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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So if there's a differentiation in terms of the level of attainment or achievement, a GED versus a PhD or a dorm versus Mar-a-Lago, it's not a natural right. If it's a genuine natural right, you have it in equal measure. Everybody gets exactly one life. Everybody has the same ability, should have the same ability to defend themselves, should have the same ability to speak.
And all of us, regardless of the technological tinkering that was done in some laboratory somewhere, have exactly two parents, one mother and one father. So children have a fundamental natural right to the two people responsible for their existence. Do adults have a right to acquire a child that is not biologically theirs?
No, they don't, because that violates the fundamental natural rights of kids.
Well, let me ask you, if you don't mind, What are the studies that we have on maternal loss and the impact that it has on kids? What are the studies that you know of, of kids that grow up without their mothers and how they fare?
The reason I asked you that is you couldn't think of any off the top of your head, right?
Right. And that's because mother loss, it used to be that if the mother was gone, the baby's dead.
Mother loss, the mother loss is so antithetical to our species, right? That mother and child are bonded so tightly, both in the ways that you're talking about in terms of like responsiveness of breast milk formulation. I mean, I always joke that... mother's breast milk will change whether or not she's nursing a boy or a girl.
So mom's boobs know male and female when a lot of Yale University professors do not, okay? I mean, like mother-infant bond and reciprocity between the two of them is primal. I mean, that's really the only word that you can have for it. And so we don't have a lot of studies of mother loss in children because it goes against the grain of what it means to be human.
And now we think we are just going to casually say, you know what, we can intentionally and commercially sever that bond between mother and child because we have the means to do it. And who am I to say that a woman who's 35 that has the means that desperately wants to be a mother who is going to take home her own genetic child? Who am I to say that she shouldn't do that? Well...
I'm here to say, as best as I can, that I am representing the interest of that child. And the interest of that child is to not be intentionally separated from the only person they know the day that they are born. And I would say that the best example, the best proof that we have of the harms of that is adopted kids. And I say this as an adoptive mother.
I say it as a woman who is the former assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world. Somebody that understands that adoption is an institution centered around the wellbeing of children. And it is an act of justice for children who have lost their parents. So I'm not anti-adoption.
I am telling you that adopted children have more externalizing disorders than the general population, even though they are raised by Homes that are statistically more stable Wealthier and adults who spend more time and money on them than the average population. So why is that?
It looks as though disruption of that primal bond with the birth mother has some kind of lifelong consequences and fallout.
Right. Well, and that's where most of what we have in terms of maternal harms is in rat populations. Why is that? It's because it's absolutely unethical to test this on human children. Because even brief maternal deprivation we know, based on those rat studies, can permanently alter the structure of a child's brain.
So like when we start tinkering with the maternal-child bond, because some adults are sad. Or maybe they have an identity that leads them to a place where they do not have an egg or a womb between them. So then we're going to just bypass and ignore everything that we know about the nature of the human child and maternal deprivation and the harms that go along with maternal loss.
Yeah.
I agree. I mean, just because I'm a mom and I'm an observer of reality and I'm around a lot of women and children and husbands and children, all of which, I mean, mothers and fathers offer distinct and complementary benefits to children. Neither of them are replaceable. Kids need a mom and a dad. And, you know, it's so interesting because...
And then I'm sure some of the objections that we're getting from some of the people that are listening to this, they'll say, well, and you know, Dave Rubin said this in your conversation with him, too, that his husband, David, is very nurturing and very empathetic. Yes, which is true. Yeah, sure. Well, you know, one of the other...
categories of children whose stories we try to catalog at Them Before Us as children with same-sex parents. Our website, thembeforeus.com, probably has the largest story bank of kids with LGBT parents. And for a while, I had a very active group chat of kids with two moms or two dads who could just talk amongst themselves.
Because I'll tell you, if there's one demographic in this country that's truly in the closet, it's kids with same-sex parents who desperately miss their mother or father, but cannot say that out loud because they are accused of being bigots and homophobes, even by people in their own family. So the place where they can talk to each other is sort of in these anonymous spaces.
Showing 61–80 of 161 · page 4 of 9
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