Kids are not running for public office, enacting laws, litigating policy, or even voting, and yet children often bear the weightiest consequences for the bad policies adults implement. 

“I get angry when kids are victimized because adults refuse to do the right thing,” says Katy Faust, the founder and president of the pro-children advocacy organization Them Before Us. “It's an injustice at the individual level and at the national level.”

If protecting the well-being of children were the first priority of adults in public policy-related decisions, all of society would benefit, Faust contends. Sadly, adults have repeatedly chosen to place their own gratification in marriage, family formation, economic policies, border politics, and so on, ahead of the interests of kids. 

“Adult-centric policy,” Faust says, is policy that gratifies “adults in the immediate, but then kids have to pay the price.”

Take, for example, the issue of marriage. For decades now, phrases like “kids are resilient,” and “children just need love” have been used to justify adult decisions to divorce, cohabit with a partner, or marry a same-sex partner. In reality, these nice phrases are nothing more than permission slips for adult desires to override the interests of children, she says. 

“Unfortunately, when you see that transformation away from a child-centric understanding of marriage toward an adult-centric understanding of marriage, children are victimized,” she says.

In vitro fertilization has recently taken center stage as a major issue in the 2024 presidential election with both Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump declaring their fervent support for the practice. Yet neither candidate acknowledges that thousands of embryos that were created through IVF, and that are fully capable of life, will be put into a freezer and “often don’t come out,” Faust says. 

Faust, the author of a number of books—including her latest, “Pro-Child Politics: Why Every Cultural, Economic, and National Issue Is a Matter of Justice for Children”—joins “Problematic Women” to discuss the ways political agendas consistently harm children in the name of adult gratification.