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Federalist Radio Hour
‘The Kylee Cast’ feat. Katy Faust, Ep. 24: Why IVF, Gay Marriage, And Divorce All Violate Kids' Rights
01:05:23
On this episode of The Kylee Cast, Katy Faust, a children’s rights advocate, author, and founder of https://thembeforeus.com/, joins Federalist Managing Editor Kylee Griswold to discuss the many ways children are being forced to sacrifice their rights...
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- [00:01]
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- [00:54]
Kylie Griswold
Visit ahs.com listen see ahs.com contracts for coverage details including limit amounts, fees, limitations and expenses exclusions Hi everybody and welcome to the Kylie Cast. I'm Kylie Griswold, Managing Editor at the Federalist. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you don't know, we have a new channel specifically for the Kylie casts on Spotify and Apple Podcast. So if you are only subscribed to the Federalist Radio Hour or you're wrong with Molly Hemingway and David Harsanyi, two of our other great Federalist podcasts, be sure to like and subscribe to the Kylie Cast as well so you never miss an episode and leave us a five star review. That's one of the easiest and best ways for you to help out this show. And even better yet, if you're just listening to the show, go check out the full video version on my personal YouTube channel or the Federalist Channel on Rumble, and then of course like and subscribe there too. If you'd like to email the show, you can do so at radio@the federalist.com I would love to hear from you. I feel compelled to give my audience a trigger warning for this episode because I am interviewing none other than Katie Faust. Katie is an author, she's a children's rights advocate, and she's also the founder of the nonprofit Them Before Us, which exists to help protect children's rights to their mother and father. Katie and I dive into some pretty hot button topics, everything from IVF and surrogacy and adoption and abortion to gay marriage and divorce. There's certainly something in this episode that's going to ruffle some feathers, but there's also so much here to help arm listeners with language and apologetics to know how to talk about these very important but very difficult issues. It's definitely an episode you won't want to miss. In fact, it's probably one you're going to want to bookmark for later to listen to again and maybe even send to a family member or friend. So without further ado, please welcome to the show, Katie Faust. Katie Foust, it is so good to have you on the Kylie cast. Thanks for being here today.
- [03:03]
Katie Faust
Oh, it's my honor. Love your show. Thanks for letting me be a guest.
- [03:07]
Kylie Griswold
Oh, of course. I would love if you could start us off just by telling listeners who might not be familiar with you, who you are, where you come from and how on earth you got into the work you're doing now. And I'm curious also, I know you weren't raised conservative Christian, so how you became a conservative Christian as well?
- [03:23]
Katie Faust
No, I wasn't. No, ma'. Am. I was raised in Portland, Oregon, not to religious parents. They divorced when I was 10. My father dated and remarried. My mom re partnered with a woman. So they've been together since I was 10, 11 years old and have been a big part of my life all throughout. I ended up going to a youth group with a friend in high school and, and really got pretty good first taste of Christianity from the youth pastor there who was really serious about the Lord. Very sacrificial to like everybody that came through the door. And I just had never seen anything like it before. Officially got saved at like a Billy Graham youth rally in 1992. Plunged back into sin for a good year or so before I handed everything over to God. And I was like, if you can free me from the slavery to sin, I'll. I'll give you anything. And he did like, he freed me, went to college, met my husband. He was a baby Christian too. So we both kind of grew up together in college and then had a postgraduate scholarship in Taiwan, went to Colorado and he got his masters of Divinity while I worked at a Chinese adoption agency. So I have a bit of an adoption background. Then we lived in poverty for a while while he was the assistant associate pastor out of at a small church. And we three little kids and then moved to Seattle where he was the senior pastor of our church. We adopted our own child, our fourth. And very soon after that, the gay marriage debate came to Washington state. And what I heard the pro gay marriage advocates saying is kids don't care if they have two moms or two dads. They love having two moms or two dads. And I was like, hold on there. When a child has two moms, that means they have lost their dad. And when a child has Two dads, that means they have lost their mom. And from being a mom myself, having an adopted child, working in ministry. Ever since college, my husband and I had been volunteering with the high schoolers. We ran the junior high ministry in Colorado. We did high school and college ministry. And when you're doing ministry with kids, you are hearing their greatest burdens. You're hearing the things that tear apart their souls. And it's so interesting because most of those have a common theme. And it is, where is my father? Why doesn't he love me? Why did my parents break up? Why did my mother choose drugs over her family? Like, I don't know who my dad is. And I take that as a personal rejection. I mean, like, it is some of the deepest wounds that you can inflict on a child. When they lose their mother or father, if that happens to tragedy, very often the whole community comes around and they mourn and the child's not alone in their grief. But when it happens, because an adult desire is prioritized above the rights of the child, it leaves a lifelong wound that very often they blame themselves for. So that's when I got into this. Because I am much more of a grace giver than a truth teller by nature. I would rather keep my friends. I don't like to offend people, but it was when they were using, really leveraging this incredible wound, that of mother and father loss, that impacts children on a physical, mental, emotional, academic, spiritual and relational level. It was when they were diminishing that and even capitalizing on it to advance this new form of family that I was like, gloves off, let's go. And I just started to write under an anonymous blog and then under my own name. And then I finally founded the nonprofit then before us in 2018 that defends children's right to their mother and father. So the way I talk about this is we've got, thank God, about a hundred organization defending children's right to life. And we need all of them. Them before us is the only organization defending children's rights in their families to their mother and father. And that means we want to put the child first in conversations about the definition of marriage, divorce, surrogacy, modern family, same sex parenting, reproductive technologies, IVF and adoption. If it touches marriage and family, we going to say put the kid first.
- [07:29]
Kylie Griswold
Yeah. So we're going to get into a lot of those issues over the course of our conversation. But I think this foundational starting point, the very name of your organization then before us is so important for people to understand and it's, it really helped me kind of reframe these issues to, to understand the apologetics behind them when I was first becoming politically sentient, if you want to put it that way, because that happened kind of late for me. And so a lot of your work on this helped me understand, you know, these things that on a gut level, I know they don't feel right or I know I, I naturally oppose them, but I'm not even sure if I have the language for why. And as soon as you understand that so many of these issues are about whether it pits the, the rights of children against the desires of adults. And once you see it in those terms, it really helps you understand like the very foundation of why so many of these things are wrong, such as IVF and surrogacy and, and all of the rest. So I'm really excited to get into this because just if people can keep that in mind throughout the course of our conversation, like that is what it all goes back to is, are we going to put kids rights first? Are we going to put adults desires and rights before, before children? Because so often they, they can be in conflict with one another and adults have a responsibility to sacrifice for children that children do not have to sacrifice for adults.
