it’s hard for you to contextualize this in any way other than me being some kind of Christian nationalist that wants to impose her morality on everyone else. What I’ve told you are the realities of the human child that are true in South Carolina and South Korea, in ancient China and modern China.These are the non-negotiables of the human child. 

The fact that my religion also validates that the child should be raised by both their mother and father is a testament to the strength of my worldview, but I’m not building this case based on Leviticus or Ephesians 5. My entire book, our first book, Them Before Us, has 120 studies of children who lost their mother or father, probably 100 references in each chapter to different studies, no Bible verses. Do you want me to make a scriptural case for this? I will. But I don’t need a Bible to tell me who children are, where they come from, and to whom they have a natural right. The created world will do that for me.

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned a few challenges that were made to you in the early days, right, and that actually got you thinking. Has there been any challenge that’s really shifted your thinking?

Ms. Faust:

I didn’t know a lot about reproductive technologies, especially. I really didn’t know a lot about IVF [in vitro fertilization] or surrogacy. I had heard of sperm donor babies, but I hadn’t looked into it at all. Now, if you Google Katy Faust surrogacy, or Katy Faust IVF, or Them Before Us IVF, you’ll see we are probably the most public-facing critics of big fertility right now.

And 15 years ago, I didn’t know anything about it. So I had to learn. I had to learn a lot. I still don’t feel like I know as much as I should, especially about the processes and the risks. I mean, there’s a lot of risks, especially to maternal health as it relates to serving as a surrogate or being a seller, a donor. We do consider ourselves the experts on the impact on children. 

But that was an area where I didn’t know anything. People would say, Why do you feel like you have the right to speak on behalf of donor conception? And you’ve never struggled with infertility. And do you have a bioethics degree? And I’m like, no, I don’t. I have an Asian studies and political science bachelor’s. 

But nobody was doing this. Nobody was fighting on behalf of children in matters of reproductive technology: to be known and loved by their mother and father. So it required a long and sometimes arduous on-ramp onto the freeway of critiquing the baby-making world because it victimizes kids.I’ve had to learn how to read policy. 

I’m not a thought leader. I’m much more of a translator as it relates to understanding and speaking and engaging. So I’ve had to learn to read policy and understand constitutional law. And that doesn’t come easily for me. I am not great at it. I’m not a good writer either. That’s another thing. That’s why Stacy was so clutch in those early years. There’s an awful lot of this work where I had to get up to speed.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, in a world where, you know, the birth rate is below replacement in this country, it seems difficult to argue against IVF because, you know, people are wanting to have their own children. So explain to me what you think about IVF, how you came to these conclusions, and how that comports with this harsh reality we’re in?

Ms. Faust:

The reason why I am one of the most vocal critics of IVF is because it victimizes children. It victimizes children on three different levels. First, it violates their right to life. Only 2 to 3 percent of lab-made babies are going to be born alive. Probably 90 per cent are going to be frozen or discarded or donated to research and never transferred to the womb. So we mass produce embryos in the big fertility, so that we can screen out the undesirables.It‘s a eugenics project and it violates children’s right to life and it deserves to be critiqued. 

The second reason why IVF is a problem is because up to two-thirds of the children created through IVF will also lose their mother or father in the process. So if you are one of the two to three percent that make it through the eugenics gauntlet alive and you’re not selectively reduced, you are going to lose your mother or father because somebody used an egg or sperm donor in the process.So, it violates children’s right to be known and loved by their mother and father. 

And then the purchasing of sperm or egg or the renting of a womb violates children’s right to be born free and not bought and sold. What is it that you are paying for when you purchase eggs or sperm? You are paying the genetic mother or father to stay out of the child’s life forever. You are paying them to relinquish their parental rights. 

Now, in the world of adoption, when I was working at the adoption agency, the bright line between adoption and baby is that money never went from the adoptive parents to the birth parents. We spent a lot of money on our adoption. Most adoptive parents do, but it’s not to buy the baby. It is to get people to come into your home, to fingerprint you, to look at how you parent your other children, and see if this is going to be a safe placement for a child because the adults raising the baby are unrelated, and therefore we know they pose a significant risk to the child. 

So the purpose of spending money in adoption is vetting, not paying somebody to hand over their child. But in the world of big fertility, that’s what you’re doing. When you pay somebody to be your commercial surrogate, you are paying her to promise to relinquish her rights, not after birth, but probably in the second or third trimester. So that’s why I’m a critic of IVF. But will this help the birth rate?

