Speaker 1: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Kylie Cast. I'm Kylie Griswold,
Managing editor at The Federalist. Please like and subscribe wherever
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to email the show, you can do so at radio
at the Federalist dot 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 insurrogacy
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 gonna want a 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 Faust, it is so good to have
you on the Kylie Cass. Thanks for being here today.
Speaker 2: Oh it's my honor love your show. Thanks for letting
me be a guest.
Speaker 1: 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 Christians, so how you became a conservative Christian
as well?
Speaker 3: No, I wasn't, no, ma'am.
Speaker 2: I was raised in Portland, Oregon, not to religious parents.
They divorced when I was ten. My father dated and
remarried my mom repartnered with a woman, so they've been
together since I was ten eleven 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 really got pretty good first taste
of Christianity from the youth pastor there, who was really
serious about the Lord, very sacrificial to everybody that came
through the door, and I just had never seen anything
like it before.
Speaker 3: Officially got saved at.
Speaker 2: Like a billig youth rally in nineteen ninety two, plunged
back into Sin for a good year or so before
I handed everything over to God. I was like, if
you can free me from the slavery to sin, I'll
give you anything, and he did like he freed me.
Speaker 3: Went to college, met my husband.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Then we lived in.
Speaker 2: Poverty for a while while he was the assistant associate
pastor at a small church, and we had 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 father. If that
happens to tragedy, very often the whole community comes around
and they mourn.
Speaker 3: And the child's not alone in their grief.
Speaker 2: 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 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 Them Before Us in twenty eighteen that defends children's.
Speaker 3: Right to their mother and father.
Speaker 2: So the way I talk about this is we've got,
thank god, about one hundred organization defending children's right to life,
and we need all of them.
Speaker 3: Them Before Us is.
Speaker 2: 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're going to say,
put the kid first.
Speaker 1: 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 really helped me kind of reframe these issues
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 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 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 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? Or are we
going to put adults desires and rights before children? Because
so often 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.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I would say in every sphere you see
adult desire overriding the rights of children.
Speaker 3: And you know, we're going to talk about a variety.
Speaker 2: 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 is 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.
Speaker 1: H And so often you don't know, you don't know
about the kid's sacrifice until later because they're not going
to have the words to tell you or they know
how to express it and it's going to come out later.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: 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
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 can someone 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?
Speaker 2: 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 could to violate
the child's right to life or write 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 write 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.
Speaker 3: Because a woman that's.
Speaker 2: 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 fifteen,
You're talking about twenty five 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 then 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.
Speaker 3: To report or share what they do with these little lives.
Speaker 2: Our best estimate is that ninety seven percent of children
created in a laboratory will never be born alive. Probably
ninety percent will never even have the chance to live.
They want to be transferred to the womb, and so
you have child destruction on a mass scale. So of
the two to three percent that do make it through
the process alive, anywhere from one third to two thirds
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
with 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 of
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.
Speaker 3: Now, why do you think that is? Because both of these.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Mend the wound of their parental loss.
Speaker 2: These kids that were created through sperm donation, whose parents
purchased the sperm from their biological father with the promise
that he never had contact with the child ever. Again,
these people created the wound.
Speaker 3: So both of.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Can you explain the difference between paying for adoption and
paying for IVF or surrogacy.
Speaker 3: This is a really important distinction.
Speaker 2: 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
to 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.
Speaker 3: A surrogacy process.
Speaker 2: There is no state 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 of 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
is 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 parmental rights and hand over their genetic
children to you, so there's money spent in both places.
One of them adheres very carefully to the standard to
never have there be a cross pollination between those two
streams of cash and the other one is based on.
Speaker 1: It, right, right, So back to IVF specifically, what would
you say to birth parents or sorry, the people, yeah,
the people commissioning the child through IVF, if they could
find a facility and IVF facility that refuse to do
embryo grading and or sex selection, that they only you know,
I know, the reason that they fertilized 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.
Speaker 2: Everybody asks, because everybody wants to do it right, all
of the people in our world.
Speaker 3: We love babies.