- [08:42]
Katie Faust
So yeah, I would say in every sphere you see adult desire overriding the rights of children. And you know, we're going to talk about a variety. I don't know what we're going to talk about, but I guarantee you will be triggered. At some point, you, the listener, are going to feel a little bit threatened in this conversation because this is not a call for the gays to do the right thing. Right? I mean, this is not a story of people using surrogacy victimizing children. There is no adult group who has not at some point collectively said the kids are going to sacrifice for me. Like, in this world of putting children first, at some point every adult is going to have to make the decision, is it going to be us that sacrifices or is it going to be them that sacrifices? And in this world of children's rights, nobody gets a pass. Single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile, all sacrifice because the only alternative is kids sacrificing for you. And that's an injustice.
- [09:39]
Kylie Griswold
And so often you don't know, you don't know about the kids sacrifice until later because they're not going to have the words to tell you or know how to express it. And it's going to come out later.
- [09:49]
Katie Faust
They can't advocate for themselves. It is just like the right to life. They're voiceless, they're voteless. They don't hire lawyers, they can't lobby, they don't do podcast interviews. It is our job to protect the rights of the most vulnerable for the voiceless. We speak up on their behalf.
- [10:04]
Kylie Griswold
Right, Right. So let's start with one of these issues that's such a huge hot button thing right now, and that's ivf. And I know this is something that really divides people on the right, especially for a number of reasons, one of which is because we've seen such an increase in fertility issues among men and women. Some of that is, of course, self inflicted because women are, you know, sacrificing their best fertile years at the altar of the lean in girl boss, you know, way of living. Sometimes it's completely out of your control and totally unintentional and just like an absolute sorrowful tragedy that women are struggling with. This like one of the worst things you could possibly struggle with. And so, you know, I have compassion for, for people who think that this is their only option in ivf. Some of it is also because of a lot of the rhetoric that this is pro life. You know, it creates babies, it creates life. How? How can someone who, who loves families and who loves children and who wants to bring life into the world be against something that creates life? So, Katie, why is IVF a denial of children's rights? Why is it not pro life?
- [11:05]
Katie Faust
It's anti child. IVF is anti child. I too know and empathize with my friends struggling with infertility. And this is where we get to the infertile who have to sacrifice for kids, the very fertile who are facing an unplanned pregnancy. They don't get a pass just because the child was unplanned. That doesn't mean they get to violate the child's right to life or right to their mother and father. The solution there is for all adults to do hard things to protect the rights of children. If you're struggling with infertility, that also is not a pass to victimize any child's right to life or right to their mother and father. But unfortunately, the world of baby making IVF destroys more little lives every year than the world of the baby takers of abortion. Now why is that? Because a woman that's dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, if she's going into the Planned Parenthood clinic, there's usually one little life on the line. Anybody that's done IVF knows that it's not one life. You're talking about. You're talking about five. You're talking about 15. You're talking about 25 little lives that have been fertilized, very often graded, genetically screened, sometimes sex selected, and then only the prime candidates, the one that meet the specifications of the adults, are going to be implanted. And then the less than ideal will be frozen, and the ones that are completely unwanted will be discarded or donated to research. And so what you see is the best that we can ascertain, because Big Fertility doesn't have a lot of requirements to report or share what they do with these little lives. Our best estimate is that 97% of children created in a laboratory will never be born alive. Probably 90% will never even have the chance to live. They want him to be transferred to the womb. And so you have child destruction on a mass scale. So of the 2 to 3% that do make it through the process alive, anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 are going to lose their mother or father or both in the process. Because now we have these vibrant online markets where you can shop for your child's genetic mother or father and filter them down right to your specifications. You want a known donor or an unknown donor. You want a white egg donor, in which case you're going to pay a little more. Obviously, white donors, they just, you know, fetch a higher fee than the brown ones do. You can choose the eye color. You know, has she gone to Yale or did she just go to a state school? I mean, like, where are you getting the genetic material for this? The market is going to adjust based on your preferences. So kids that are born separated from their mother or father at birth, we know that they have higher rates of struggles when it comes to identity issues, higher levels of distrust for their own parents. The one study that we have that compares outcomes, children created through sperm donation, raised by their biological mother, and then either no other parent, another female parent, or a social male parent, shows that those kids do not fare as well as adoptees who are raised by neither mother or father. Now, why do you think that is? Because both of these kids, the children created through sperm donation and the children who were adopted, both of them have suffered the primal loss of their mother and father, or at least on this side, just their father. And yet these kids, the adopted kids being raised by neither parent, are doing better. Why do you think that is? It's because these kids that are adopted, they're being raised by the adults who are seeking to mend the wound of their parental loss. These kids that were created through Sperm donation, whose parents purchased the sperm with from their biological father with the promise that he never have contact with the child ever again. These people created the wound. So both of these kids have grief, both of them have questions, both of them are mourning. Both of them probably have some inner turmoil. These guys, the adoptees, they get to process it with their parents because the parents didn't choose for it to be that way. They're simply trying to remedy a broken situation. Whereas the kids of Big Fertility are being raised by the people who said, we like it this way. We're glad he's gone.
- [15:00]
Kylie Griswold
Can you explain the difference between paying for adoption and paying for IVF or surrogacy?
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Katie Faust
This is a really important distinction. So I'm an adoptive parent. I used to work in the world of adoption. I actually was responsible for compliance for international, federal and state level standards when it came to adoption best practices. And there is a lot of money that gets exchanged in adoption. But I'll tell you one thing, money will never go from the adoptive parents to the birth parents. If any of the money that my husband and I spent to bring home our fourth child, if any of that money that we contributed to that process went directly to his birth mother or his genetic family in exchange for their parental rights, that would no longer be adoption. That would be trafficking. You are not allowed to do that. There are international standards set up, so cross country, inter country, that is not allowed. There should be no payment to genetic parents or birth parents for relinquishing parental rights. Now, Big Fertility also involves a lot of money, but it's built upon direct payments from intended parents to genetic parents and birth parents. When you donate your eggs or your sperm, you are always in explicitly signing over your rights. I will have no contact with any biological children that result from my donation. When you are going through a surrogacy process, there is no state in the, in the, in our country that allows a birth mother to sign over the rights of her child before the baby is born. All states have some kind of a waiting process, a couple days, a couple weeks, because the state presumes that the baby belongs to the birth mother and she should not be able to relinquish her rights prior to the time the baby is born. In surrogacy, they now have something called pre birth orders, where in the second or third trimester, the woman signs over her rights to the child and when the baby's born, she's legally not the mother and she is doing that in exchange for money categorically under the Best practice, best interest of the child. Statutes of adoption. This is baby buying. You are paying genetic parents and birth parents to relinquish their parental rights and hand over their genetic children to you. So there is money spent in both places. One of them adheres very carefully to the standard to never have there be cross pollination between those two streams of cash. And the other one is built on it.