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and there’s another question, though, because you’re also saying that, okay, there are these rights of the child that are being violated. But what about the right of this, you know, hypothetical IVF child? 

Ms. Faust:

Yes, that’s a really common question that children created through IVF and especially donor conception or surrogacy face, which is, you know, if they say something like, well, I would like to know what it’s like to have a father, or, I have some questions about, you know, being commercially separated from my mother, or my birth mother was paid to carry me, and that doesn’t sit very well. You can imagine that from their own parents and from people around them, the immediate response is, would you rather not exist alive without this technology? I think that’s one of the most cruel forms of gaslighting I’ve ever heard.

There’s one study that compares outcomes of children created through sperm donation and children that were adopted. The sperm donor children were always raised by their biological mother, sometimes as a single mother, sometimes in a same-sex couple, sometimes with a social father. The adopted kids were never raised by either biological parent; they were always raised by two unrelated adults. But interestingly, the psychological outcomes for adoptees were better than for the sperm donor children.

And I’ll tell you why, in my humble opinion. It is because these kids experienced significant parental loss. They were not being raised by their father. These kids, too, weren’t raised by their mother or father. But when these kids said, I wonder if my father knows that I exist. Do you think that I’ve passed him on the street somewhere? Do you think that that’s why I play the piano, but everybody else in my family is an engineer? I’d really like to know who he is someday. These kids, the donor-conceived kids, probably hear from their parents as well, that’s not your father. He’s just a donor. Honey, do you know how much we paid to make it possible for you to be alive? Honestly, you should just be grateful that you exist. 

Then these kids over here, if they say, do you think that my mother or father know where I am? Do you think I’ll pass them on the street someday? Maybe that’s why I’m such an engineer and all of you guys are so musical. The adoptive parents are more likely to say, I’ve wondered that too. I think it’s sad that you weren’t able to stay with your birth family. You know, we’ll do what we can to make sure that if they’re in a good place, they get a birthday card from you. And if you ever want to go find them, we can go with you. 

These people, these children over here, are being raised by the adults who created their loss. These adoptees are being raised by the adults who are seeking to mend their loss. That creates a really significant psychological burden on the child. Both of these children have questions. Both of them are going to experience grief. Both of them are going to mourn because they’re met with the, you should be grateful to be alive. The adoptees are more likely to have other people join in their questions and their longings because the people raising them would have wanted it to be another way if possible.

So, that question, don’t we want more babies? Don’t we want them to be alive? No. I think that we can insist that children have a right to their mother and father, and we need more babies. And children shouldn’t have to lose their mother or father so that we can increase the birth rate.

Mr. Jekielek:

Surrogacy with both biological parents?

Ms. Faust:

So, if you look at surrogacy from the adult’s perspective, it’s pretty fantastic. You get the child that you want. Oftentimes, the surrogate’s happy. She’s made $40,000, $60,000. Oftentimes, the egg or sperm sellers are happy. They also made some money. And obviously, the parents, the adults taking the child home from the hospital, they’re usually very happy with the situation. Lawyers don’t mind either. 

From the child’s perspective, surrogacy is always forcing kids to do hard things on behalf of adults. So, the best way to think about surrogacy today is that it splices what should be one person, mother, into three purchasable and optional women. The first mother is the genetic mother that provides the egg. She is the person that helps children answer the question, who am I? She grants kids their biological identity. She is the one that 80 per cent of kids are going to want to know the identity of because she is the one that can answer for them the question, who am I?

The second mother is the birth mother, the woman with whom the child bonds for nine months. It is that woman, that body, that female that the child already has bonded to. Why is it that we put newborns on their mother’s chest right after they’re born? It’s not so they can form a bond; it’s because they have an existing bond. That woman’s body, the smell of her breast milk, the colostrum, is the exact same scent as the amniotic fluid the baby’s been swimming in for nine months. Her body, her presence, is what lowers a baby’s cortisol level more than any other skin-to-skin contact, even with the genetic father, even with the genetic mother in the room. 

It is her body that soothes the child in a way that no other body can. We’ve actually measured the pain that a child will experience during that pinprick on the heel in the hospital. Laying on the mother’s chest, it pains the child less. So there’s something about her body that facilitates trust and attachment moving forward. 

