Katy Faust
Children's rights advocate and author
Katy Faust brings a framework largely absent from European policy debate: that reforms to marriage and parenthood law impose real costs on children, not only on adults. With the European Court of Human Rights pressing member states to recognise foreign surrogacy arrangements and EU institutions advancing cross-border parenthood proposals, her children-first analysis lands squarely in European legislative territory.
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, a children's rights organisation built on a single structural argument: that when marriage law is redefined, parenting law is redefined with it, and children are the ones who absorb the loss. Where most policy debate frames surrogacy, donor conception, and same-sex parenthood as questions of adult rights, Faust insists the prior question is always what children are owed — beginning with a connection to their biological origins and the two people responsible for bringing them into the world.
In the Beyond Gender episode Children First or Adults First? (8 January 2026), Faust joined hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman to work through this framework in detail. The conversation is acutely relevant for European listeners: the European Court of Human Rights has been pressing member states to grant legal recognition to commercial surrogacy arrangements concluded abroad, and the European Commission has tabled proposals for cross-border recognition of parenthood. Faust's counter-argument — that such moves transfer legal authority to commissioning adults while severing children's ties to biological kin — represents a position almost entirely absent from current EU institutional debate.
She is the co-author, with Stacy Manning, of Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement, which marshals social-science evidence, case law, and testimony from donor-conceived adults and children of surrogacy to make the empirical case that the child's perspective must be the starting point of any family-law reform, not a footnote to adult entitlements.
For European clinicians, family lawyers, and policymakers grappling with the EU's proposed parenthood regulation and the ECHR's surrogacy jurisprudence, Faust's insistence on centring the child — rather than accommodating adult preferences and then working backwards — offers a durable analytical lens that extends well beyond the American context in which it was first developed.
