Marriage isn’t just a private arrangement between two adults. It’s the one relationship that unites the two people a child has a natural right to. So when marriage gets redefined, something else always gets redefined right alongside it: parenthood.

This session traces what happens to kids when that redefinition plays out, first in same-sex parenting, and then in the next frontier already knocking on the door: polygamy and polyamory.

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We knew it would ruffle feathers, but when you’re fighting a legal and cultural establishment increasingly built upon the desires of adults over the rights of children, that’s kind of expected.

Some of the response billboards included:

Both at the hearing and online, one can notice a version of the same objection over and over: “So, you think adoptive families are fake? You think stepparents don’t count? You think my remarried mom and her husband aren’t real parents to me?”

No. That is not what the billboard says, and it is not what we believe. But the fact that so many people heard it that way—or have been coerced into hearing it that way by the very LGBTQ crowd that benefits most from such confusion—tells us that additional clarity is important because the distinction we’re drawing is really the whole ballgame.

A Statement of Biology, not a Statement About Love

Here is the claim on the billboard, and the claim I made at that meeting, stated in different words: every single person reading this article was conceived by one man and one woman. Not two men. Not two women. Not a single parent working alone. Not a “throuple.” One man, one woman, full stop. That is not an inherently religious or political claim. It is a claim you can verify with a paternity test or even AncestryDNA. We didn’t invent this fact, and we can’t undo it; we’re just refusing to pretend it isn’t true, because state legislatures increasingly are, and that makes kids suffer for the whims and desires of adults.

That claim is entirely compatible with adoptive families and stepfamilies being real, loving, and worthy of full legal recognition. Nothing about “every child has a mother and a father” denies that adoptive parents are parents in every sense that matters legally, relationally, and practically. That would be a really strange claim for an organization founded by an adoptive mom and former adoption industry executive to make.

Stepping In vs. Deliberately Cutting Off

So, where’s the line our billboards are drawing? The line is this: there is a profound moral difference between stepping in to repair a broken situation and manufacturing brokenness on purpose.

Adoption exists because something has already gone wrong—a death, an abandonment, an abuse finding, or a parent unable to care for a child. Adoptive parents did not create that loss. They show up afterward and absorb tremendous burdens to give a child stability they would not otherwise have. The same is true, in a different way, of a stepparent who marries into a child’s life after a divorce or death. Neither one authored the child’s loss of a biological parent. Rather, they are responding to it.

Surrogacy is entirely different in kind, not just degree. In a surrogacy arrangement, the child’s separation from one or both biological parents isn’t a tragedy the arrangement is responding to. Instead, it’s the product being purchased. The contract is signed, a child is created, and the plan from day one is that the woman who gestates and delivers the child will hand that child to someone else and, typically, never have parental rights or even ongoing contact. The loss isn’t incidental; it’s the deliverable. The same is true of anonymous sperm and egg donation, where a child is deliberately conceived to be permanently severed from all knowledge of, and connection to, one entire side of their biological identity.

That is the distinction our billboard is making, and it’s the distinction that gets lost when people hear “no child has two dads” as an attack on the family down the street that happens to include a stepdad. In reality, it’s an argument about what adults shouldn’t be permitted to engineer into existence on purpose versus what adults valiantly do to clean up after something has already broken. And the truth is that LGBT couples regularly choose to create that brokenness through IVF and surrogacy rather than make use of adoption…because a biological connection actually matters to them too, but largely for their own sake rather than the sake of the child they create.

Why the Distinction Matters for Child Safety, Not Just in Philosophy

Saying every child is the offspring of one man and one woman isn’t some kind of abstract point about origins disconnected from practical reality. That claim ought to have profound impacts in child welfare law. During my testimony, I asked the council a pointed question: how many laws does Ohio have requiring a background check, a home study, or a sex offender registry search before a child conceived via surrogacy is handed over to the people who purchased that child? The answer is zero. Compare that to adoption, where home studies, background checks, and post-placement supervision are standard practice precisely because we’ve learned, sometimes at children’s expense, that unrelated adults gaining custody of a child requires vetting.

I also raised a second, uncomfortable data point in the testimony: one of the highest-risk environments for a child to live is a household where they live with an unrelated adult male. Just do an internet search for news stories including the words “mother’s boyfriend.” We’re not saying that to indict single mothers or their partners, but because biological relationship is protective, and law and culture ignore that at children’s expense.

Adults Absorbing Loss vs. Adults Manufacturing It

If there’s one sentence to take from all of this, it’s this: adoption and remarriage are adults sacrificing to absorb a child’s loss; commercial surrogacy and anonymous donor conception are adults arranging for a child’s loss to happen in the first place, for the adults’ own benefit. Both situations can produce loving homes, but love is about much more than simple sentimentality and emotion. Biology still matters, even when love is present, and only one side of those arguing treats a child’s severance from a biological parent as an acceptable cost of doing business. News flash: it’s not us.

That’s the conversation we came to Lima to start, and it’s the conversation we intend to keep having in city councils and statehouses across the country—not because we think adoptive and blended families are anything less than real, but because we think children conceived into surrogacy and donor arrangements deserve the same protection and honesty that we already extend everywhere else in family law. (Side note: how strange is the argument that our side “denies the existence” of certain groups or individuals just because we’re highlighting the reality for children? None of that denies the physical existence of a human being. But I digress.)

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If you think children deserve a mother and a father—and when that’s not possible, deserve honesty about what was lost—join us. Them Before Us is a movement working city council by city council, statehouse by statehouse, to put children’s rights at the center of family policy. If this testimony resonated with you, consider partnering with us to help us keep showing up in rooms like the one in Lima this week.

We are ordinary people with an extraordinarily (and sometimes offensively) ordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility.

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Bonus

Check out Katy’s recent interview with the folks at Answers in Genesis about our billboards and why it’s important to highlight the ideal for children even as we support the adults sacrificing for children who have suffered loss.

Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

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I’m often amused as I (Michaela) watch the algorithm attempt to refine its content to keep me hooked, because the typical “woman in her 20s” material doesn’t work for me. But the algorithm still tries: I see posts from Christian couples, influencers, runners, young families, and then I get an ad for “the hottest summer fits” or “the one exercise to get that swimsuit body in six weeks.”

I’m quite tired of it, and I’m spending less and less time on the app these days.

Instagram’s algorithm is just one example of the cultural lies, especially targeting Gen Z women. These lies are hidden in every movie, show, and podcast and simultaneously proclaimed as doctrine among female influencers and content creators.

As women consume more of these deceptions, the folly informs their life choices. The days pass into years, filled with discontent and heartbreak, and all the while women pursue the fool’s gold that promises fulfillment, until one day they realize they missed the greatest blessing of life: family.

Here are five of the common cultural lies I’ve seen and the devastating impact they have.

Lie One: Masculinity is toxic

Classic. Common. Utterly false.

The phrase “toxic masculinity” is itself toxic – it has poisoned our minds and daily actions. But, given I believe that adjective is thrown around far too frequently (and without any thought), I won’t make that argument.

This lie has trained women to scoff at courtesy and protection as if these honors are insults. True masculinity values women as sacred and honorable. A man who holds the door does so to show respect, not because he believes a woman can’t open her own door. A man who walks on the street side of a woman does so to protect her from danger – not because she is weak, but because she is vulnerable.

Vulnerable, yes. Many women will likely scoff at that word and perhaps even stop reading. But hear me out: no matter how strong you physically are (and many women are incredibly fit), evil predators choose victims who are smaller and weaker than they are, and women, biologically speaking, are. The biological reality of male and female is inescapable, no matter how much our culture attempts to deny it.

Wicked men see this treasure as an opportunity for robbery. Honorable men see this treasure as sacred and worthy of protection. Men who use their physical strength and physique to protect women fulfill proper masculinity – a character that is admirable, not toxic.