Speaker 2: We're conservative, we're pro life. We don't want to do
to any kind of genetic screening. We're not going to
throw out the boys and keep the girls. We understand
that life begins at conception and is 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'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 increats 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 couple 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. Four how
many children that they transfer finally do make it to
the place where they are born alive. Many of them
are going to be premature because IBF 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. 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 fifteen thousand to twenty five
thousand dollars a pop and then transferring them every single time.
Much much better if you can fertilize fifteen at fifteen
thousand to twenty five thousand dollars 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.
Speaker 3: I've talked about this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: 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 five different people come up to me and say
we did do that.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Some of them froze the children, but went back for
all of them, which I would say, you.
Speaker 3: Cannot freeze children.
Speaker 2: 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
for my other three.
Speaker 3: I had a medical emergency.
Speaker 2: 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 on to somebody else.
Speaker 3: What do I do?
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: We did it.
Speaker 2: 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 where there were twins
that were unexpected, and I was like, congratulations, I'm so
glad your children are alive and healthy.
Speaker 3: Are you loaded? And they're like, right, yes, yes. I'm
like how many homes do you own? And they're like,
we own many houses.
Speaker 2: Okay, there you go, right, Like you can do it
the quote unquote pro life way, but not unless you're
a millionaire.
Speaker 1: Right, And these are exceptions to the rule, and we
need laws that are that govern the rule, not the exceptions.
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?
Speaker 3: Now? You go get your babies.
Speaker 2: 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, we aren't their life
around the child and around each other, so the child
doesn't lose their right time life and they don't lose
their right to their mother and father.
Speaker 3: If one or both.
Speaker 2: 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 fifteen 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. A solution to the very planned
child is the same it is as it is for
the unplanned child.
Speaker 3: It's parenting.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Those are your children. Go get your children.
Speaker 2: So we have been contact with a lot of people
that would say.
Speaker 3: I am now doing that.
Speaker 2: I'm reornenting my life and we're going to get through
as many of these embryos as possible. Even though it's
tough when you're thirty nine 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 way past the place. You're
fifty six 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, 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 one million and ten million children
frozen in this country. By some estimates, twenty to forty
percent have been abandoned. Nobody's paying the storage fee, they
cannot find the parents. 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 in fertile right and a lot of these
parents didn't have a chance to think about it, and
had they thought, I'll make eight embryos, Oh my gosh,
it would be incredible if I was able to have
half of them 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 their doctors certainly didn't
help them think it through clearly.
Speaker 1: 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 to 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 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.
Speaker 2: 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
thirty five, I mean, if you're if you're forty four,
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 IBF.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, let's switch gears a tiny bit, just for
a quick sidebar. What are your thoughts on IUI intruder
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?
Speaker 2: We say, that's totally fine, Like, it doesn't 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. Right, you still are getting that natural
kind of competition needed for sperm to zeek and be
welcomed into an egg. You're still getting the hospitable environment
of this taking place in a womb.
Speaker 3: I think that there's some.
Speaker 2: 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 life. I mean if 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 whose dies when we're talking about the ones
in the pea tritish or the ones in the freezer.
So we don't condemn all forms of art, we condemn
the child commodifying, child victimizing practices that are so often
connected to art.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, okay, so yeah. The ethical concerns with divorcing
sex from reproduction is is a conversation for another day,
but it's just a good thing for people to consider.
So let's talk surrogus 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: And is there really nothing?
Speaker 2: There's nothing? Okay, there's nothing. There's no background checks, there's
no screening.
Speaker 3: There's some agency like.
Speaker 2: Well we do a psychological exam, but that's if they
do A.
Speaker 3: It's not required. B.
Speaker 2: It might just be like have you had any mental health? Nope,
I do have any like problems with domestic rese Nope.
Speaker 3: I mean, like nobody's there's.
Speaker 2: No background checks anybody has who has gone through adoption,
Like you got your fingerprints multiple times. Probably you were
vetted by the state agency, 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 you're doing training.
Speaker 3: Then there's postplacement.
Speaker 2: 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 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 seventy four 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.
