Children First or Adults First? - Katy Faust
Katy Faust, founder of children's rights organisation Them Before Us, brings a framework largely absent from European policy debate: that when marriage law is redefined, parenting law is redefined with it, and children bear the cost. With the European Court of Human Rights pressing member states to recognise foreign surrogacy arrangements, and the EU proposing cross-border parenthood rules, her argument that adult fulfilment should not come at children's expense is directly relevant to audiences in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and beyond.
Katy Faust spent her childhood navigating a family reshaped by divorce and her mother's same-sex partnership. That experience, she insists, was generally a positive one — yet it left her with a precise and enduring awareness of what children lose when adult choices reorganise family life around themselves. She went on to found Them Before Us, a global children's rights organisation, and has since taken her argument to the United Nations, to national parliaments on several continents, and to the United States Supreme Court through amicus briefs. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, Faust sets out her central claim: that marriage law and parenting law are inseparable. When the legal definition of marriage changes, she argues, the legal definition of parenthood changes with it — and those changes determine which rights children can expect to hold. Her concern is not with adult relationships as such, but with the downstream effect on children when policy consistently places adult fulfilment ahead of children's need for stability, identity and connection to both biological parents. She extends the argument to surrogacy and donor conception. Children born through these arrangements, Faust contends, do not simply begin life from scratch in a loving home. Many carry, over time, a felt absence — a question about the parent or the genetic line they do not know. Drawing on testimony gathered through her organisation's work, she makes the case that the experience of loss, even when it is not immediately visible, tends to surface. For her, this is a structural problem rooted in how the law is written, not a personal failing of any individual family. The debate lands with particular force in Europe. Surrogacy is banned in France and Germany, and heavily restricted across much of the continent, yet the European Court of Human Rights has in recent years issued rulings that complicate national bans by requiring member states to recognise parent-child relationships established abroad through commercial surrogacy. The European Commission's proposed regulation on cross-border parenthood recognition would, if enacted, extend that logic further across the single market. For European clinicians, legal scholars and policymakers watching these developments, Faust offers a children's-rights vocabulary that has been largely absent from the official conversation. Nordic countries have long led on donor-conception reform — Sweden was among the first in the world to grant donor-conceived people the right to know their biological origins — yet even there, the question of how to weigh children's identity rights against prospective parents' reproductive autonomy remains contested. The Netherlands, Finland and Germany have each revisited their donor-anonymity frameworks in recent years. Faust's argument gives European listeners a way to articulate what is at stake for children at a moment when EU-level legislation is beginning to standardise family law across very different national traditions, and when the voices of children formed by those arrangements are only starting to be heard.