So, women, kindly acknowledge when men honor you. Compliment them. Our culture has beaten many men into hiding and inaction, and women who praise a good man’s character and actions will draw them from seclusion.

Lie Two: Enjoy your 20s because marriage is imprisonment

Betty Friedan, one of the main voices of second-wave feminism, called the home a “concentration camp,” and her despicable characterization of marriage and family has evidently circulated for nearly seven decades.

It’s hard for me to even wrap my mind around this claim. The work, travel, adventure advertisement, while certainly exciting, is also exhausting – and I haven’t been doing it very long. The idea that the security and beginning roots of marriage are somehow an entrapment is absurd. In fact, marriage itself is an adventure, as I’ve seen firsthand through the lives of my parents, sister, and friends. A life shared with another will contain mini-adventures throughout the decades.

Adventure alone is never as fun as shared memories.

Even more important, marriage is a gift and an opportunity to daily demonstrate and receive the humble, sacrificial love of dying to oneself for another. If the opportunity arises, if you’ve found the person you want to do life with, jump in hand-in-hand. Then, adventure together.

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Lie Three: One-night stands are fun and harmless

Utterly false. This lie could not be more harmful or devastating, especially to young women. No matter how hard society tries, an individual cannot truly deny the innate connection of body, mind, heart, and soul.

In such moments, women are freely giving men everything they want in exchange for nothing: no protection, no security, no commitment. When he wakes up and leaves, she is desolate and heartbroken, even if she denies it.

Free sex has isolated and devalued women. Even the introduction of contraception during the sexual revolution harmed the female sex.

The promise of sex without fear of pregnancy became sex without his commitment. When the biological ties of sex supposedly disappear, oftentimes, so does the guy. Instead of granting a woman promised freedom, the sexual revolution handed her lack of commitment, abuse, and heartbreak, disguised with a pretty bow.

Lie Four: Living together is a necessary trial run before the altar

“Let’s just see how it goes.”

That very phrase lacks commitment. If he isn’t sure about marrying you, he shouldn’t get all the benefits.

Besides, sharing a space and life is likely one of the most beautiful yet challenging aspects of marriage. Maybe his laundry is always on the floor. Maybe she snores. Maybe he likes more silence, and she always talks. Maybe he sleeps in, and she goes to bed early.

First, these habits can adjust – and often, that’s the sacrificial choice in a marriage. But more importantly, these habits are far less significant with an altar vow sustaining them. When no such vow exists, the habits become much more grating and damaging to the relationship.

So, living together is one of the worst things a couple can do before marriage. Grant each other the honor and devotion of a life utterly committed to the other. Support each other in patience and perseverance through those long months of engagement. The reward is well worth the wait.

Lie Five: Kids can wait, enjoy life

In May, Alex Cooper, who will be 32 in August, announced on her podcast that she is pregnant and due later this year. This follows a video from last June when she disclosed that she, 30 at the time, was not ready for kids and wanted to enjoy her adult years a bit more.

Society has promoted this lie more and more, especially as the technology of in vitro fertilization and egg freezing has improved.

Scientists claim they have overcome that “biological clock,” which is simply untrue. Only 2% of eggs frozen ever result in born children, according to new data from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Additionally, the number of women who chose to freeze their eggs quadrupled from 2014 to 2021, according to the same study. This means the majority of women who froze their eggs and hoped to have kids either decided not to or could not conceive when that time came.

The biological design still dictates physical realities, despite culture’s numerous attempts to deny these features. But when the promise of future kids falls unfulfilled, women wish they had listened to the biological signs.

Many adventures of life can fill various seasons: travel, career, side projects, private businesses. But children and a family dictate a very specific season. The fertility and children window might seem long, but delaying this stage could bring the unintentional consequence of never seeing it. In some ways, this season cannot wait, whereas other adventures can. At the end of a life, the people around you are the important reflections of life, not the awards and photo albums gathering dust in the basement.

Conclusion

Culture’s lies, disguised in perceived happiness and success, are harming women and leading them down paths of discontent, frustration, and anger. No person’s life can be reduced to an algorithm, no matter how much social media attempts to force-feed us the same content.

Women must resist the AI-edited reels that present a false reality. They must know their self-worth and the respect they deserve. Even these two reminders deflate the premises of circulating lies and strengthen women’s confidence in their uniquely feminine qualities, hopes, and pursuits.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.

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In this session, Katy just walked through what changes when a culture makes that swap, not for the adults doing the swapping, but for the kids standing in the room where it happens. Mom’s love, dad’s love, and stability are the three things every child needs to grow up whole. The first two only get delivered in full by a child’s own mother and father. The third, stability, only comes from one place: a marriage that was built to last, not one built to feel good.

Cohabitation and no-fault divorce are not two unrelated modern problems. They’re the same problem, just in different stages. Both trade a lifelong vow for a feeling. Both hand children a home with an expiration date.

This is session three of our series walking through the Them Before Us book, section by section. We’ve covered whether children have rights, and why biology matters to those rights. This week, we ask what happens to those rights once the adults in a child’s life stop making promises and start making preferences.

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But the video gets worse. Their five-year-old son, Mauz, runs into the frame, and, excited like all five-year-olds at a dance party, he begins bouncing up and down between them. If you forget about the context for a second, it’s such a sweet video, one that all of us can relate to: the moment when playful dancing, tickling, or wrestling with your spouse draws a child sprinting across the house to join in the fun. After all, children don’t experience their parents’ love and playfulness and flirtations with each other as some sort of competition for their love. In a strange, unexplainable way, when children see their mother and father acting this way, they actually receive love; the love between them is also something that belongs to them, the child. And they know instinctively that their place is to be right in the middle of it all. Mauz saw his mother and father enjoying each other in this way and jumped right in. Sadly, he had no way of knowing the video was intended to announce the death of his own family.

The internet backlash came hard and fast. Muniz was forced to delete the announcement, and instead replaced it with a happy-looking picture and a more conventional, culturally acceptable statement:

“Following a period of separation that we kept private, Paige and I have decided to move forward with ending our marriage. After 10 beautiful years together, we’ve grown in ways that made us realize our relationship feels most natural and strong as a deep friendship and as co-parents. We share an incredible son who remains the center of our world, and we’re both happier, stronger parents because of the love and growth we’ve shared.” He then promised to keep “building Muniz Racing together” and closed on a high note: “We’re closing one chapter with gratitude and opening the next with bright futures ahead, for us as individuals and especially for our son.”

Now, I (Josh) want to tread carefully here, because as a child of divorce myself, I know on the one hand how fortunate that child is to have parents who seem to be handling this amicably. I know that divorce is sometimes necessary; in cases where there is abuse, addiction, adultery, or abandonment, ending a marriage can be justified, and in some cases an act that protects a child. But it should never be lost on us that even under those extenuating circumstances, every child caught in the middle of that dissolution, however warranted, will carry the scars.

Frankie said after the backlash that “we grieved our divorce beyond anything you can imagine.” I think that’s a normal and even good reaction to such a big, traumatic event. But that isn’t the message of the original video. The initial attempt to spin or even celebrate your way into framing the decision to divorce as something good, especially while reaffirming how prioritized the child would be, received the pushback it deserved. Nobody films a dance number for a funeral, and there is a reason for that.

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Watch that video again from the child’s side of the equation.

He walks in on the two people he loves beyond belief, bonded to them in ways he couldn’t express if he tried. He sees them delighting in each other. His body reads that as safety and stability. He runs to get in the middle of them because he believes he’s joining a moment of love, recreating the perfect triad, a fusion of those two people. He finds himself in harmony at the rightful place, the center of all of it. And yet all viewers know that in reality he is being deceived. He is a piece of Instagram content, a prop in a PR production.

