At a forum hosted in Sydney by former deputy prime minister John Anderson, US-based author and child advocate Katy Faust urged Australians to rethink every major policy— from economics to family law—through the lens of what is best for children.
The fast-talking, pro-child activist was a guest speaker at the forum on 19 June organised by Anderson and the Page Research Centre.
She was promoting her latest publication, Pro-Child Politics: Why every cultural, economic, and national issue is a matter of justice for children. In the book, 20 or so experts discuss the lies and truths of public policy on issues ranging from taxation to pornography to gender ideology to immigration to smart phones.
Faust heads a Seattle-based foundation called Them Before Us, which defends a child’s right to his or her own mother and father. With her husband Ryan, an Evangelical pastor who is currently serving as a chaplain in the US Navy, she has four children.
Her fundamental argument, expressed in the introduction to her book, is that “there’s really no area in our society broadly, whether politics, culture, or economics, where we prioritise what is best for children.”
“What exactly would it look like to put them (the children) before us (the adults)? How could our society improve if we considered their rights, needs, and well-being before our own?”
The answer is that divorce, same-sex parenting, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, adoption, tax policy, and the national debt would look entirely different, both in the United States and Australia.
“Children cannot defend themselves. That is your job,” Faust reminded her Sydney audience. “You need to create a child-centric fighting force to defend them.”
Framing policy issues with children first and foremost is a powerful weapon in public debates, she contended.
“You take it out of the abstract of, well, this is just our party and where we stand. And you make it very practical, applicable and personal.”
For example: the national debt.
“If I choose to raise this debt ceiling, that means that instead of a newborn that’s born today in the United States, instead of them owing $87,000 the day that they’re born, they’re going to owe $102,000 the day that they’re born,” she explained.
“Individualise it. Talk about the distinct harm to children, and then you’re not just going to get great policy. You probably are going to win a lot of people to your cause, because you are doing the thing that everybody wants to do, and that is champion the genuinely vulnerable.”
One theme of Faust’s remarks and the questions that followed was collapsing fertility.
She pointed out that most Western and Asian countries are not replacing their populations. Australia’s fertility rate is 1.5, meaning that on average, women have 1.5 children.
But it takes a rate of 2.1 simply to maintain the same level of population. Other countries are far lower. Spain and Italy’s fertility rate is 1.2; South Korea’s is 0.7.
“About 70 percent of the world lives in countries where the fertility rate is below replacement rate,” said Faust. “So we are actually entering a population winter where there is sort of a species-level threat taking place.”
What’s the solution? It’s not government subsidies or tax breaks or paying women to stay at home. “You can’t buy your way out of this problem,” she said. The answer is something intangible and can be seen at work in Israel, she believes.
Israel has the highest fertility rate among OECD countries, averaging around three children per woman. Part of this is due to large ultra-Orthodox Jewish families, but even secular Jews are having more children. The difference is that motherhood is highly esteemed in Israel.
“Israel does that well: we value you as a mother, not just as a widget in the economic machine,” said Faust. “We need to tell a better story, especially about motherhood, definitely about children, but especially as it relates to women choosing to have those children.”
Furthermore, religion matters. Observant Evangelicals, Catholics, Jews and Muslims all have more children. Religion leads them, Faust said, “to the place where they say, ‘I don’t want just one. I’ll take seven.’”
Which means that the future is being shaped by couples with religious convictions. “Now anecdotally, my friends on the left are having zero to two children, and my friends on the right are having two to 13,” Faust said.
“So there are areas of hope. If things continue this way, we won’t have to fight the culture wars a whole lot longer. We’re simply going to breed them out.”
