Katy Faust
Children's rights advocate and author
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, a global children's rights organisation that puts the child's perspective at the centre of debates on surrogacy, donor conception and divorce. Her work arrives at a pivotal moment for Ireland, a country mid-way through implementing landmark assisted reproduction legislation and still reckoning with the shape of family law.
Katy Faust is the founder of Them Before Us, a global organisation that centres the voices of children raised outside of biological families in public debates about assisted reproduction, surrogacy and family law. Drawing on testimony from donor-conceived adults, children of surrogacy and adult children of divorce, Them Before Us makes the case that policy shaped around adult desire consistently passes its costs on to the youngest and least powerful.
Faust is the author of Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement, co-written with Stacy Manning, and has testified before legislatures and international bodies on the rights of children to know and be raised by their biological parents wherever possible. Her central argument is that children are not a product of adult relationships but persons in their own right, and that law should recognise that distinction before it expands the commercial or legal mechanisms that separate children from their origins.
In the Beyond Gender episode Children First or Adults First? (January 2026), Faust joined hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to apply this framework to surrogacy, donor conception and divorce, arguing that each of these arrangements, however well-intentioned, requires children to bear losses that adults are unwilling to carry. The conversation carried particular weight for Irish listeners: Ireland's Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Act has moved the country from near-total legal silence on these questions to active regulation, and the choices embedded in that legislation will shape the lives of children conceived under it for generations.
For an Irish audience — and for Stella O'Malley as a psychotherapist who works with families navigating exactly these pressures — Faust's insistence on keeping the child's experience at the centre of the debate is both a challenge and a resource. Her work invites Ireland to ask not only what adults are permitted to do, but what children have a right to expect.