What infuriated people was not the adults’ decision to get a divorce; many probably disagreed with it, but that is hardly newsworthy in this day and age. It was the propaganda: enlisting the child in a fictitious depiction of how happy their new family units would be, how willing and excited he looked to be in the middle of it all. The commercial was selling the idea that after the divorce they would remain one happy family, that he would be happy, that everyone could stay happy. And there he is at the center of it, an unwitting participant, blissfully unaware of the pain that awaits him from the very decision he is celebrating with dance moves.

Return for a second to their original statement’s claim that their son “remains the center of our world.” That is a myth that needs to be dispelled, because it describes something that is no longer possible. The only way for a child to truly be the center of his parents’ world is for all of them to live in the same one. Divorce separates a child’s world into pieces, sometimes two, sometimes more. I know because I’ve lived in them. There is dad’s family, there is mom’s family, there is the shared third space the siblings carve out between the two, and then there is the lonely fourth space a child occupies by himself when none of the others quite fit. You may be important in every one of those worlds, but the existence of them all makes you the center of none. There is no way for two people to divorce without requiring their child to make sacrifices on behalf of adults. There is no way to create separate worlds without destroying theirs. You may say he is the priority, but your decisions still hand him the bill.

The research is blunt about what those sacrifices cost. An NBER research paper released last year linked tax and Census records for more than five million American children and found that experiencing parental divorce at an early age raises a child’s risk of teen birth by roughly 60 percent, his risk of incarceration by nearly 40 percent, and his risk of early death by roughly 45 percent, while cutting his adult earnings by 9 to 13 percent and lowering his odds of attending college.

The standard reply is that unhappy parents make unhappy kids, so the split ultimately serves everyone. The data resists that too. A University of Chicago-led team found that two-thirds of unhappily married adults who stuck it out and stayed married described their marriages as happy five years later, while those who divorced were on average no happier than those who endured.

But here is the bright spot: it was not too long ago that the culture was silent on divorce, especially high-profile ones. “Conscious uncoupling” might ring a bell. This time, the comments were filled with people telling a Hollywood star to fight for his marriage, to not exploit his child to manipulate his audience, and to stop putting a positive spin on the death of his family. The pushback grew loud enough that he had to take the video down. Something is shifting, and it’s shifting towards children.

That brings me back to the boy in the frame. Someday Mauz will be old enough to find that clip and understand what he was dancing to, and the cheerful question about staying friends with your baby momma will not be the line that comforts him.

Divorce is sometimes necessary.

It is never a celebration.

And it is always a tragedy, especially for the kids.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, with our 4 kids.

The messages had only been up a few days when activists started posting, tagging us, and harassing the billboard company that agreed to host our message.

As of this writing, these posts have received thousands of comments.

We thought it would be helpful to show you the five most common objections to basic biological truth and how you can reply if you hear these in your daily life.

1. “Biology for me, not for thee”

One of the most common objections was some version of “DNA doesn’t make you a family.” The loudest voices came from people whose own family-building choices tell a different story. One woman explained that her daughter has two biological mothers! That she and her wife created a daughter “together” through reciprocal IVF.

For those who do not know that term, it is a costly medical process where you extract one woman’s eggs, create life in a lab, and then implant it in the other woman’s womb. It is unnecessary, carries added risk for the child, and the entire point is to manufacture a feeling of connection for the woman the child is not related to.

They said:

“That’s my situation...my wife and I have a beautiful daughter together; her egg implanted via IVF and I carried our daughter...so she is both of ours.”

I (Josh) replied:

“Wanting a biological bond with your child is natural. You split egg and womb at great cost chasing a piece of what only one of you can have. Your daughter has one biological mother and father. No one ever weighed her need for the same bond with him. Turns out biology only matters when adults want it.”

The hypocrisy should be self-evident. Two women paid a fortune to split motherhood between them because getting as close to a biological “connection” to their daughter mattered that much. Unfortunately, her daughter’s biological connection to her father was never given a second thought. That is the whole game: biology is priceless when adults are buying and worthless when a child comes asking.

We wrote more in depth on that here:

2. “Oh, so you hate stepdads?”

To hear the commenters tell it, we had just insulted every stepdad, uncle, and grandfather in America. Most of them weren’t defending a talking point. They were defending their own families, and they heard the billboard saying those families aren’t real or don’t matter.

They said:

“Outside of the LGBT aspect of this... Millions of kids have two moms or dads, they’re called stepparents!”

I replied:

“Stepparents step in after a family breaks. Nobody intentionally plans a divorce or a death so a stepdad can exist. Two-“dad” households require the removal of the mother from day one, on purpose.”

The objection pretends that your mother remarrying gives you a second father. Anyone who has lived through it knows better. You have one father. In rare and fortunate cases a stepfather plays a unique and positive role in a child’s life, and the men who do that deserve real honor. He still does not become your biological father, and no child who gained a stepdad stopped wondering about the dad she lost.

3. “So you guys are against adoption?”

They said:

“I am disgusted at the hatred some people have towards kids, this could refer to children with parents who are remarried, kids that are adopted, kids who have a parent that died and the surviving parent remarried.”

I replied:

“You listed divorce, adoption, and death, and every one of those children still has one mother and one father. The billboard states that fact. Stepparents and adoptive parents step in after a child loses something. Two ‘dads’ requires the loss on purpose.”

This objection trades on the good name of adoption, and it is everywhere. The claim is that saying a child has a mom and a dad wounds the kid who lost his dad to tragedy. The truth runs the other way. The best thing we can do for a grieving child is not to normalize her loss with “you have a mom who loves you, and that’s all you need.” It is to tell her the truth: you lost something, and that is hard. Erase the ideal, and you erase the tragedy, and once the tragedy is gone there is no basis left for real compassion.

These adults prefer it that way, because admitting the child lost something means anyone who arranges that loss on purpose did a hard and bad thing to a child.

We wrote about these issues here:

A woman commented on the posts about the billboards, “I appreciate your message! You changed my mind on IVF and surrogacy. Thank you for all you’re doing.” We are able to change the conversation and offer that children’s rights perspective because people are supporting this work. You can help push this forward with a monthly gift. Help us defend the rights of children today.

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4. “Mind your own damn business.”

They said:

“This is opinion but incorrect better two moms and two dads than horrible parents. They deserve amazing parents regardless of what that looks like! It’s 2026 people needs to grow up and stay out of other peoples lives”

I replied:

“Notice how the people defending a child’s loss always demand we ‘mind our own business.’ Deliberately depriving a child of her mother or father is everybody’s business. That is what it means to be a society that protects kids.”

Notice what the freedom on offer actually includes. When adults want the liberty to do whatever they want with children, whether that means aborting them, freezing them, buying them through surrogacy, or transferring them into any number of adult arrangements, the truth that every child has a right to life and to her mother and father becomes an unwelcome intrusion into their affairs. “Mind your own business” translates plainly: this truth gets in the way of me getting what I want, when I want it, at a child’s expense.

5. “All kids need is love.”

They said:

“Kids should be loved. It shouldn’t matter who raises them. Who cares what a family unit looks like so long as they are being raised well, supported, and loved heartily. That’s what’s important.”

I replied:

“It shouldn’t matter to whom? Not to the kids. They search for birth parents, ache for missing dads, and call their ‘donors’ half of who they are. The ones saying it should not matter are the adults who took a mother or father from a child to get what they wanted.”

They said:

“In this world, spreading hate only hurts people. Does having two dads or moms really hurt the kid??? Really??? Love is more powerful than hate, as long as kids grow up loved and cared for, they will be beautiful humans”

I replied:

“Stating a fact is not hate. And true love doesn’t pay a stranger to hand over her newborn. Love doesn’t buy sperm and delete the father. Love sacrifices adult wants for a child’s needs, and that is the one thing these arrangements refuse to do.”