Adoptees who lost their birth mother on the day they were born would call that a primal wound, right? They lost something that they needed the day that they were born. And many adoptees, and now some surrogate-conceived children, would say it hampered them as it related to their ability to form relationships in the future. Many of them would say, I have a fear of abandonment. I sort of smother people because I’m always worried that they’re going to leave me. And it’s some sort of unconscious urge to try to compensate for something that they lost the day they’re born. So the second one is the birth mother.

The third is the social mother, the woman that provides that female-specific love, that tailored development that only a mother can provide every day of the child’s life. So those are the three mothers. Now, according to nature, all three of those are going to be one woman. The woman whose genetic identity contributes to the child is also the one who gestates and also the one that kisses their boo-boos as they grow up.Which mother do you  need? Which one do you not want? 

Some children are going to lose just their birth mother if the child goes home with their genetic mother and father. Okay, so they’re only dealing with the birth trauma and the struggle to trust and attach, but they won’t deal with their genetic identity, and they’ll have the female-specific love. Some children are going to lose their genetic mother through egg purchase. Some will lose their birth mother, and some will go to a household where there’s no maternal love at all.

This leads to tragedy. We mourn, and we seek to mend their loss. Surrogacy forces us to inflict that wound on a child intentionally, just because an adult wants something. So, no, there’s no scenario where surrogacy is child-centric. It’s always adult-centric.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m not convinced of this because if my wife and I wanted to have children, but we just can’t, right, is it better for us to just give up on that, than to try?

Ms. Faust:

It’s better for the child to have adults sacrifice for them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, I mean, I would think that we are sacrificing for them quite greatly.

Ms. Faust:

Monetarily?

Mr. Jekielek:

Not monetarily. Like, you know, changing our lifestyles, trying. Really, the whole idea is around the child here. I mean, I mean that sincerely when I’m saying this. I mean, I’m that, yes.

Ms. Faust:

I totally understand why a lot of people will see it that way. I don’t think the child would ever consent or agree to losing the only person they know the day that they are born, and these subsequent struggles that accompany that. So, the closest, the most data that we have now—we don’t have a whole lot of data on children created through surrogacy. And for the ones that are created, we have not yet been able to parse out, well, they were raised by two men, or well, they were raised by their genetic mother and father. It’s hard to get good studies on this for several reasons. Number one, it’s actually unethical to test mother deprivation on children. We will not allow it because we won’t subject infants to that kind of cruelty.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right.

Ms. Faust:

So it’s hard to test the importance of birth mothers on children because right now we only do it in rodents. We won’t even do it in chimpanzees anymore because it was too cruel. Number two, there are so few children that have been created through surrogacy in the population that it’s hard to find them at random. And number three, most of them are too young to report on outcomes on their own. You typically need to wait until kids are out of the home before they can objectively reflect. So it’s going to be a while before we have that kind of data. 

What we do have is data on children that were adopted at birth. And what we see in those children is that those children were also very wanted. Those children, on the whole, are raised by mothers and fathers who are wealthier, better educated, and who spend more time and more money on them. And yet, those adoptees fare worse as it relates to emotional problems and academic outcomes, even though they have all the advantages of adults who really, really want them and are working to do hard things for them. So, what’s the explanation there for doing objectively, measurably worse than children raised by biological parents? Well, there are two possibilities.

One, adopted children are conceived by people who are genetically subpar and stupid. That argument is being made by some people online. The alternative is that the bond with their own mother matters, and that severing it at birth is going to create some level of hindrance and disadvantage for the child as they move through life, even if they’re raised by a mother and a father. These parents love them, can put them in the best schools, will spend more time with them, and will give them all kinds of material advantages that maybe their biological parents could not. I think it’s more likely that the one relationship we have in the whole pantheon of human experience where we are connected by a literal cord probably matters a lot.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just that in this case, right, in this specific instance, the child couldn’t exist at all, right? And they have two parents that love them, and it might not be ideal, right? A society that has a negative birth rate might be better than the alternative of non-existence.

Ms. Faust:

Well, I’d say there are other scenarios where children would not exist.

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t want to press, you know, I don’t want to kind of beat a dead horse with this one.

Ms. Faust:

I don’t want to beat it, because your questions are everybody else’s questions, and they deserve a really good answer. So, first, I would say there are a lot of children that would not exist today without rape, and yet we’re really critical of rape.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, we’re critical of rape, but we value the people that have come from rape nonetheless.

