Katy Faust
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Katy Faust’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Because one of the things we do at Them Before Us is we catalog the stories of children who have lost their mother or father to a variety of different adult interests, not due to tragedy, but because some adult wanted it that way on some level, what I call desire-based desire. maternal or paternal losses. And so one major category of that is children created through reproductive technologies.
Sperm and egg, quote unquote, donation, which is a misnomer. This isn't a buying or selling, or children created through surrogacy. And so you can imagine that many of the kids get these kinds of objections where they talk about how They're troubled by the fact that they have dozens or hundreds of half siblings because their father was a serial sperm donator.
Or maybe their mother donated her eggs to somebody. And so then they have questions like, who is my mother? Very normal questions. Very human child. The kind of questions that every human child asks at some point. Who is my mother? Who are the people that are responsible for me? This is questions that adoptees have overwhelmingly.
These are questions that children created through sperm and egg donation have. Unfortunately, many of them, when they voice their concerns, when they voice their loss, when they voice their pain, what they hear is, would you rather be dead? So I think that this is pretty manipulative.
I think it's a manipulative tactic to say you do not get to ask the questions or feel the kind of loss that every other human child has experienced throughout history because otherwise you wouldn't exist. So I say, look, there's other situations where we can be manipulative. For sure.
Well, let me just say, we can be grateful for, recognize the dignity and the worth of these individual little lives, Dave and David's two children, that they are precious, worthy of life and protection. And I would actually say that means that we require that we be critical of the circumstances of their conception. The exact same way we would handle a child conceived through rape.
Your life is altogether good. But I can be critical of the circumstances of your conception because you were brought about in a way that actually did not respect and protect your fundamental rights as a human.
I don't necessarily think that there is a delicate, nuanced line. And can it be iterated? And if you are going to do one thing that is going to be extrapolated for the general population, I'm kind of a simpleton in that I'm not a thought leader. I read the thought leaders. I listen to you and John Anderson. And I love Carl Truman. But I'm a translator. I listen to what you guys say.
I respect the policymakers, but I want to translate it down to something that is accessible and applicable for everybody. And I will tell you, I can use the same metric and rubric, and I think this is great for personal decisions and policy decisions. And that one rubric is adults should sacrifice so kids don't have to. We should not force children to do hard things on behalf of adults.
And ultimately, any form of surrogacy is forcing children to sacrifice something so adults can have what they want. Nobody has a right to a child. Children have a right to their mother and father.
But children have a right to- They don't have a right to acquire a child. You have a right to your own biological child. I mean, when you leave the hospital, you don't want to just leave with any baby. You want your baby. And you have a fundamental, natural, pre-political right to that baby.
But you don't have a right to acquire a child that then has to lose their genuine right to their mother or father so that they can be taken home by you. So there is not a nebulous right-
Yeah, so first let me say, I think that there's an abuse of the word rights in our world, you know, and it's very much like a Mr. Incredibles thing. When everything's a right, nothing is a right. And unfortunately, it seems like whatever adults really, really, really, really want is conveniently framed as a right.
But if you're looking at things from a natural law perspective, not necessarily what we would even consider to be a civil law, because civil laws can be out of step with natural laws. And again, I'm not a natural lawyer.
thank God, one of the most well-renowned natural law scholars, Robert George, wrote the foreword for our first book, Them Before Us, Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement. So there is natural law precedence for this. But like I said, I'm a translator. And so I don't think in these kind of first principle ways.
I will tell you how to determine whether or not something is a natural right based on sort of my simplified understanding of natural rights. And then
we'll be able to figure out pretty easily whether or not you have a right to acquire a surrogate-born child, even though you're purchasing egg and renting the womb and taking the children across borders without any kind of background check, even though you've got a criminal history and you're a known pedophile, which has happened in surrogacy cases. So let's figure out to what extent
children and adults have a natural right. So when I, my understanding of natural rights and my co-author Stacey Manning and I kind of detailed this out in our first book, there's three rules that make something a genuine natural right. Number one, it needs to exist pre-government, right? And that's kind of what our country was founded on is this idea that government doesn't give you rights.
They just recognize and protect rights. So a genuine natural right exists pre-government. So like your right to life, your right to life existed before the government. Government's not there to give it to you. They're there to protect it. Number two, nobody has to provide it for you.
So if it has to be like dug up from the ground, bottled, labeled, shipped, and put on a shelf, it's not a natural right. You might even need it to survive, but it's not necessarily a natural right. Number three, a natural right is given an equal distribution.
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