Love does not ask a child to sacrifice her mother or father so an adult can get what they want. That is manipulation. A child has a mother and a father, and saying so is not hate. Depriving a child of that relationship for the sake of adult desires is not love.

For anyone whose first instinct is still “but they’re safe and loved,” we wrote this for you:

A Final word:

A mother and a father are a fact, not a feeling. And words matter. It matters that “mother” means something, that “father” means something, that “child” means something.

We do not get to rewrite words tied to a biological reality humanity has acknowledged for centuries because some adults want “family” to mean something new.

That is the real reason basic biology triggers people this badly: if they cannot redefine the words, they do not get to do to children whatever they want. So they scream, they yell, and they call you names. None of it changes what a child is or what she is owed.

The child was never at the table when the decision got made. Somebody has to speak for her, and that is the only job Them Before Us has ever had. To everyone still yelling in the comments: we are very sorry that biology does not cooperate with your idea of progress.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.

Subscribe now

Here’s the problem. We have decades of family-structure research telling us exactly what produces safety and love in a child’s life, and it isn’t a feeling adults decide to have. It’s a specific arrangement: a child raised by their own married mother and father.

This is session two of our series for church small groups, pastors, and ministry leaders, or anyone faithfully wanting to protect children, walking through the Them Before Us book, section by section. Last week, we asked whether children have rights. This week, we ask what biology has to do with it.

In this session, you will learn:

• The three things children get when their right to their mother and father is protected, and the data behind each one

• Why biological identity isn’t a luxury, but something kids actively search for their whole lives

• What mothers and fathers each contribute that the other cannot replicate

• Two real stories of what it costs a child when biology gets overridden by adult arrangements

This series, the data, and everything else in it are for TBU Insiders. For the price of a drive-thru Big Mac, you get this series, the IVF | FYI series, and every Insider resource we publish.

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At twenty-five, even though he’d been “safe and loved”, with nothing materially missing from his life, Saroo started spending his nights scanning satellite images on Google Earth, searching for a landscape he’d last seen as a small child. He didn’t stop until he found it — and ultimately was able to find his mother because she was still living within walking distance of the house he was born in, waiting for him. (Source)

Nancy Verrier had a name for what sent him looking for the family he came from, even though he loved his adoptive family and they loved him.

Followers of Them Before Us have heard the term “primal wound” used in reference to adoption loss, and to the growing number of children intentionally denied a mother or father through surrogacy and donor conception. The term makes people uncomfortable. Some adoptive parents may bristle at it, while others resonate, having found a name for their child’s experience. Parents who used a donor or a surrogate (intentionally choosing the child’s loss) more often reject the term. It is difficult to look at the infant in your arms and consider that you are only holding her because she has experienced profound loss. This is especially true when you inflicted that loss. Nobody wants to look at the infant they love and accept that she might be suffering.

But thirty years of research have confirmed: she might be.

Nancy Verrier’s book The Primal Wound landed in 1993 as a challenge to the “baby scoop” era of the mid-twentieth century. The operating assumption was this: a baby relinquished before she could form memories would carry no wound from the loss. This was the precursor to the “all babies need is to be safe and loved lie. Unmarried women with unplanned pregnancies were sent away, and often pressured into relinquishment; adoptions were sealed, and children were often never told their origins. Everybody moved on - everybody except the children.

Verrier named what many adoptees and adoptive families had been struggling to put into words. She wrote that it was difficult, “and understandably so, to change our thinking about adoption from that of a wonderful, altruistic event to that of a traumatic, terrifying experience for the child.” Without acknowledging a child’s loss, she argued, there is no permission, explicit or implicit, to mourn.

She was right, and the research has kept proving it.

The bond forms before birth

A child’s relationship with her mother does not begin at hospital discharge. It begins in the womb. Before birth, a baby is learning the sound of a specific voice, responding to one person’s emotional state, and growing familiar with one woman’s smell. By the time she is born, she already knows her mother.

A 2016 Stanford University study confirmed just how deep this goes. Researchers found that a far wider range of brain areas is activated when children hear their mothers than when they hear the voices of other women, and this brain response predicts social communication ability. The regions responding most strongly to a mother’s voice extend beyond auditory areas to include those involved in emotion, reward, social functions, and face recognition. As lead author Daniel Abrams noted, many social, language, and emotional processes are learned by listening to a mother’s voice, and that voice has unusually direct access to multiple brain systems simultaneously. (Source)

Stanford Children’s Health notes that newborns recognize their mother’s smell and voice immediately after birth, using that familiarity as a source of comfort and security from the first moments of life. The baby does not develop this preference over time. She arrives already oriented toward one person, and that orientation is not transferable. (Source)

When that person disappears

A 2018 study from Indiana University found that when a baby is taken from its mother for even a brief period early in life, the separation alters adult brain function and cognition in lasting ways. In the study, young rats were removed from their mothers for 24 hours at nine days old, a critical period of brain development. The separated animals showed memory impairment, reduced communication between brain regions, and neurological changes similar to those found in people at risk for schizophrenia. “Children exposed to early-life stress or deprivation,” the researchers wrote, “are at higher risk for mental illness and addictions later in life.” The separation window was 24 hours. (Source)

A 2022 review from NYU’s Emotional Brain Institute found this pattern across dozens of studies: early adversity within the caregiver-infant relationship disrupts the trajectory of brain development at every level of analysis, from genes and epigenetics to neurotransmitters and hormones, to systems-level brain structure. (Source)

Epigenetics is not a metaphor. Maternal separation can permanently alter how genes are expressed. Repeated postnatal maternal separation has been shown to produce lasting hyperactivity of the stress hormone system and persistent DNA methylation changes. The stress of losing one’s mother can be written into a child’s biology in ways she carries for life. (Source)

A 2024 review confirmed that separation disrupts neuroinflammatory responses and alters the metabolism of neurotransmitters, including noradrenaline and serotonin, and that disruption of maternal affiliation produces strong deterioration reactions in newborns. (Source)

Thirty years of research have traced exactly how maternal separation rewires a child's biology, down to which genes get expressed. The primal wound isn’t just a theory.

What animal research tells us

Setting up a controlled study on maternal loss in human infants would be highly unethical. So researchers have worked from animal models. Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments of the 1950s and 60s established that maternal connection is foundational to healthy development. His research has not been repeated because the designed maternal deprivation in his studies was considered unnecessarily cruel and remains controversial to this day.

Science has moved well past Harlow. A 2021 study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry used a controlled nonhuman primate model to examine the effects of at-birth adoption, and was specifically designed to rule out pre-adoptive adversity, the objection most often raised against older studies. Even when adoption occurred at birth, with all other needs met by a female member of the same species, infant primates showed increased risk for atypical behavior and anxiety. The separation itself was the variable. (Source)

No ethics board would approve a human study built on that design - assigning newborns at random to be separated from their mothers just to observe what happens. That's precisely why this research exists in primates and not in people. Surrogacy arranges the same separation on purpose, by contract, for a fee, agreed to before the child is even conceived. What no researcher is permitted to test on a child, the fertility industry sells.

The extrapolation from primates to humans is imperfect. But humans form deeper emotional attachments than monkeys, and human brains are more profoundly shaped by early relational experience. If separation produces measurable neurological disruption in primates, the animal data is a floor for what happens in children, not a ceiling.

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The paradox that adoptive families live with

Adoptees are typically raised in stable, two-parent homes with above-average resources. And yet the research indicates that the early loss they experienced—even a loss they may not remember—has a lasting impact.