- [17:26]
Kylie Griswold
Right? Right.
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- [17:52]
Kylie Griswold
Plan video chat feature available as a benefit to AHS members with select plans. See ahs.com for hours and details. So back to IVF specifically, what would you say to birth. Birth parents or. Sorry, the people. Yeah, the people commissioning the child through, through ivf if they could find a facility, an IVF facility that refused to do embryo grading and, or sex selection that they only, you know, I know that the reason that they, they fertilize so many embryos is because the cost of each of those cycles. But say they were only going to fertilize four embryos and every single one of those they were going to implant and whatever. What would you say to somebody who's trying to pursue that course of action? If that even exists.
- [18:35]
Katie Faust
Everybody asks because everybody wants to do it right. All of the people in our world, they're like, we love babies. We're conservative, we're pro life. We don't want to do any kind of genetic screening. We're not going to throw out the boys and keep the girls. We, that life begins at conception and it's precious and wonderful. So we're only going to create the number of children that we can immediately implant and carry those babies. So that's noble, but very few doctors are even going to agree to help you with that. And I'll tell you why. Number one, it's so cost prohibitive. They are, they're boxing out repeat customers. That IVF cycle is very likely to fail. The older you are, the more likely it's going to. Your failure rates get exponentially, exponentially increase every year. Okay. And so they want you to have a bank of children that you have to come back for. They want you to be dependent on them for the next pregnancy. And so I have had couples say, yeah, my doctor wouldn't even do that. Here's the other reason. The one thing that fertility clinics do have to publish is their live birth rate. That's the thing. They compete against one another for how many children that they transfer finally do make it to the place where they are born alive. Okay, Many of them are going to be premature because IVF is categorically a risky pregnancy. But that's the thing they're competing against. And if you want to implant a subpar embryo, it actually could destroy the thing that is the most objective standard they have to prove how successful they are.
- [19:54]
Kylie Griswold
Right?
- [19:54]
Katie Faust
And then the third reason is you don't have the money for this. You don't have enough money to go through the process of creating two embryos at 15,000 to $25,000 a pop and then transferring them every single time. Much, much better if you can fertilize 15 at 15,000 to $25,000 and then only pay a couple thousand dollars for the transfer when you need to go back the second or third or fourth or seventh time, because the first time failed. So I've now spoken across the country to tens of thousands of people at conferences. I've talked about this kind of thing. Everybody asked me this question, and I say, it's so cost prohibitive. Nobody does this, and very few doctors will even help you if you try. And so far, I've had four, five different people come up to me and say, we did do that. Now, some of them froze the children, but went back for all of them. Which I would say, you cannot freeze children much of the time. When you freeze the babies, they never come out of the freezer, even if you have the best intentions. We get emails all the time from somebody saying, I had two. I want to go back to my other three. I had a medical emergency. My hysterectomy is gone. I don't want to give my children away. I can't donate them to research. I can't adopt them onto somebody else. What do I do? So you have to do this in a way that doesn't involve freezing. So even with freezing, I've only had five people come up and say, we did that. We did it. We didn't destroy any embryos. We didn't grade any embryos. We didn't sex select. We didn't selectively reduce, which is abort when multiples took place. Or there were twins that were unexpected. And I was like, congratulations, I'm so glad your children are alive and healthy. Are you loaded?
- [21:29]
Kylie Griswold
And they're like, right, yes, yes.
- [21:32]
Katie Faust
I'm like, how many homes do you own? And they're like, we own many houses. Okay, there you go.
- [21:37]
Kylie Griswold
Right?
- [21:37]
Katie Faust
Like you can do it the quote unquote pro life way, but not unless you're a millionaire.
- [21:42]
Kylie Griswold
Right. And these are exceptions to the rule. And we need laws that are, that govern the rule, not the exception. So how about speak to women who maybe are in this category where they feel misled or they really thought IVF was pro life. They went through these cycles. They now have, say, three healthy children and a dozen eggs still in a freezer somewhere. What is the most pro life thing they can do now?
- [22:10]
Katie Faust
You go get your babies. You know, people come to me all the time and they're like, what do you think about embryo adoption? And I'm like, well, let's answer some fundamental questions first. What do you do in an unplanned pregnancy? Well, you reorient your life. You and the father reorient their life around the child and around each other so the child doesn't lose their right to life and they don't lose their right to their mother and father. If one or both are unable to do that or unwilling to do that, then adoption is the most child honoring option. But don't be mistaken. Adoption costs the child. Okay? Adoption is what I like to call, a friend of mine calls divine plan B. But it doesn't come without a cost to the baby. The best case scenario is the adults do hard things, so the child in the unplanned pregnancy has all of their rights protected and maintained. So what do you do in a very planned pregnancy where you planned so much that you have 15 children, three of which are alive, you know, maybe some of them that didn't make it through the process and you have six left? Well, the solution is not for the children to lose their right to life. It's not for the children to lose their mother or father. The solution to the very planned child is the same as it is for the unplanned child. It's parenting. You made the baby, you raised the baby. Even if you have to take out some loans, even if you have to get a bigger house, even if your mother has to move in with you, even if you have to go without some of the other things that you wanted to spend your money on, those are your children. Go get your children. So we have been contacted with a lot of people that would say, I, I am now doing that. I'm reorienting my life and we're going to get through as many of these embryos as possible. Even though it's tough when you're 39 and they're seven, you know, to go back, they're like, we're going to do whatever we can to bring up the children that we have created. So it's for a lot of people, you get to that point where you are one way past the place you're 56 and you still have those three kids in the freezer, and they're like, what do I do? The answer is, you're cooked. I mean, I. People hate to hear that there's no way forward without those children losing something that is critical to them. And we should sound the alarm. We have somewhere between 1 million and 10 million children frozen in this country. By some estimates, 20 to 40% have been abandoned. Nobody's paying the storage fee. They cannot find the parents.
- [24:48]
Kylie Griswold
Right.
- [24:48]
Katie Faust
Do you understand the magnitude of the human rights crisis on our hands? Because Big Fertility has capitalized on the desperation of parents that were told they were infertile.
- [25:00]
Kylie Griswold
Right.
- [25:01]
Katie Faust
And a lot of these parents didn't have a chance to think about it. And had they thought, I'll make eight embryos, or, oh, my gosh, it would be incredible if I was able to have half of them. And. And all four of them took, and they have four left. I mean, a lot of them just did not go into this understanding the genuine moral weight that was before them. And they, their doctors certainly didn't help them think it through clearly.