Ms. Faust:

Correct. That’s exactly right. And it’s the same thing with children created through IVF or sperm or egg donation or surrogacy. Those children are precious. They’re worthy of life, and they’re actually worthy to have their rights respected because they are so precious, because they are made in the image of God, because they have human dignity. That’s actually the case for being critical of IVF and surrogacy and third-party reproduction because they actually deserve the kind of respect and dignity that the rest of us would expect from a world that puts children first. 

On the question of, don’t we need these reproductive technologies because we have a 1.5 birth rate in the United States and around 1.4 in Europe? The answer is no. In the few jurisdictions that we have that have subsidized IVF and reproductive technologies, you don’t see an increase in birth rate. What you see is women postponing childbearing longer, so it actually creates an incentive to put off childbearing, which is the exact opposite of what we need. 

The places that do see increases in birth rates, what do they see? Earlier marriages, which leads to women taking advantage of their reproductive years sooner rather than putting them off. So there are places where we have tried to subsidize reproductive technologies, and it doesn’t touch the birth rate.

Mr. Jekielek:

So maybe give me a picture of how you view adoption, whether it’s what you did, right, conventional nuclear family adoption, same-sex couple adoption, single-parent adoption. How does this all flesh out?

Ms. Faust:

It’s a really important question because adopted children are vulnerable children. And the best way to think about adoption is that it’s not for adults. It’s not a way for same-sex couples to complete their family. It’s not a way for infertile couples to have children. The adults are not the client in adoption. Children who have lost their mother and father, they are the client in adoption. 

I remember back when I was at the adoption agency, I went to the founder, I was like very new, and I said, this adoptive couple, and boy, there’s a lot of red flags. But I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be able to get them approved. And she goes, you misunderstand. We are not here to get that couple approved. We are not here to get them a baby. We are here to find a loving home for every child that does not have one. The adults might be paying us, but they are not our client. The child is the client. I was like, I’m so glad that I learned that lesson early because that’s the right way to think about it. 

So, what do children need? Whenever possible, they need maternal love and paternal love. Every child needs a mom and dad. But adopted children who have experienced that maternal loss, and maybe who have been part of a revolving door of foster homes or have suffered institutional deprivation like our son, maybe you could make a case that they need a mother and father even more. They need that soft parent that is going to be more emotionally in tune with their immediate needs. And then you need the other parent who will have generally firmer, better-enforced boundaries. The reason why our son was able to stabilize is because mother and father were the food that he needed on steroids to get to the place where he could overcome a lot of those early deficits. 

So, the real solution is we need more stable mothers and fathers stepping up for children in foster care and who need adoption. And I’m not talking about the white, drug-free infants for which there are years-long waiting lists. I’m talking about the hard cases. I’m talking about the sibling groups and the older kids, and the kids with special needs, the ones that nobody wants. We need mothers and fathers to step up and do hard things on their behalf. 

So there are times where you are not able to find the married mother-father home for that child. And then social workers have to do what they have always done, which is elevate the best interest of the child. And sometimes that may be a single parent. Maybe there are times where it’s a same-sex couple. Maybe the social worker decides that two women are going to be a better placement for this child. You know, the foster care churn, but it needs to be based on what the child needs, not based on what the adults want.

Mr. Jekielek:

I imagine that a lot of people who are deeply committed either to having children through IVF and having had children through IVF or many of these other scenarios that we described today don’t like what you do very much.

Ms. Faust:

That is correct. It’s interesting because I’ll be in interviews where we’re critiquing gay marriage. You know, I’ll be on a conservative influencer’s, and they’re like, yes, down with gay marriage. And then I’ll say, you know, we also should talk about IVF and the massive destruction of human life that goes along with that. And they’re like, oh, now don’t you touch IVF. You know, or I’ll be talking with a radical feminist who’s like, we have got to do away with surrogacy. It’s the exploitation of women. I’m like, I agree. 

I’m one of the primary signatories of the Casablanca Declaration, which is seeking to abolish surrogacy globally. And I’ll say, but you know, gay marriage actually creates the legal pathways to make a mother and father optional in the life of a child. And they’ll say, Oh, no, no, don’t you go to gay marriage. Or I’m talking with somebody about the dangers of big fertility, and they’ll say, yes, we shouldn’t be buying and selling children. Then we’ll talk about divorce, and they’ll say, no, don’t you go there on divorce. Sometimes adults just need to get out of an unhealthy marriage. So you probably have noticed.

Mr. Jekielek:

But on this point, okay, sometimes adults really do need to get out of an unhealthy marriage, an abusive marriage and so forth, right?