Analysis of U.S. Department of Education data by the Institute for Family Studies found that the odds of a student having a severe emotional disturbance were more than 10 times higher for adopted students than for students living with both married biological parents. Adopted students had greater odds than students from single-parent or stepfamily homes of having parents contacted for schoolwork or behavior problems and of repeating a grade. (Source)

A University of Minnesota study published in Pediatrics found that the odds of a reported suicide attempt were approximately four times greater in adoptees compared to non-adoptees, a relationship that held after adjustment for psychiatric symptoms and family environment. (Source)

A 2022 study comparing a small sample size of adopted and non-adopted individuals who died by suicide found significantly higher rates of ADHD, mental health comorbidity, Cluster B and C personality disorders, and elevated adversity scores among adopted individuals. (Source)

None of this indicts adoptive parents. Most of them love their children fiercely. What the data indicts is the old pretense that relinquishing parental rights is a simple matter, that the child will carry no wound because he is too young to remember. The simple truth is that adoption always follows loss. A better understanding of the trauma that precedes adoption has better equipped adoptive parents to acknowledge the loss, create space for grief, and help their children process the loss they’ve experienced. Adoption is not a magic reset button. It is a lifeline extended to a child who has already experienced painful trauma. It recognizes real loss and real needs.

This is not only an adoption story

The implications of maternal separation and biological bonding extend beyond adoption. It applies to every child deliberately separated from her biological mother or father by adult design.

Donor conception and surrogacy are not adoption. But they share the feature Verrier was describing: a child who grows up without her biological parent. In adoption, the loss is at least named a loss. In donor conception and surrogacy, the same loss is rebranded as a gift, and the child is expected to receive it as one.

Donor-conception researchers disagree sharply about how to weigh the evidence on long-term outcomes. A widely circulated 2024 review claiming to synthesize 50 studies has since drawn scrutiny for miscategorizing findings and for drawing nearly half its sample from just five repeated-measure cohorts — including a dozen papers from Golombok’s long-running lesbian-family studies — rather than from fifty independent populations, a pattern that makes the evidence base look far broader than it is. What holds up independently, echoed even by researchers broadly supportive of donor conception, is narrower and harder to dismiss: children told early about their donor origins consistently fare better than those who find out later or by accident. (Source)

A separate self-report study of 272 donor sperm-conceived adults found increased rates of attention deficit disorder, autism, identity formation problems, learning difficulties, panic attacks, and alcohol and drug dependency compared to spontaneously conceived peers. The children grew up and became adults who were able to describe what it cost them to live without access to their biological origins. (Source)

Qualitative research has shown that finding donor connections, meaning one’s biological relatives, leads to greater self-understanding and a sense of belonging. The longing is real. Whether the adults who made that choice are willing to recognize that the loss is real is up to them. The children already know. (Source)

The children who cannot speak for themselves

Children are not blank slates. They arrive in the world already attached, already oriented, already belonging to someone. When that belonging is severed, their mind and bodies register the loss. It shows up in stress hormones, in behavioral outcomes, or in a search for biological connections that can last a lifetime.

Saroo Brierley’s mother never left the neighborhood she raised him in, on the chance that he might someday find his way back. He did, not because his life in Australia was lacking, but because some part of him needed to find his biological origins. Millions of people watched that story and called it inspiring. Fewer noticed what it actually was: a grown man, decades and a continent removed from any material need, still looking for his mother.

Society builds family policy around adult desire and calls it progress. But when children are just accessories to be cut and pasted into whatever family arrangements adults intend, children are the ones who pay the ultimate price, even with their physical bodies and mental well-being. We can build family policy around what adults want, or around what children need. Not both.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

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I (Julia) grew up with an amazing family. My dad was a loving, tender dad and has always been a good provider for his family. My mom was a nurturing, intelligent, and fun-loving stay-at-home mom who gave everything for her kids. I’m glad she was a dedicated mom during our family’s younger years because her life was cut short by cancer when I was nine years old. We were six kids, and my dad raised us for nine years as a single dad after my mom’s death while I went through adolescence.

When I was a senior in high school, my dad married my step-mom, which brought her four younger children into the family. I have always felt thankful that, on the whole, for a step-family situation, everyone did their best to make the most of it, and it worked out o.k. for all of us. Behind the scenes, though, my original siblings and I have all experienced much pain as a result of combining families because of the favoritism to my step-siblings by my step-mom. I know she tried to incorporate us, but I guess you could say that often the husband goes along with whatever the wife puts effort into, and there is often a distinct difference in the effort the mom naturally puts into her own kids. This was the case with our combined family. As a result, her kids were favored over my original siblings.

For 20 years, I experienced severe emotional pain, feeling rejected and unimportant to my parents. And no matter how kindly I tried to bring up that pain, I was rejected and shut out even more by my step-mom. I internalized it to mean I must not be worthy of love because it felt like a chore to her. Where I had started out feeling excited to gain a mom, in the end, I felt like I had lost my closeness with my dad (we had been very close during his single years), my biological mom by death, and my new mom (my step-mom) by being unlovable to her. Having to let go of all of your parents and the nurture you know you should be receiving, but are not, is a kind of pain I cannot describe. It is a grief that affects how you feel about yourself every day.

The grief I have felt at all of the milestones of life has been deep and unending, especially at the most significant milestones of motherhood when I gave birth to my own five babies and did not have that person beside me who knew me at birth and adores me and my offspring inherently. Every good characteristic of my children, my step-mom would insist was my husband’s genes. I longed for a force behind me to know what came from my genes and looked like me, too, as a baby.

When I was a teenager, I would watch my friends’ moms hype up shopping for school clothes or formal dances. I would tag along with my best friend on her shopping trips with her mom because I had no one taking me out. I actually became a very independent person as a result; meeting my own needs became like second nature. I longed for someone to tell me on those bad hair days when I felt awkward as a teenager and needed someone to give me advice on what not to do with my hair, that it would all pass. In so many ways, I have needed my mom over the years; the pain runs so deep it is usually buried up in a well that very few have seen.

I continually choose to put my children first and stay home to care for them. I know too well what the absence of a mother feels like in the home. Being a dedicated parent, especially staying in the home to raise your children, isn’t just a luxury like some people try to categorize it; it is a sacrifice by choice that affects generations. Children need daily nurturing, usually through the most mundane tasks. Feeding them, driving them, brushing their hair, scooping them up when they have scraped their knee, and being there for them through the many different stages they go through connects them to you. It is how they feel loved and how they will know how to love as they become adults. While there are many noble professions that we can do, there is only one of you for your child. Any other occupation can have a replacement for you at any time—a teacher, a nurse, or even the president—but you are irreplaceable to your child. No one could ever replace you, even if they tried.

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This is not to say that those who courageously and lovingly step in to fill in the gaps when a parent is not present do not make a difference. They make an extraordinary difference! To this day, my grandma, my aunt, my sisters, my dad, my step-mom, and many neighbors and friends’ moms filled in the gaps, and I only have the utmost honor for them. They did all that they could to meet my individual and family’s needs and should be applauded. I have the highest love and admiration for them.

A child’s need for their biological mom or dad can only be filled by that person who fits that role of that gender. My dad fulfilled his role as dad in a spectacular manner. He even fulfilled the gaps of not having my mom in a spectacular manner! It will never be in his capacity to fulfill the role that was my mom’s. Understanding that has been a big part of my healing process.

I have come to a place of healing for the grief I have felt throughout my life through my beliefs in a loving and just God who will make everything right someday. I have learned to rely on Jesus Christ daily to get through my grief and pain. I say every day because it is cyclical and never goes away. It will always be part of my life. Children never stop missing or needing their biological parents, even and especially as adults. Parents who nurture in their unique roles make all the difference in the life of a child. I admire the work that you are doing to shine a light on this truth and hope that many more will share their stories to reaffirm the truth of society’s duty to protect children’s rights.

Julia's grief didn’t end when she became an adult, but it became the reason she pours out her love on her own children. It’s the reason she tells her story, so that fewer children have to live the additional tragedy she did.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

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Teen homelessness.