- [25:22]
Kylie Griswold
Right, Right. Which, I mean, now would be a good time to say, if you go to see your doctor, and their first solution to you having tried for a period of time to get pregnant is to refer you to Big Fertility and not to say, have you checked your thyroid? Can we do this blood test? Can we do this other thing, then find a different doctor? Like, that is not the solution, because they're not. That will never help you heal your body. And so that's not a doctor's role. A doctor's role is to help you heal, not to refer you to the next cash cow.
- [25:52]
Katie Faust
And that medical wing that is working to restore fertility is called Restorative Reproductive Medicine. And a lot of people that were told you have infertility or you have unexplained infertility. You and I both know that you have unexplored infertility. Nobody's even tried to look. They have not checked your thyroid levels. They have not evaluated his sperm count or sperm health. There are dozens of reasons why your body is not able to get. If we're talking somebody under 35, I mean, if you're, if you're 44, you're just outside of what your body is ready to do and prepared to do. Maybe there's still some things you can do to help. You should totally check out the restorative reproductive medicine world. But if you are younger, something is wrong. Something that might have an easy fix or maybe a surgical fix that can free your body up to have babies on your own, where you're not dependent on a technician to decide whether or not you can have a child. And even if you don't end up with a baby at the end, you're not going to have surplus frozen embryos, you're probably not going to be in debt, and your body's going to be healthier as a result. The moral weight of this is taken completely off the table. And depending on the condition that is preventing pregnancy, restorative reproductive medicine has higher rates of success than ivf.
- [27:02]
Kylie Griswold
Yes, yes. Let's switch gears a tiny bit just for a quick sidebar. What are your thoughts on IUI intrauterine insemination, where you are using the biological mother and father's genetic material and the mother is carrying her own child? Like, what is your view on that?
- [27:20]
Katie Faust
We say that's totally fine. Like it doesn't it. It's not somebody forcing certain sperm to meet certain eggs, which I think is problematic from the perspective of just the health of the embryo. But you still are getting that natural kind of competition needed for sperm to seek and be welcomed into an egg. You're still getting the hospital, hospital environment of this taking place in a womb. I think that there are some people that say, well, you're still separating the procreative act from procreation itself, but from a children's rights perspective, you still have the right to. The child does not. If there is not a successful conception or implantation, it's not a technician making that decision, which is really kind of the problematic eugenics aspect of who lives and who dies when we're talking about the ones in the petri dish or the ones in the freezer. So we don't condemn, like all forms of art, we condemn the child commodifying child victimizing practices that are so often connected to art.
- [28:19]
Kylie Griswold
Yes, yes. Okay. So, yeah, the ethical concerns with divorcing sex from reproduction is a conversation for another day, but it's just a good thing for people to consider. So let's talk surrogacy versus adoption. When it comes to the vetting because I think people are very uninformed when it comes to how much vetting you have to go through as an adoptive parent and how little exists for surrogacy. Can you speak to the specifics of that?
- [28:43]
Katie Faust
The vetting for adoption is extensive. The vetting for surrogacy is non existent. I mean that's like, that's as close as I can like put it. Like there is no vetting and is there really nothing? There's nothing. Okay, there's nothing. There's no background checks, there's no screening. There's some agents that are like, well we do a psychological exam but that's if they do A, it's not required. B, it might just be like have you had any mental health? Nope. I do have any like problems with domestic abuse? Nope. I mean like nobody's, there's no background checks. Anybody has who has gone through adoption. Like you got your fingerprints multiple times. Probably you were vetted by the state agents, like your agency, the state, the federal government. If you're going overseas you're getting like immigration as and like everybody's looking at you. And it's not just the criminal background check. You're getting references from friends, the social workers coming to your house to see how do you parent your other kids. Like you're getting financial reports and it's taking place over long. You're doing training, then there's post placement. They come and they look at you. How's the child? How are they being treated? We're doing follow up. You're not allowed to like take children across international borders without some kind of like verification and permission. None of that exists in surrogacy. And that is why you have scenarios like the 74 year old man who had the two six year olds removed from his home this summer after keeping them in cage like conditions in his upstairs loft. 74 year old man raising twin 6 year olds through surrogacy. That is how you get the Chinese couple that mass produced children and were raising them in a Californian mansion. Fifteen of them were three years old and under and they had some kind of business going there where people would pull up to the the foyer. There was some kind of like a reception desk. They'd stay there for a couple hours and then they would leave. We have no idea what's going on. We only knew about this because one of the children was abused by the nanny and was taken in to the hospital. And then they went and checked and they're like oh look at this. We've got like a harem of babies in here. That is how you get, you know, the Chinese billionaire who is custom ordering now over a hundred children through U.S. surrogates. He doesn't even touch grass in the United States. They fly the babies back to him. He's got U.S. citizenship. I think all of the boys are, all the children are boys. He is raising up people that are going to take over his video game business. Like there is, we have, you know, the famous Mitchell. His, his name was last name Mitchell in Pennsylvania who went viral because he and his partner were kissing their baby, their surrogate born baby at every month, you know, newborn one month, two months, three months, all the way up to 12 months old. And people were like, well, that kind of makes me uncomfortable, like two guys kissing their baby. And then it came out that he was a registered sex offender. A year before that, we had the veterinarian from Chicago who was busted by child trafficking agents because he had talked openly about how he was looking forward to picking up his surrogate born son next month. And he had described what he was going to do to the child once he got them. In terms of abuse, there is no vetting and screening. Like many of these people choose surrogacy because they would never pass an adoption background check. So sometimes people think adoption and surrogacy, right, two different ways to form a family. No, adoption is a child centric institution that elevates the best interest of the child. Reproductive technologies are an adult centric marketplace where the child's interests are never even considered.
- [32:23]
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- [32:55]
Kylie Griswold
Right? So I know you work at them, them before us. You don't just work to change hearts and minds, you also work to change laws. So what are the, what, what laws would you advocate advocate for? Is it just to outlaw surrogacy? Like do we ban that as far as ivf? Like what, what laws are the most palatable, the best to actually solve these issues?