Seventy four year old man raising twin six year olds
through surrogacy. That is how you get the Chinese couple
that mass produced children, and we're raising them in a
Californian mansion, fifteen of them. We're three years old and under.
And they had some kind of business going there where
people would pull up to the.
Speaker 3: Foyer. There was some kind of like a reception desk.
Speaker 2: They'd stay there a couple hours and then they would leave.
Speaker 3: We have no idea what's going on.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Like a harem of babies in here.
Speaker 2: That is how you get, you know, the Chinese billionaire
who is custom ordering now over one hundred children's in
the US surrogates. He doesn't even touch grass in the
United States. They fly the babies back to him. He's
got US 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 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 month, three months more, all the way
up to twelve 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.
Speaker 3: Would never pass an adoption background check. So sometimes people think.
Speaker 2: Adoption and surrogacy write two different ways to form a family.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: Adoption is a child centric institution that elevates the best
interest of the child. Reproductive technologies are an adult centric
marketing place, a marketplace where the child's interests are never
even considered.
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Speaker 1: So I know your work at them before us. You
don't just work to change hearts and minds, you also
work to change laws. So what are the what laws
would you advocate advocate for? Is it just to outlaws surrogacy?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: Do we ban that as far as IBF like? What
laws are the most palatable, the best to actually solve
these issues.
Speaker 2: Well, if you're a policymaker and you're listening to this,
you can come to them before US dot 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, and do you know
what happened. It was the most pro life decision we'd
ever heard from a court. Hey, 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 whoe there.
Speaker 3: We can't do IVF.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Moment of conception.
Speaker 2: You will wipe out ninety nine percent 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 egg 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
hyperovulation hyper ovarian oh my gosh, where the ovaries are
so enlarged due to all of the injections, so that
you can extract twenty eggs rather than just one per cycle, Like,
it's actually a very high risk process that these young
co eds are 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.
Speaker 3: Not getting paid.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Kind of future.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: 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 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 the biological mother who
carried her, or what does that look.
Speaker 2: Like the best way to understand surrogacy from the child's
perspective is it splices what should be one person mother
into three purchasable and notional 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 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 babies 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 booboos, 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 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 lass. So
in the scenario you presented, which I would say is
sort of 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. Even in that scenario, you're still
asking the child to sacrifice.
Speaker 3: For adults, the child has.
Speaker 2: 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, these are just two strangers out
of eight 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 unflinching
worldview that says every adult has to sacrifice. It's not
just the gaze 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.
Speaker 3: I get it.
Speaker 2: It cannot be at the expense of fundamental child rights.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. 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 errs, 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 are the stakes in overturning that law?
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 2: Well, first, let me talk about what's happened in the
last ten years. So there were some of us that
were warning in twenty fifteen, 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,
and so that's just what is we're expanding marriage. Well,
we've got ten years of receipts, and you know what
they did. They made mothers and father's optional in Parentedly,
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
it's about ten different states have passed the Uniform Parentage Act.
Speaker 3: Which does exactly this.
Speaker 2: 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 pre eminence of the natural parent child relationship,
that this was something that was privileged and pre political
that the state.
Speaker 3: Should not touch.
Speaker 2: 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.
So you have to deconstruct the importance of biology in law.
So fast forward today, ten years later. Now we have
children treated as accessories in law, facilitated by these technologies
and carried along by the cultural wins 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 ten 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 victims
of gay marriage were going to be the florists 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 ten 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?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So, then 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 dot com 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.
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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it excites me so much because it's just I
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 ten years of receipts pulling back
a little bit from that because you know, we can
look at twenty fifteen to twenty twenty five 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.
Speaker 2: One 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 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 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 nineteen sixty nine 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 five million children, five
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
sixty three percent more likely to become teen moms. It
caused boys to have a forty percent increase in criminality.
It caused a thirty five to fifty five percent 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 of twelve years. They need them
all their life. And right they're starved of that permanence.
Children's thriving is going out the window.