Ms. Faust:

Right. Which is why we used to have at-fault divorce because there are times to exit a marriage. And in those situations, I think the guilty party should be punished. In no-fault divorce situations now, what it has resulted in is the parent who wants the marriage the least has the most amount of power in the proceedings. And very often it’s not a no-fault divorce. 

It’s a unilateral divorce where somebody is being divorced against their will. And oftentimes, the person that is going to receive the brunt of it is the innocent party and the children because the misbehaving spouse calls all the shots. So, all that is to say, yes, everything that I say and do is unpopular with somebody.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, just to go down that path a little further, right, you’re saying that cohabitation is a bigger threat to kids than divorce.

Ms. Faust:

I would say cohabitation is a bigger threat to kids than gay marriages. Right now, divorce rates are falling, which is good, but that’s because marriage rates are falling, right? Fewer people are getting married. We’ve seen a slight uptick in marriage rates, and the marriages that are forming tend to be more stable, but more people are opting for cohabitation than marriage. 

Some of that is because those kids grew up in the no-fault divorce era. And what they learned from their parents’ no-fault divorce is anyone can leave me at any time for any reason. I’ll never see it coming. There’s nothing I can do about it. So the lesson that they imbibed about marriage from their own parents is that marriage is risky. Cohabitation, that’s safe. 

Now, from a child’s perspective, cohabitation is terrible, right? Children whose parents are cohabiting, even if they’re biological parents, have much higher rates of abuse, neglect, and delinquency. And if it’s an unrelated partner that your mother is cohabiting with, well, you’re living with statistically the most dangerous person in a child’s life. So, cohabitation is no substitute for marriage, and it does threaten one of the largest numbers of kids in our country. I’m unpopular with everybody because that’s the whole thing about putting kids first; every adult has to bend.

Mr. Jekielek:

Bottom line is responsibilities, right? The bottom line with a lot of these things is people taking responsibilities, which now over generations they’ve been taught maybe aren’t things they need to be responsible for anymore because we’ve been emancipated from those responsibilities.

Ms. Faust:

I think that’s part of it, but I think we have circulated the same lies culturally over and over.

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, and blank slate theory, I’m just cutting you off here. But that’s also this idea, right, that there’s no genetic component. I mean, of course, that has always been ridiculous, but it’s still very prominent. And sorry to cut you off like that.

Ms. Faust:

No, that’s it. Like there are genuine, non-negotiable, you can’t swap them out, needs of children that are hardwired into them. But we have said for decades, love makes a family. If the adults are happy, the kids will be happy. Kids don’t need a mother and father; they just need to be safe and loved.  And so, if that’s what you believe, then of course you can swap out a child’s father and insert a cohabiting boyfriend. Of course, two mothers are going to be able to raise a child just as well as a child’s mother and father. Of course, you should be able to exit a marriage if you’re unhappy because, hey, two Christmases. 

So, I think that a lot of adults have been convinced. That there is no hardship if they choose to upend a family, or separate a child from their mother or father through reproductive technologies. They have grown up in a world that says that it’s all malleable, but it’s not. And children are paying the price for it, you know, in all of these different spheres. So that’s the message that needs to be communicated. A lot of adults have thought, well, there’s no hardship here if I want to leave my husband or if I want to be a single mother by choice. Nobody’s doing anything difficult. The child will always be doing something difficult, always. And it’s been too easy to dismiss that because we have had these cultural mantras that have told us that any two will do. And that’s just not the case.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, with that in mind, what does this global movement for children’s rights that you envision look like?

Ms. Faust:

Total conquest.

Mr. Jekielek:

Explain that.

Ms. Faust:

I want to take over every country in the world. I want every country, the personal and the political, to first consider the kids.That if they are trying to figure out if it’s parent one or parent two on a birth certificate, or if it’s mother or father on a birth certificate, they first say, what about the child? The child needs their mother and father. They get their identity through that mother and father. They’re most likely to be safe and loved with their own mother and father. 

So we probably should not normalize the idea that any adult can put their name on a birth certificate and take a vulnerable newborn home from the hospital. If it has to do with your personal decisions, what about the child? To think, I can just run off with my trainer at the gym because he’s the guy that really gets me, and my kids would be so happy if I’m happy. The answer is no. You conform to what your children need, which is you in a relationship with their father in the same home joyously and sweetly all their life. So that’s it. 