- [33:16]
Katie Faust
Well, if you are a policymaker, and you're listening to this. You can come to thembefore us.com and you can send us a message, and we will meet with you and we will give you policy recommendations. There's a lot of different things that you can do from sort of the safer options. If you're in a blue state, you could say, well, I just want you to share. Just tell us how many kids you're making. What do you do with them? How many of them get stored? How many of them are donated to research? How many of them are actually transferred to the womb? Then who goes home with the baby? Is it their genetic parents? Is it a single parent? Is it a foreign national? You know, just tell us what you're doing. Now, we've tried to propose those kinds of checks, and big fertility has a conniption, because I think if the US People knew what was happening in these laboratories, it would blow apart this myth that this is just about helping infertile couples to have a baby. So at the very lowest level, you can just say, just tell us what's going on. Let's just do some record keeping. Okay? But you could also do things like dignify the embryo by saying, this is a human child. Even if you want to continue doing ivf, recognize that children have a right to life from the moment of conception. And that means you can't arbitrarily destroy them. Now, this is exactly what the Alabama Supreme Court handed down last February 2024. And do you know what happened? It was the most pro life decision we'd ever heard from a court. Hey, if your. If your embryo is destroyed accidentally by a fertility clinic, you can sue under a wrongful death claim for a child. The entire industry ground to a halt. Hospital said, whoa, there. We can't do IVF unless we can destroy embryos. So, unfortunately, all the lawmakers, including Republicans, circled the wagon, and the result was protecting the industry, not parents and not kids. So if you just wanted to stop the excesses, even if you're like, well, we're pro ivf, but we just don't think children should be destroyed. Then just hold on to your bills that say that children have a right to life from the moment of conception, you will wipe out 99% of. In fact, most of them just won't do business. They will not make money unless they can select, discard, and curate the exact child that the purchasing parents want. You can absolutely criminalize. You know, we've got some policy suggestions of saying, take all the money out of sperm and eg, donation and surrogacy. You can no longer buy and sell the genetic parents of a child and then you would still have people that are donating altruistically. But a lot of this is a monetary incentive. Many girls are not going. No girl is going to risk their prime fertility years. Things like hyper ovulation, hyper ovarian, oh my gosh, where the ovaries are so enlarged due to all of the injections so that you can extract 20 eggs rather than just one per cyc. Like it's actually a very high risk process that these young co EDS are subjecting, subjecting themselves to. Not a lot of people are going to endure the daily injections and the discomfort and the medical risk if they're not getting paid. And then, yeah, we can and should ban all surrogacy. But we could start by, you know, not allowing us women to give birth to children who are then flown overseas and then disappearing across borders for God knows what kind of future. So I mean, there's a lot of different things that you can do if you want to curtail the excesses of big fertility without saying all of this should stop. Even though I think pretty much all of it should stop.
- [36:46]
Kylie Griswold
Right, Right. What do you think about when a family member is a surrogate for someone who can't have children in their own family? Like a girl's sister carries a child for her because she can't, she can't do it herself or something like that. What are the primal wounds like in that scenario? Is that less problematic because you are, the child still has a bond with, with the biological mother who carried her or what does that look like?
- [37:08]
Katie Faust
The best way to understand surrogacy from the child's perspective is it splices what should be one person mother into three purchasable and optional women. The first one is the genetic mother and she contributes the egg. That is the mother that helps children. Answer the question, who am I? It's, it's critical for identity formation. The second mother is the birth mother. This is the woman that the baby bonds with for the first nine months. This is the one whose smell, whose voice, whose skin, whose touch drops baby's cortisol levels in a way that skin to skin contact with any other adult will not. She is the one that regulates the baby's stress hormones in a way that nobody else will. Okay. We place babies on their mother's chest right after birth, not so they can form a bond, but because they have an existing bond. And if you disrupt that bond you are going to set the child up for struggles to trust and attach in the future. And then the third mother is the social mother, the woman that kisses the boo boos, that rocks them to bed at night, the one that is going to be there all day, every day, hopefully all their life, giving that distinctly female love that maximizes their development and satisfies their longing for maternal connection. Okay, so surrogacy is splices what should be one person into three. The problem is none of these women are optional. The child needs all of these women, and if they are not found in the same person, the child's going to experience loss. So in the scenario you presented, which I would say is sort of the. The gateway of surrogacy, right, you get the surrogacy industry gets a lot of mileage out of saying, well, there's no money that takes place. The child's going home with a genetic parent. This is altruistic. It's just a woman helping another woman. And even in that scenario, you're still asking the child to sacrifice for adults. The child has to lose a relationship with the only person they know the day they're born. And even if they're being handed to their genetic parents, those are just two strangers out of 8 billion. And the baby starts from ground zero when it comes to forming a bond. So it's just. Anyway, this is why I'm saying, like, this is a unique flinching worldview that says every adult has to sacrifice. It's not just the gays, you know, it's not just, you know, the people that are experiencing an unplanned pregnancy. At some point, everyone has to say, this is something I really long for. This is something that I want. Maybe this. I'm feeling like I'm fulfilling some kind of creation mandate. I get it. It cannot be at the expense of fundamental child rights.
- [39:42]
Kylie Griswold
That's right. That's right. Uh, let's change gears a little bit away from big fertility to gay marriage, because I know this is something that you are especially working on some initiatives right now about, you know, a couple months ago, by the time this airs, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case that would have reconsidered Obergefell. Do you see Obergefell ever going away? What's the next step to getting there? What. What are the stakes in overturning that law? What do you think?
- [40:13]
Katie Faust
Well, first let me talk about what's happened in the last 10 years. So there were some of us that were warning in 2015, hey, if you make husbands and wives optional in marriage. Mothers and fathers will become optional in parenthood laws. And they said, away with you, bigot. This isn't about children. This is just about adults. A lot of couples choose to get married without having children. So that's just what is. We're expanding marriage. Well, we've got 10 years of receipts. And you know what they did? They made mothers and fathers optional in parenthood law. We have stripped the words mother and father out of a variety of different laws, state level and federal level. We've redefined infertility. So now a single person or a same sex couple can be infertile in the name of adult equality. So they too can have the state or their insurance company fuel and fund the creation of motherless or fatherless children. Through IVF and Big Fertility. We have actually created new pathways for adults to acquire children. The two legitimate pathways are biology. I give birth to this child, therefore I can take them home from the hospital or adoption. I proved myself to the state to show that I am not going to abuse or neglect this child, which is statistically vastly higher with an unrelated adult. And so I have done what I can to prove that as much as possible I will love this child as if they had been born to me. Now both of those pathways unfortunately were considered discriminatory for the same sex crowd. Right. It's undignified for me to have to go through an adoption process when that woman gave birth to her child and her husband was recognized as the parent. My wife gave birth to a child and I'm the wife. Why can't I be recognized as the other parent? And so they've created these new pathways to acquire unrelated children. And they. It's about 10 different states have passed the Uniform Parentage act which does exactly this. It says if you can assemble sperm, egg and womb and you intend to parent the child and you have a valid contract, then the state will assign the child to you even though you're not related. You haven't gone through any kind of vetting process. And so I actually wrote something at first things called the end of Natural parenthood, where I looked at about nine different statutes that used to recognize the preeminence of the natural parent child relationship, that this was something that was privileged to and pre political that the state should not touch. It showed that there was something special about a child's own relationship to their mother and father. And very slowly each of them have been deconstructed because the natural parent child relationship is a threat to gay marriage. Why because two men and two women can never both be biologically related.