Teen suicide.

Incarceration.

Poverty.

Dropout rates.

Everyone chooses a different social ill to solve. Someone always knows a friend who was a teen mom. Someone else has watched a classmate attempt suicide. But notice something else. Every one of those crises traces back to the same root Katy just walked through. Kids lose their mothers and fathers, and the consequences change their lives and impact all of society.

This is session one of our church series, where Katy will lead you through the Them Before Us book, connecting our fight for children’s rights with the Christian ethic for justice and protecting children. The facts, the framework, and the ethic God laid out for anyone who claims to follow him.

If you missed Katy’s introduction, you can see it here:

In this session, you will learn:

• What a natural right actually is, and the three-rule test you can use to spot a fake one

• Why the term “children’s rights” has been hijacked, and how we will reclaim it

• The four groups of people God says he has a special heart for

• Why this issue is the one thing the political left and right actually agree on, whether they know it or not

Whether you’re watching this with your small group, alongside your spouse, with friends, or on your own, watch the video first, then read on for additional material to help you engage more deeply with the content. Put your thoughts and questions into the comments below.

This series, the discussion questions, the data, and everything else in it are for TBU Insiders. If you are already a paid subscriber, keep reading below. If not, subscribe now so you don’t miss a session!

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For those who may not know, we are an organization that advocates for the rights of the child to their mother and father. Mothers and fathers are facts. Like sex, they can be proved with a blood test. We don’t “assign” sex to a child, and we shouldn’t “assign” parents either; in each case, a reality is recognized, not decided. A child’s bond to their mother and father is written as deep as DNA; a child doesn’t just come from two people, a child is two people, fused.

Identity, belonging, and the desire to sacrifice are all wrapped up into one, motivating adults to create a better future they won’t live to see. This attachment is not some leftover evolutionary sentiment, nor is it purely religious or political; it is the sacred bedrock beneath nearly everything good in society. Destroy that bond, and you do more than wound children; you dissolve the foundation, and everything built on it comes down.

But believe it or not, some adults want that bond gone, because biology is the great obstacle to their radical remaking of the family. In their world, parents really are assigned at birth, by contract rather than recognized by blood, and any adult with enough money can acquire a child. A mother and father raising the children they created stands directly in the way of an agenda that wants marriage disposable, children purchasable (designer, on demand), and gestation rentable. In a word, they want children to serve their desires, and they refuse to sacrifice their desires for the best interests of the child.

We say no. We stand in the gap. But the gap is wide.

It is under threat in statehouses that are rewriting parenthood law so that a contract, rather than a biological relationship, decides who a child’s parents are, and rewriting birth certificates so that a government document can declare a child was created by two women or two men, erasing the factual mother or father from the record. It is under threat in a culture that has normalized homes without fathers, and it is coming over the horizon in the form of artificial wombs and lab-grown eggs and sperm, which would make mothers and fathers optional by engineering. Most people have no idea that there are forces hard at work to destroy that fundamental relationship. That’s what makes our work in Texas so important.

Why Texas Called This Hearing

The nation is waking up to how its immigration system is being abused, and to the uncomfortable fact that children have become the vehicle. Texas saw it coming. Back in March, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick issued the Senate’s interim charges and directed the Health and Human Services Committee to examine “the unethical and foreign interests exploiting the surrogacy and fertility industries in Texas” and to recommend ways to end that exploitation and its harm to patients and children. Then, on June 30, the Supreme Court handed down Trump v. Barbara, upholding automatic birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, and within a day, lawmakers were demanding a special session on birth tourism, with one proposal specifically calling for a ban on surrogacy contracts where any party is a citizen or resident of a country of concern, mirroring what Florida has already enacted. We have been documenting the connection for years: close the front door of birth tourism and the market moves to the higher-tech back door of commercial surrogacy, where citizenship arrives with a birth certificate and nobody asks who is taking the child home.

That is where Protecting Texas Children came in. When they asked us to come make the child’s case to the committee, I booked the flight before I finished reading the message. They are engaged in this work every single day; what they needed from us was the research and the testimony to keep the child at the center of the conversation. Them Before Us is the only organization in the country monitoring these issues across all fifty states, so it is an honor anytime we get to lock arms with a local ally and strengthen the people changing hearts and minds on the front line.

What We Told the Committee

Texas has built one of the most attractive legal frameworks in the world for the global surrogacy market. The state’s only residency requirement can be satisfied by the surrogate alone, so intended parents need no ties to Texas, or to America at all; roughly one in seven surrogacy arrangements in this country is commissioned from a foreign country of concern like China, and where adoption requires a home study, surrogacy requires only a check.

And what does that check buy? The stories coming out of this industry sound like they can’t be real, except that they are. There are documented cases of pedophiles acquiring children through surrogacy, men who would never have survived an adoption screening. The Wall Street Journal has reported on Chinese billionaires commissioning American-born children by the dozen; one videogame billionaire, Xu Bo, has more than 100 children born through American surrogates, some of whom he admits he has never met. And foreign nationals openly treat the rental of a Texan’s womb as a golden ticket to citizenship: the baby is born an American, and at 21, that child can sponsor green cards for the whole family. Beneath it all sits the deeper problem: surrogacy contracts, in advance and on purpose, the separation of a newborn from the only person that baby has ever known.

If you want to read the full testimony or watch the video, click below:

Texas Testimony

111KB ∙ PDF file

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After the hearing, we met with several state legislators to walk through these issues from the child’s perspective. For so many legislators, the unregulated world of assisted reproductive technology (IVF, surrogacy, and soon artificial wombs) is simply not an issue they have experience with, and we are so grateful for how receptive they were. At the end of the day, they need educated advocates sharing what these types of arrangements do to a child.

They Win in the Dark

If you take one thing from this article, take this: the biggest way the anti-child forces win is by living in the dark. Nobody records what happens to the embryos. Nobody follows up on the children created and handed over to strangers. There is no vetting of the buyers, and no questions are asked of agencies making millions off the sale. Every one of those silences is a policy choice, and every one of them protects the industry instead of the child. We want to help pull back the curtain and shine a light on the ways children are being victimized, because none of it survives being seen clearly.

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Children in this conversation do not have a voice. They can’t organize, they can’t testify, and they can’t vote. With your help, we give them that voice. That is how the culture changes: through conversations, testimony, statistics, and research, convincing one heart and one mind at a time to stand up and defend kids. And if you give financially to this work, you are a part of all of it; you are helping expose this industry and protect children from being bought, sold, and handed off to unrelated adults. No version of this fight happens without you.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.

Subscribe now

I shared this story in the introductory episode of Them Before Us’s IVF-FYI podcast series, which we filmed in January of 2025. A month later, I was surprised by a positive pregnancy test, and in the fall, my husband and I welcomed our daughter.

That’s the short version of the story. On its own, it sounds like I was told one thing, it turned out to be incorrect, and I easily got pregnant. But there’s more to it than that — more steps along the way, more tears, more appointments, more doctors.

I recently shared more of my story in a comment I submitted on the proposed Federal Excepted Fertility Benefits rule, and I’d like to share it with you, too.

Receiving the news that you likely won’t be able to have children is heartbreaking and overwhelming. It comes with a sense of anticipated loss and uncertainty about the future. I don’t claim to know what it’s like to navigate decades of infertility, nor am I sharing my story to say that I am a mother today because I got it right and others are getting it wrong, or that I did something to earn or deserve motherhood.