If I have my way, I’m going to get up in everybody’s business. And we’re going to do what we can to force the rights of the child to be at the forefront of every conversation in the culture and the courts. We’re going to work to change hearts and we’re going to work to change laws because children deserve to have their needs prioritized in a world that is so eager to dismiss them.

Mr. Jekielek:

What keeps you going with so much pushback from so many sides?

Ms. Faust:

Rage. I get really angry when adults normalize brokenness for children to advance their own desires. There was a post that kind of went viral over the last couple days of the Malcolm in the Middle program star announcing his divorce. And he had one post where he and his wife had some kind of camera on the top of their loft living room shining down at them, doing this techno dance of like, oh, look, we’re getting a divorce. This is incredible. And they’re so happy and they’re smiling at the camera. And their sweet kid, who looks like he’s about six, jumps in and he’s dancing with them. And they’re celebrating the demise of their child. That’s what they’re doing. 

He got a lot of pushback about that online.  So he deleted the dance video and then reframed it as this chapter of our life has ended. We’re going to continue to co-parent our wonderful son together. We’re going to work together in partnership. And he had to recast it as everything’s fine here. 

But what they’re doing is they’re saddling their son with lifelong loss. There is an increased likelihood that he’ll die early, increased likelihood that he’ll be involved in crime, increased likelihood that he will drop out of school, be involved in drugs, you know, increased likelihood that he will never get married himself. That’s what you’re doing. 

So I see those kinds of things and I get angry that adults think they should celebrate the death of their child’s home so that what? I don’t even know what. Like they’re still good friends, but they can’t be good friends in the same home so that their child can enjoy all of the safeguards that go along with having a married mother and father for life.

Mr. Jekielek:

Aside from looking at statistics right now, looking at this one individual case since you mentioned it, how can we know that the possible problems that this child will experience will be greater than what he would have experienced with parents that have these constant problems, potentially?

Ms. Faust:

Yes, well, that is definitely the case. Isn’t it better if my child grows up with happy parents that are divorced than unhappy parents who are married? And I’m like, well, there are more options than just that. You could have a happy marriage. And your inability to do the work needed to resolve your issues, work through your problems, get therapy, get accountability—why is that your son’s problem? What you’re doing with that kind of a divorce situation—there are times where adultery or abuse or addiction might necessitate exiting the marriage, really for the sake of your child. That’s not what this was all about. 

These were two adults who said, whatever burdens we’re carrying, we’ve decided we don’t want to hold on to them anymore. You take it instead. That’s what they’re doing. They’re offloading the hard work onto the shoulders of their child, who’s going to have to carry it for life. And maybe Malcolm and his wife—I forget what his real name is—would have had to undergo a couple years of struggle, counseling. I mean, my husband and I, along with every married couple I know, has had at some point to say, we need a course correction here. We need a little bit of intervention. They chose not to do that. Instead, they’re going to burden their child with what is likely going to be lifelong intervention, lifelong struggle.

Now, is the kid going to be okay? Possibly. There are divorced kids all around us. Many of them are in really successful positions. I think most of them would say, I figured it out. I worked it through. I got over it. 

But many of them would also say, but I’m walking with a limp. I’ve never really, really recovered from the pain. And honestly, I’m still dealing with the problems of my parents not both wanting to attend my wedding. I have to kind of choose, do I get my dad on this holiday, or my mom on this holiday? The new stepmom in my life, she’s really created a dividing wedge between my father and me. Now, since she does not have the same interest in me and my siblings, I’m getting less attention and connection from my own father because there’s a divided loyalty there. 

The fallout of divorce lasts forever. Does it mean that kids will never succeed? No, kids can succeed. Kids can succeed with two fathers, two mothers, a single mother, divorced parents. But to pretend like there are no additional hurdles, roadblocks, or stumbling blocks is sociological foolishness.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, I guess you’re really saying put the responsibility back on the parents. Don’t channel, don’t sort of send it down to the kids.

Ms. Faust:

That’s exactly what I’m saying. I am saying in all these situations that admittedly are hard, those road bumps in marriage are hard. Experiencing same-sex attraction and wanting to form a family or be parents is hard. Being a 40-year-old single woman who would be an amazing mother and hasn’t gotten married yet and desperately wants to be pregnant is hard. None of that justifies forcing a child to sacrifice for you. Somebody is going to do the hard thing in each of those scenarios, and it should not be the child; it should be the adults.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Katy Faust, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Ms. Faust:

It’s really good to chat with you.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.