- [42:48]
Kylie Griswold
Right?
- [42:48]
Katie Faust
So you have to deconstruct the importance of biology in law. So Fast forward today, 10 years later, now we have children treated as accessories in law, facilitated by these technologies and carried along by the cultural winds that say, biology doesn't matter. Love makes a family. So we have really egregious situations that are popping up. Some of the ones that I just mentioned, even when it's a heterosexual couple, they are taking advantage of the new ways that we're conceiving of parenthood as assigned rather than a child belonging to their own parents prior to the signing of a contract. So we now have 10 years of receipts showing the direct child harm. So I actually was grateful that they didn't take up Kim Davis's case. She was the wrong victim. And what I mean by that, she has been a victim. But that was one of the reasons why we lost gay marriage. Ten years ago, we decided that the gay. The victims of gay marriage were going to be the florist who didn't want to arrange the flowers and the baker who didn't want to make the cake. Now, they're victims, but adults who have to provide a service, they're not the direct victims. Children who lost their mother or father because of this ruling, they are the victims. But when we talk about how Kim Davis is a victim because she has to sign a paper, a lot of people here, you're telling me that my gay brother who has been with his partner for 10 years, they can't get married because she has to sign a paper, she's the wrong victim. Okay. It's the wrong question. And it's. We don't want the Supreme Court to answer the question again, which adults get what they want.
- [44:25]
Kylie Griswold
Right.
- [44:26]
Katie Faust
So them before us is doing it differently. We are spearheading a coalition of every major national organization, a lot of different state allies as well. You can go right now to Greater Than Campaign and you can take a look. Right. It's a bit of a skeleton site right now, but sign up. We're going to send you some updates, but we're going to do this differently. This is not going to be pitting religious adults against gay adults. This is going to be forcing the court to answer a different question, which is, do children benefit from their own mother and father more than an adult who is assigned to them by the state via contract?
- [45:04]
Kylie Griswold
Mm.
- [45:04]
Katie Faust
We're going to make them evaluate this from a different perspective. It's not our gay people, second class citizens, or you Know what about their dignity? It is going to be who benefits children most, Their own mother and father or adults who have acquired them through contracts. So, yes, gay marriage is going down. It has to, if we believe in justice for children. And there's going to be a lot more happening in the next year for you to kind of see how that plays out.
- [45:35]
Kylie Griswold
Yeah, it excites me so much because it's just. That's a great point. You know, adults will always squabble over whose rights trump whose rights. And just being able to point to the real victims is so powerful. And yeah, you're right. We have 10 years of receipts pulling back a little bit from that because, you know, we can look at 2015 to 2025 and what has happened in that decade. But it's hard to even talk about kind of how the definition of marriage has devolved without talking about the role of divorce in this. And specifically no fault divorce. And even the ethos of, you know, if, well, if the adults are happy, the kids are happy. So can you talk about how no fault divorce has completely paved the way for gay marriage?
- [46:17]
Katie Faust
A hundred percent. So you can look at marriage from the perspective of why is it. Why do we always say it's the building block of society? It's because there's three characteristics of marriage that make it really different from all the relationships that you have, different from the relationships you have with your children, from your friends, with your own parents, with your tennis partner, with your business partner. There's three things that set marriage apart and why it's so critical to social thriving. So what are those three things? The first one is permanence. It's supposed to last for life. The second one is complementarity. It's supposed to involve both halves of the human species. And the third one is monogamy. It's supposed to only include those two and exclude all others. So those are the three distinctives of marriage. No fault Divorce was the original redefinition of marriage because it removed permanence. It said if the adults are unhappy, the marriage can cease to exist. It doesn't have to last for life. Previously we had an understanding that sometimes dissolution of the marriage was justified if one of the spouses was found to be at that fault of addiction, abuse, adultery, abandonment. But now you could exit the marriage when there was no fault. And that just meant that anyone can leave you for any time at any time. You'll never see it coming and there's nothing you can do about it. And so I'll tell you What? You know, after Reagan initiated that in California in 1969 and all the other states followed, you saw a massive spike in divorce. Of course, everywhere, like rates doubled, tripled. And this is a really big problem. There was a huge CDC report that. Well, a report using CDC data of 5 million children, 5 million children that just came out this summer. We've known that there were problems with divorce if a child got divorced, but we didn't know what it really was. I mean, is it, was it the socioeconomic aspect of it? Was it because there was a lot of turmoil happening in their home before the divorce? This one conclusively showed not correlation but causation. The divorce caused children, girls to be 63% more likely to become teen moms. It caused boys to have a 40% increase in criminality. It caused a 35 to 55% increase in early childhood death. Divorce caused it. Permanence is not a non negotiable for kids. They need their own mother and father. And they don't just need them for two months or two years or 12 years. They need them all their life. And when they are starved of that permanence, children's thriving is going out the window.
- [48:49]
Kylie Griswold
Right, right. Well, and that's such a good point too because it's not just when kids are young. It's not just pre adolescents that this affects. I've seen so many trends online. Not only the divorcing the good guy trend, which is just so ridiculous of these, you know, middle aged, narcissistic women in their cars talking about how they were married to this wonderful guy, but they just didn't love him anymore, whatever, but also gray divorce. And how many couples have been married for decades? They've built a life together, they have grown children and they're divorcing after 20, 30 more years of marriage. I think through your work with them before us, you've even heard many of the stories of adult children and how this has psychologically affected them. Can you share a little bit about that?
- [49:31]
Katie Faust
It is absolutely destabilizing. Obviously it's terrible when your parents divorce when you're in the home and then you're ping ponging between dad's house and mom's house and their new partners and all of that. But there's a really distinct burden that it places on a child when they are grown. And the best way that I can put it, after hearing a lot of these stories, capturing some of them is they're supposed to be sort of a. The older generation supports the next generation who supports the youngest generation. And I know that like as a middle aged woman, you know, even with teens, I really needed my mom's support. I remember times when I slept the best. Even though I've got a wonderful, incredible husband. When my mom would come to visit, I slept, I slept so well. And like, even as I got older, like she was still mothering me in a lot of ways. Like I still needed her to support me in some areas so that I could support my children.
- [50:19]
Kylie Griswold
Right?