Speaker 1: 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 adolescence 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 them anymore whatever, but also great 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
twenty thirty 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.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely destabilizing. Obviously, it's terrible when your parents
divorce when you're in the home and then you're pingponging
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 sports 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. Right, But what happens with great divorce,
right when the parents' divorce after their children are out
of the home, is now that middle generation supports above
and supports below. Now they are the load bearing wall
for all the generations. So very often you've got a
mom who's forty, she's got three young kids. She's desperately
trying to make sure that they're going to school, and
she 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 kN kun. 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
have they're doing the caregiving duties, which is taxing and
burning them.
Speaker 3: But now they're like, was it all?
Speaker 4: Lot? Why?
Speaker 3: Is that all? A?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: And it's interesting how many of these and you know,
you and I move in the kind of conservative Christian
pro marriage space, 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.
Speaker 3: Parents do it.
Speaker 2: Now I'm wondering, is it possible? Will I also be so?
Am I gonna fall pright right that my future? Is
that my destiny too? It's incredibly destabilizing, and I would
say it's unjust.
Speaker 1: 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 can 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 things. 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 marriages, why
would you really rather have children suffering and 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.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, you have to recognize what you're doing.
You're pitting exception against exception, okay, and a lot of
times it's framed us 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.
Speaker 3: So first, let's establish.
Speaker 2: 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 what they stick because they victimize their own children,
and it's just one of the worst to us before
them is 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. 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.
Speaker 3: I love my mom.
Speaker 2: 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
not skyrocket. 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, 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.
Speaker 3: The solution is, if you're.
Speaker 2: 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 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's no place for them. Go go put
them before us and bring those kids your home.
Speaker 1: 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 children to fall into the hands of good families?
Speaker 2: It it shouldn't be easy to acquire an unrelated child, Okay,
and adoption does not exist for adults.
Speaker 3: That want them.
Speaker 2: True, yes, this is this is not a way for
infertile couples to have children, and it's not a way
for same.
Speaker 3: Sex couples to have a baby. This is.
Speaker 2: This is an institution that centers around justice for children
to redeem something that.
Speaker 3: They have lost. The goal and I made this mistake.
Speaker 2: 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 are approved to adult.
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 is 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.
Speaker 1: 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, you know,
say and 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 their friend who's pursuing IVF. Well,
what would you say to them, how can they have
the courage to stand up for the rights of children
no matter what it costs them.
Speaker 3: Well, that was me for a long time.
Speaker 2: Like I was on the bench in the culture War
for a long time because I didn't want.
Speaker 3: To pay the social price.
Speaker 2: And there is one the reason you're staying quiet is
you will be punished. You'll be punished socially, maybe I'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 fifty percent of kids that grow up in
two different homes develop split personalities because their world that
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 it 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 that the kids are
going to pay the price. Right, But in a just society,
we the strong do hard things on behalf of the week.
And the truth is culture and even the Church has
been complicit. 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. Yes, 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 footbinding in China, whether it
is scripting poor homeless kids to work in factories in
the UK in the eighteen hundreds for fourteen hours.
Speaker 3: And like, every.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: So welcome to the great cloud of witnesses. People.
Speaker 2: 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 researchers the undesirable children
and keep only the ones that are going to be
above six feet tall with blue eyes. 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 then if you're complicit
in causing one of these little ones to stumble, you
have to answer to God for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Katie, I have about twenty five 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?
Speaker 2: Yeah, go to Greater Than campaign and just sign on.
Speaker 3: Let us know how we're doing.
Speaker 2: 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 them before us dot 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 a little like Bernie bros.
Speaker 3: Like, We've got the solution for you.
Speaker 2: 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 nineteen 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?
Speaker 3: And you get all my opinions on.
Speaker 2: X at a dvo underscore kat Y advo Katie and
there you're just gonna get like Katie uncensored.
Speaker 3: There's no boundaries.
Speaker 1: 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, because there really is so many
other things I would love to get to. So thank
you so much for your time today though. It was
so good talking to.
Speaker 3: You, great to be with you. Thank you, thank you so.
Speaker 1: Much for tuning into 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 gonna want to follow, You're gonna 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.