Instead, I share my story because I know I am not the only one who has been told that IVF is her only option. I know that I am not the only one to feel frustration that women’s healthcare frequently offers a band-aid solution without addressing underlying problems. I know I am not the only one who has felt devastated by a diagnosis or faced thoughtless comments from people who assume to know more about me than they do. And I want others to know that they deserve healthcare that provides answers and restores health. I want others to know that there are options beyond IVF, and that they’re not crazy for wanting other options—in fact, the majority of fertility patients would like options beyond IVF and would pursue those options if they had better information about them.

Something I shared in that podcast episode was that, when I was diagnosed and informed that my options consisted of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and the Pill, I was in the unique position of having spent a lot of time learning about the ART industry. Because of my work, I had wrestled with the ethical questions of ART long before the topic of fertility treatments became personal for me, and knew which lines I wouldn’t be comfortable crossing. Even with that background, I found myself wondering at times if I would ever reach a point where I would change my mind and pursue “my only option.”

I understand why so many people pursue IVF, especially when they’re told that it’s their only option.

The longing to have children is a powerful desire, and when unfulfilled, can be a heart-sickening grief. It’s also the case that most infertility patients haven’t been told that 97% of the embryos created don’t survive the process, that the grading process which determines whether an embryo is “viable” is arbitrary and inconsistent, that freezing imposes unnecessary risk on embryos, or that the industry routinely stores human embryos in storage tanks designed for short-term storage of cattle sperm and that there is little to no recourse for parents when those tanks fail or embryos are accidentally lost, swapped, or discarded in a lab.

Still struggling with difficult and unpleasant symptoms, I started looking online for a clinic that might offer a different approach for treating my condition. Eventually, I found myself on a discovery call with a doctor who practices Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM)—a specialized approach to reproductive health backed by decades of research. Over the next few months, she had me utilize cycle charting to get timed labs looking at my hormone levels during specific phases of my cycle, as well as to make note of symptoms like double-peaks in my cycle and tail-end bleeding. She used these to identify and address low progesterone levels in my luteal phase. She identified underlying insulin resistance that was contributing to my symptoms, including anovulation. She ran a full thyroid panel and addressed hypothyroidism that had gone unidentified and untreated in more “traditional” settings. In my decade of trying to get answers, none of the doctors I had seen before her had run these tests or even discussed them as possibilities.

Recent data show that 78% of fertility patients would pursue a non-IVF option if they had better information about them. 85% would seek more information about the impact of metabolic health on fertility, but only 44% reported that their provider had a conversation with them about it. 49% learned about their fertility options only after they had encountered challenges.

At Them Before Us, we frequently highlight how the fertility industry disregards the well-being of the lives it creates. It also disregards the well-being of the men and women who walk through their doors.

If Them Before Us has made a difference in how you think about and talk about marriage, family structure, and reproductive technology, would you consider supporting this work? Your monthly gift enables us to say “Yes" and equip as many people across the country as we can.

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I firmly believe that it doesn’t have to be this way, in part because I have experienced something better—but only after years of searching for answers and finally finding an alternative to the approach embraced by the majority of fertility specialists. RRM is not limited to women’s health or to metabolic conditions. It also addresses endometriosis, adenomyosis, low AMH, male factor infertility, and hormonal imbalances, among other things.

Through RRM treatment, I saw an improvement in my symptoms and began to feel much healthier. I began ovulating more consistently, and the possibility that maybe I could get pregnant dawned on me as I looked at my chart and realized that my period should have started two days before. A pregnancy test confirmed that yes, I could get pregnant, and I had.

Throughout my pregnancy, my doctor continued to monitor my hormone levels. A significant drop in progesterone in my first trimester was caught and addressed, possibly saving my daughter’s life. Standard practice outside of RRM typically requires multiple losses before progesterone will be prescribed to prevent miscarriage. As I write this, I am pregnant with my second child, thanks to RRM treatment, and am again receiving hormonal testing and support throughout my pregnancy.

You Can Make a Difference

This is why I am encouraging the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, and the Department of the Treasury to prioritize access to restorative healthcare in the new Excepted Fertility Benefits rule. Fertility care does not have to and should not endanger or commodify human lives.

I encourage you to submit a comment as well—this is an incredible opportunity to encourage healthcare that protects children’s rights and actually addresses infertility, rather than simply circumventing it. Encourage our leaders to promote healthcare that really helps those facing fertility challenges.

Visit here for more information about submitting a comment. To submit a comment, visit this link and click on the blue “comment” button in the upper left part of the screen. You can then type or copy and paste your comment into the “comment” field and fill out the information below.

They are receiving comments until July 13, and we hope you will help us advocate for better healthcare options for men and women and answers to infertility that do not harm the rights and well-being of children. Consider sharing this to someone you know!

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.

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So over the next few weeks, Katy will walk you through the Them Before Us book, section by section. The facts. The data. And the ethic God laid out for anyone who claims to follow Him.

Each week, you'll get a video of Katy teaching a section of the Them Before Us book, the citations and facts behind it, and discussion questions to take deeper with your group. This series, and everything else in it, is for TBU Insiders. For the price of a large Frappuccino, you get access to this series, the IVF | FYI series, and every Insider resource on our Substack.

The series will cover:

Session 1: Children’s Rights

Session 2: Biology Matters

Session 3: Marriage Matters & Divorce

Session 4: Modern Families

Session 5: Reproductive Technologies

Session 6: Surrogacy & Adoption

Session 7: Katy Unplugged — Q&A

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Before Next Week

• If you don’t have a copy of the Them Before Us book, we suggest buying a copy and reading along.

• Gather a group of folks from your neighborhood, family, or church who want to go through the series with you.

• If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, choose to support this work and subscribe so you can have access to all of our resources.

Gather your people. Get them equipped. Kids need strong adults defending their rights, and this summer, you can be one of them.

Share

Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.

Donate

When I (Sam) first scrolled past the birth announcement of Cameron Diaz's third child, I wanted to be excited. I wanted to celebrate. Babies are the best! But then I saw that she was 53 years old and used a surrogate for all three of her children, and my heart sank.

Cameron is known for seeing the beauty in aging and accepting our natural bodies the way …

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Maybe it was a friend who spent years trying. A sister who sat across from a doctor and heard the word “infertility” like a door closing. A woman in your church who quietly disappeared from conversations or stopped coming to baby showers because it hurt too much. Someone who was handed a brochure for an IVF clinic on the way out of the doctor’s office, as if that settled it.

Members of the Them Before Us team and our family members and friends have also sat in those same offices and have heard those same words from doctors. We don’t come to this conversation from the outside looking in. We come to it as people who understand what it feels like to be told your body isn’t working and that technology is your only hope.

But here is what eight episodes of this series have documented, and what this final episode makes clearer than any before it:

The IVF industry does not offer desperate people real help. It offers an attempt at bypassing one’s fertility. It circumvents the underlying problem without fixing it, costs families tens of thousands of dollars, carries serious health risks for women, and has resulted in the deaths of at least 108 million human embryos since 1978.

There is another way. Most women are never told about it.

Dr. Naomi Whittaker has spent her career in that other way. She is a board-certified OB-GYN and fellowship-trained surgeon who specializes in the Creighton Model Fertility Care System and NaProTechnology, an approach that works with a woman’s body to find and treat the underlying causes of infertility rather than bypassing them entirely. She is the founder of RRM Academy and one of the clearest voices in medicine, saying what this series has been building toward all along: IVF is rarely, if ever, truly the only option.

Start from the beginning or catch up on any episode:
🔗 Intro: When IVF Becomes a Right, Who Pays the Price?
🔗 Ep 1: He Directed an IVF Lab for Seven Years. Here’s Why He Left.
🔗 Ep 2: What Your Fertility Clinic Won’t Tell You
🔗 Ep 3: More Than 100 Million Embryos Have Died. The Industry Doesn’t Have to Tell You That.
🔗 Ep 4: We Figured Out How to Engineer Humans Before We Figured Out If We Should
🔗 Ep 5: Baby Selling Is Illegal. Unless You Call It Surrogacy.
🔗 Ep 6: Her Parents Were Told to Lie. She Spent 22 Years Not Knowing Why She Felt Like a Stranger.
🔗 Ep 7: They Trusted Their Doctor. He Used His Own Sperm.