- [50:19]
Katie Faust
But what happens with Gray divorce, right? When the parents divorce after their children are out of the home, is now that middle generation supports above and supports below. So now they are the load bearing wall for all the generations. So very often you've got a mom who's 40, she's got three young kids, she's desperately trying to make sure that they're going to school and maybe she's doing a part time job and she's volunteering over here and she's also doing all the shopping and the cleaning and the caregiving. But now her parents split up, Dad's got a new woman, he's completely occupied with her, right? But mom has a health condition and typically dad would help take care of mom, but Dad's gone, right? He's in Cancun now. This mom also needs care. And so it's the busy middle mom who then has to say, I am going to do the caregiving duties for my parent instead. And this is, I, like, almost always I hear, like, obviously it breaks their heart because a lot of these older parents, they talked about the importance of marriage. They talked about how this was a reflection of Christ and the church. And then not only are they doing the caregiving duties, which is taxing and burdening them, but now they're like, was it all a lie? Is that all a lie?
- [51:33]
Kylie Griswold
Right.
- [51:34]
Katie Faust
And it's interesting how many of these. And you know, you and I move in the kind of conservative Christian pro marriage space and these people who believe it to their core, they get rattled and they go, oh my gosh, I believed a lot of that because I saw my parents do it. Now I'm wondering, is it possible? Will I also be susceptible? Am I going to fall prey? Is that my future? Is that my destiny too? It's incredibly destabilizing. And I would say it's unjust.
- [52:03]
Kylie Griswold
Yes, yes. Well, and it's the same underlying problem with all of these things we've talked about today, which is just your desires and how they affect the people around you and you cannot fulfill your disordered desires. Without harming the people around you, no matter how old they are, no matter how young they are. It's so important. And of course, as Christians, we know that. And that's why sin is so destructive, no matter when it happens. Let's go back to the gay marriage thing, because I kind of took that divorce detour, but I want to go back. One of the things that I hear all of the time, specifically when it comes to adoption, you know, you'll argue that children, children have a right to a mother and a father. And if you lose, you know, if you tragically lose your biological mother and father, the next best thing is to be adopted by a loving mother and father who are married to each other. And that's like, you know, righting this wrong in the best way that you possibly can. And when you make this argument, often the immediate response when it comes to gay marriage is, well, would you really rather have children suffering in foster, in a broken foster care system or in an orphanage when they could be in, you know, a home with two loving dads who are married to each other or two loving moms? What do you say to that argument?
- [53:16]
Katie Faust
Well, first of all, you have to recognize what you're doing, doing. You're pitting exception against exception, okay? And a lot of times it's framed as, okay, I'd rather have two loving dads than a biological mom and dad who are like, drug addicting and abusive and things like that. So first, let's establish the norm. A child's own mother and father are statistically the most connected to, invested in, and protective of them. You can measure that in terms of money spent, time spent, money saved. You can measure it based on the self reporting of the kids or the parents, whether they're unrelated or related. They claim their own parents more often than they would claim an unrelated adult. So we've got an entire chapter on this in our second book then before. That's our first book then before us why we need a global children's rights movement. We talk about the importance of that biological connection as it relates to children being safe and loved, children having the kind of connection feeling like, these are my parents, okay? Now, there are some biological parents that are horrible that I would like to beat with a stick because they victimize their own children. And it's just one of the worst us before thems you can ever think of. And we have systems to take care of them. We have systems to remove them in those kinds of cases. Interestingly, the kids still want them even, you know, even the Kids that are in foster care, if you talk to them, they almost always say, I just want to go back. I want to go back to my mom. I love my mom. It's so interesting that a child's own biological parents are adults that you can miss and love even if you've never met them before. There's something about that. Right now the exception over here is an unrelated adult who loves the children. Okay. And I'm saying that because I know heroic step parents. I know men that have filled the gap of a negligent biological father who's doing what he can to shoulder the load for children that lost their dad. Okay? But it's very hard. Blended families, you know, for all of the Brady Bunch like Woohoo that we've tried to promote, blended families are hard, hard on the kids, hard on the parents. Again, a lot of those parents are stepping in to do the right thing. And on an individual level, a lot of times you do see redemption on a population wide level. There is no scenario where an unrelated adult joins the home where risks of abuse and neglect do not skyrocket.
- [55:31]
Kylie Griswold
Right? Right.
- [55:32]
Katie Faust
So what you have over here with the two men is two unrelated adults. Okay? So just recognize kind of the game that you're playing. You're pitting the exception of bad biological parents over here with the exception of fantastic unrelated adults over here. Does that scenario exist? Yeah, it does. But recognize that you've got to play the odds pretty, pretty hard to even set up a justifiable scenario for this. Well, kids don't care if they have two moms or two dads. Okay?
- [56:01]
Kylie Griswold
Right.
- [56:01]
Katie Faust
So let's talk about. First of all, there is no shortage of adoptive parents when it comes to white drug free infants. There are lots of mothers and fathers who want to adopt those children. But it's true, we don't have enough married mothers and fathers that want to take the sibling groups and that want to take the kids that have been in foster care for a while or who are older or who are overseas or who have special needs. Those children are hard to place. And sometimes a single foster mom or a same sex couple might be the only option that the child has. So my solution to that is not great. Open up the doors for same sex couples. The solution is if you're a Christian and you're married, maybe you should go get those kids. And this is again where I say this is a worldview that doesn't discriminate. Even if you don't have fertility problems, even if you're not in a Struggling marriage, you might need to put them before us.
- [57:00]
Kylie Griswold
Yeah.
- [57:01]
Katie Faust
By bringing a child into your home that desperately needs you to bear their burden. So people kind of critique the two guys adopting a child. I'm like, hey, at least they went through the vetting process. And I do think you should prioritize mothers and fathers, people that don't. I'm like, you know, now you're just looking for that, you know, progressive street cred. But sometimes, I mean, I know the social workers that say, the kid is sleeping on my office floor, There is no place for them go, go put them before us and bring those kids into your home.
- [57:37]
Kylie Griswold
Are there any things we can, any things we can do on a policy level to make it easier for good married moms and dads to adopt children or existing embryos or whatever it is if it's cost prohibitive or, you know, what if you're not chosen by the birth mother or things like this, like, how can we make it easier for, for children to fall into the hands of good families.
- [58:01]
Katie Faust
Shouldn'T be easy to acquire an unrelated child. Okay. And adoption does not exist for adults that want them.
- [58:08]
Kylie Griswold
True. Yes.
