The founder of the non-profit Them Before Us, Faust says children have a right to a relationship with their birth mother and father … and that too often, adults see self-satisfaction as life's greatest calling.
"The problem is in our marriage and family lexicon. Whether it's policy matters or cultural matters, we have flipped this and said moms and dads don't matter, biology is irrelevant, what matters only and above everything else is adult sexual desire, adult sexual feelings, adult sexual identity," Faust told American Family Radio on Friday.
"If adult sexual desire and adult sexual identity is God then children themselves are the natural sacrifice, the necessary sacrifice on the altar to that God."
A child of divorced parents, Faust was raised in large part by her mother and her mother's same-sex partner. She became a Christian in high school and an outspoken defender of children. She is the author of the book "Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Right's Movement."
"… When it comes to marriage and family, whether you're talking about the definition of marriage or divorce or same-sex parenting or reproductive technologies, in all of those areas we just think, 'You know what, as long as I'm getting what I want, the kids will be fine.' That's wrong," Faust told show host Jenna Ellis.
A big part of the problem is that certain groups in the Culture Wars have changed definitions, making it unclear exactly what are "rights"? Conservatives need to circle back and reclaim the conversation, she urged.
"We need to recognize that children don't exist for us. They're actually independent, vulnerable people who deserve protection from the only group that has the power to do so, and that's the adults," she said.
"What we have is the Left talking about children's rights, [arguing] it's their right to have their transgender identity hidden from their parents or their right to sexual pleasure or their right to get testosterone from Planned Parenthood. Those are not children's rights, so we have to be very careful about how we use the term 'rights,'" Faust warned.
Rights of children different from adults
In fact, Faust sees children's rights as less about desires and individual choices that they may not yet be emotionally mature enough to make.
"This is a matter of child protection. Children have a right to make it to adulthood with unmedicalized intact bodies, without having healthy organs surgically and electively removed. They should not have to deal with pornographic materials foisted upon them by ideological zealots when they're in elementary school. They have a right to innocence. They should know that their own male or female bodies are good without being confused by activist kindergarten teachers," Faust emphasized.
The advocate pointed out that studies show the birth parents are most often – overwhelmingly – the best path to stability for the child. The natural parents are in most cases the ones who are most protective and invested in the child, and they also provide the child with biological identity.
"It's very hard to answer the question, 'Who am I?' if you can't answer "Whose am I?'" Faust said.
Perhaps most important of all, according to Faust, the birth parents provide gender balance 100% of the time.
"We see overwhelmingly that children who are raised in the home of their biological parents fare better on nearly every outcome. That mothering and fathering maximizes child development, and that satisfies the child's longing to be loved by a man and a woman," she explained.
Big third-party business
According to Faust, evidence of adults trampling the rights of children can be seen in certain ways that children are placed with non-birth parents when necessary. Adoption and third-party reproduction are not the same, she noted. Known by some as "Big Fertility," third-party services could become a $21.7 billion industry by 2025, according to Businesswire.com.
"Maybe you're infertile, maybe you're a same-sex couple – well, you can adopt or you can use a sperm donor or an egg donor or surrogate; but from a children's rights perspective, these two things are not the same. They are actually polar opposites," Faust said.
Adoptive parents can be nurturing and loving. They've volunteered to go through intense procedures of screening and background checks. However, that may not be the case with a third-party reproductive option, Faust said.
"Big Fertility is an industry. They are not a non-profit that is there to give needy children to parents who qualify to adopt them. Big Fertility is a business. Their job is to create on-demand designer babies for whoever can pay for them," Faust said.
With adoption, the child is actually the client being served; in contrast, the adult is the client with "Big Fertility," Faust said.
"The goal [with Big Fertility] is to get an adult a baby no matter the cost to their pocketbook or the cost to the child. So, what we see are massive amounts of frozen embryos, about one-million in this country, that have been functionally abandoned," Faust said. "We see the reckless disregard for the child's right to life as they thaw and discard and donate to research all those frozen embryos."