This series has given you the science, the ethics, the policy, the personal stories, and the fraud. This final episode gives you the path forward. This is our IVF | FYI series finale, and it ends with hope. Watch Episode 8 before reading the briefing below, then come back for the full breakdown.

The briefing and reflection questions below are for paid subscribers. Thank you for investing in and supporting this work! Here’s what you’ll find on the other side:

• Why the menstrual cycle is a vital sign of a woman’s overall health, and why most doctors were never taught that

• What restorative reproductive medicine actually involves, step by step

• How Dr. Whittaker treats endometriosis, PCOS, and other conditions that IVF attempts to bypass

• What she sees in women who come to her after failed IVF cycles

• Why she says no one actually needs IVF, and what the research shows about spontaneous conception

• Her advice for every couple before they walk into a fertility clinic

• Resources to find a restorative reproductive medicine provider near you

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And for good reason.

Biologically, the risks …

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“When I was growing up, and I heard the statement, ‘Ross, you’re so lucky or privileged or blessed to have had two moms who raised you,’ I wished so desperately with every ounce in my fiber and being that I actually would have been raised with one mom and one father.”

The world had a script ready for Ross, and he was offered it early and often. You’re lucky. You’re blessed. Look how loved you are. He heard it from teachers and strangers and well-meaning friends, and every time he heard it, it felt wrong because he knew it wasn’t the whole truth. He was loved, but he was also missing someone, and no one around him seemed willing to admit it.

Ross spent years without the words for what he was missing, but now, as an adult, Ross shares his story to help people understand the truth of what children have a right to.

The Circle and the Square

Ross has a way of explaining his childhood that a five-year-old could follow.

“If you remember that game you play with your children where it’s a triangle, a circle, and a square, this is how I like to say it. When you have two moms, it’s trying to fit a circle into a square. It looks really close, it might even feel really close, but it can never perfectly fit.”

Two women raised him. One leaned feminine. One took what our culture would call a more stereotypical “masculine “ role. Some folks claim this would be good enough for a child.

“Her outward appearance was masculine, but her inward heart and language were feminine... the day-to-day living was two feminine women.”

A woman can cut her hair, mow the lawn, or work on the car, and still, in her heart and her voice and the way she loves a child, be exactly what she is. A mother. A woman can be an extraordinary mother. She cannot be a father. Ross had two women in his life offering him mothering, but he did not have a father. The father-shaped space in his home stayed empty, no matter who stood near it.

The Ache He Couldn’t Name

At five, six, and seven, Ross couldn’t understand what he was missing, only feel it.

“Most people have one mom, one dad. In my situation, I had two moms. And I recognized I didn’t have a dad to go in the backyard with me and throw the baseball. I didn’t have a dad to say, ‘Hey, son, I once was at this stage of my life. Here’s what I did that helped me.’”

By high school, the gap had a shape. Ross watched the other boys and felt the distance between them and himself. They knew how to talk to girls. He didn’t. They seemed to carry a map for becoming a man; he didn’t have one.

“I started feeling really inadequate. How do I make money? How do I choose a college? How do I pursue a woman?... I have no clue how to talk to a girl.”

The first lessons in how to love a woman, how to approach her and treat her well, are lessons a boy learns by watching his father love his mother. Ross had no father, and no marriage between a mother and a father to watch. The two women who raised him could teach him many life lessons, but they could not give him that. Ross arrived at the edge of manhood without the one teacher every boy is owed.

And at night, the ache had no daylight cover.

“There’s this ache, there’s this longing, there’s this desire, and there’s this recognition that something in the deepest place of my heart and my soul is missing... I was longing for a father, for a man, a male to come around me, to look me eye to eye, face to face, arms around me and say, ‘Son, I love you. I’m here for you. And I will never leave you.’”

No one taught Ross to want that. He wasn’t argued into it by a worldview or a belief system, and he says so himself. A child’s longing for a mother and father is simply there, the way hunger is there if you don’t get enough to eat. It was the longing of a child for the father he was made to know.

The Men Who Stepped In

What Ross did have were borrowed fathers.

There was a baseball coach, the father of a teammate, who started asking him questions. Did he want to go to the batting cages? Did he want to grab dinner after practice? Small things to those men, but to Ross, they were enormous.

“I felt a connection with another male... I felt so seen by him.”

There was another coach with a loud Mustang who would rev the engine on the drive home.

“There was something about the confidence he had in being masculine that I’d never experienced before. And I felt alive in a way that I never felt before.”

A boy felt alive, seen, and protected for the first time, because a man paid attention to him. These men were good, and we should be grateful for them. But notice what their kindness reveals. The hole they filled was a hole that should never have existed. Ross had to receive from other people’s fathers what he should have been receiving at his own kitchen table. The gap had to be patched by visiting dads who always went home to their own children.

What He Wants Now

Ross’s story does not close with a reunion. There is no missing father who turns up on the doorstep, no name in a phone book, and no resemblance staring back from a mirror. The ache he carried into adulthood is, in his honest telling, still with him. Even his mother’s partner, who helped raise him, never reached the place a mother or father reaches:

“As much as the non-biological mom has done for me, I just could never get heart-connected to her. And it’s not a sign of dishonor or disrespect.”

What Ross has instead is a decision. He has watched men who are now mentors and friends come home to children who sprint across the room to reach them. He has held those children. And it has shown him a door.

“Even though this might not have been my experience, I don’t have to live in that for the rest of my life. I can actually have a family of my own... I get to write my own story.”

This is not the longing resolved, but it is a man resolving to make sure his own children never feel it. Ross wants to be the father he was never given. That is the most hopeful thing in his story, and it is also an indictment of everything that left him longing in the first place.

What Ross Knew at Ten

Tomorrow is Father’s Day. Families will gather, and somewhere a man will be handed a card by a child who climbed into his lap, and neither of them will think twice about it, because a father in the home is the most ordinary miracle there is.

Ross is asking us not to look away from the children for whom it isn’t ordinary. The ones who watch that scene from the outside. The boy on the edge of his bed with no one to tell him how to become a man.

Next Friday marks eleven years since Obergefell v. Hodges. Eleven years since our highest court redefined marriage, and in redefining marriage, redefined parenthood. The ruling did not invent the longing Ross describes. Ross is older than the decision. But Ross is a witness to the truth that the decision denied. He knew at ten years old, sitting on the edge of his bed, what our law and our culture now treat as bigotry to say out loud. A child needs a mother and a father.

What changed eleven years ago was not that some adults were finally left alone to live as they chose. What changed is that we reordered parenthood itself around adult desire, declared a child’s hunger for a father a prejudice rather than a right, and then asked the whole country to celebrate the very absence children grieve. Ross was told he was lucky. He was told to be grateful for what he had and quiet about what he didn’t. That is what we now ask of thousands more children. Gratitude for the love they were given, and silence about the parent they lost.

A child has a right to the mother and the father who made him. The child, who got no vote in any of this, is owed the two people responsible for his existence. That is his by nature, before any court or any culture has an opinion about it.

Ross spent his childhood being told how fortunate he was, but he spent his nights longing for a dad. Believe the boy on the edge of the bed.

If you want to help build a world where children don’t have to sit longing for a mother or father they were intentionally denied, join the Greater Than movement today.

Support Greater Than

Find additional resources on Obergefell, Greater Than, and how children are harmed by redefining marriage below:

Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs.

Donate

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.

Subscribe now

McKay was donor-conceived. His mother used an anonymous sperm donor, and for as long as he could remember, McKay want…

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