- [58:09]
Katie Faust
This is, this is not a way for infertile couples to have children and it's not a way for same sex couples to have a baby. This is, this is an institution that centers around justice for children to redeem something that they have lost the goal. And I made this mistake, you know, when I was brand new at the adoption agency, I remember I went to the director and I said, oh, I'm working so hard to get this couple approved. We've run into some roadblocks. To be honest, there's been a few red flags, but I'm really going to do what I can to make sure that they're approved to adopt. And my director said, you misunderstand. We are not here to give them a child. We are here to find parents for every child that does not have them. And that means some adults will not get a baby. But if we do our job, every child that has lost their mother or father is going to be placed in a loving home. The child is the client, not the adult. So where there are unnecessary barriers, we can remove them. But the solution is not to make it cheap and easy. The solution is to make sure that it is child centric and the best interest of the child are upheld throughout every step of the process.
- [59:21]
Kylie Griswold
Yeah, that's such a good point and a good distinction. So before we wrap up here, I mean, as you said at the beginning, this is A very triggering conversation. I'm sure there's plenty of people listening who are saying, preach to everything you're saying there. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are bristling at a lot of the things for whatever reason. I'm curious what your personal experience has been like on the whole with people who disagree with you specifically because you have. I mean, this is obviously a very sensitive subject even within your own family. But I'm sure there are people who do believe the things that we've talked about but are really afraid to say so, or they. They don't want to articulate them out loud because they don't want to be called the bigot or they don't even, you know, they're a Christian. And they don't want to be accused of being unloving because they just want to love their gay neighbor. Well, or, you know, or. Or their friend who's pursuing ivf. Well, what. What would you say to them? How can they have the courage to. To stand up for the rights of children no matter what it costs them?
- [60:16]
Katie Faust
Well, that was me for a long time. Like, I was on the bench in the culture war for a long time because I didn't want to pay the social price. And there is one. The reason you're staying quiet is you will be punished. You'll be punished socially, maybe you'll be punished vocationally. Maybe there's going to be tension at the Thanksgiving dinner table. So I'm not going to pretend like it's going to be easy, because it's not. You are confronting what I think is the most powerful force on the planet, and that's adult self interest. If an adult really wants something, especially when the only thing standing in their way is a kid that can't defend themselves, they're going to get what they want. And for an adult to confront them and to stand in the path and say, hey, I know that you and Greg have had a struggling marriage for a while, but you running off with your trainer, that's going to inflict lifelong loss on your kids. Like, I read this book and it said that 50% of kids that grow up in two different homes develop split personalities because their world at their mom's house is so different than the one at their dad's house. And I just. I care about your kids and I don't want them to suffer that way. That might go well, or she might unfriend you in every way. You can be unfriended and spread terrible lies about you. So it's it really is the question of, like, someone's going to be victimized here. Okay, either the kids are going to be victimized or you are. Like, you're either going to pay the price or the kids are going to pay the price.
- [61:44]
Kylie Griswold
Right.
- [61:44]
Katie Faust
But in a just society, we, the strong do hard things on behalf of the weak. And the truth is, culture and even the church has been comp. Implicit. They've decided to preserve their social standing right at the hands of child victimization. They've been quiet about marriage or they've been quiet about ivf. They've been quiet about divorce because they think, well, we want to be welcoming of adults. We don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable. Okay, I bet you accomplished that. And the result was child victimization.
- [62:13]
Kylie Griswold
Yes.
- [62:14]
Katie Faust
So especially if you are a Christian, you have to understand that child defense is and always has been one aspect of your pure and undefiled religion before God. Every country that Christians have set foot on, they have found very distinct threats against kids, whether it is infanticide, whether it is abortion, whether it is children running the streets because there's no orphanages, whether it's foot binding in China, whether it is conscripting poor homeless kids to work in factories in the UK in the 1800s for 14 hours. Like, every culture finds some way to victimize kids. And in every one of those scenarios, Christians have stepped up and said, over my dead body, don't do that to kids. They've dignified children, they've protected children. Many of them paid a price for it, personally, financially, socially. But the result was oftentimes entire societies were transformed to dignify the human child. So welcome to the great cloud of witnesses, people. Okay, this is a different fight. It doesn't look like throwing babies in the Ganges. It does look like mass producing them and then doing a complete genome screening so that you can throw to the. The researchers, the undesirable children and keep only the ones that are going to be above 6ft tall with blue eyes. Right, okay. Like, we've got different kinds of threats, but your mandate has not changed. Your mandate is not to hinder any of these little ones from coming to Christ. And if you're complicit in causing one of these little ones to stumble, you have to answer to God for that.
- [63:56]
Kylie Griswold
Yeah. Katie, I have about 25 other things that I could ask you, but our time. Our time is short. So where can people find you? Where can they find your books? Where can they find you online, on social media? And how can they join this New Greater Than Movement. Can you remind them of all of those things?
- [64:13]
Katie Faust
Yeah. Go to Greater Than Campaign and just sign on. Let us know how we're doing. We'll send you some updates every now and then. If you want everything about children's rights on all these different Topics, go to thembefore us.com and subscribe to our newsletter. We will arm you to the teeth. We will make you a defender of children. If you want the entire primer on everything we've been talking today on all these different topics, then before us why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement that I co authored with Stacy Manning. You can find it on Amazon or anywhere. Stacy and I also did a little second project on parenting called Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City. If for some reason you're worried about the way that the world is coming for your kids, going to consume, like turn them into little like Bernie Bros, like we've got the solution for you. Even if they're going to public school, even if you live in a deep blue city, there's a way to replicate your worldview in your kids and make them influencers of culture rather than influenced by culture. Our third book is Pro Child Politics where we take all of the major issues. We conscripted 19 subject matter experts on immigration, national security, the environment, energy, and we made them talk about their political issue through the lens of putting children first. So that's sort of a comprehensive what would it look like to put them before us on everything? And you get all my opinions on X at a D V o underscore K a T y advo Katie and there you're just going to get like Katie uncensored. There's no boundaries.
- [65:44]
Kylie Griswold
If you're not following Katie on Twitter, I don't know what you're doing with your life. She's a great follow, so definitely follow there. And I'm so excited to join the Greater Than Movement and get all those things in my inbox. So Katie, I can say this without a doubt, we will definitely be having you back on the Kylie Cast if you're willing to, because there really is so many other things we I would love to get to. So thank you so much for your time today though. It was so good talking to you.
- [66:05]
Katie Faust
Great to be with you. Thank you.
- [66:11]
Kylie Griswold
Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Kylie Cast. If you haven't done so already, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a five star review and of course go follow Katie on social media. Go find her book. Go find her website. She is definitely one that you're going to want to follow. You're going to want her in your inbox. So go subscribe to those newsletters and hopefully we'll have her back again very soon. I will be back soon with more. So until then, just remember, the truth hurts, but it won't kill you.