I posted this brief review on Facebook last September, but it really belongs here as well. 

Katy Faust's book Them Before Us should be high on everyone’s reading list. I have followed Faust’s outstanding work for several years on various social media platforms and this book represents the distillation of much of her research. It is a defense of children’s rights. For too long, our culture has lived “us before them” - putting adult desires above children’s needs (especially adult sexual desires above children's needs). The result has been the wreckage we see all around us - abortion, no fault divorce, fatherlessness, intentional single motherhood, the pain children experience from surrogacy and placement in same-sex households, etc. Virtually all our social ills can be traced back to our rejection of God’s design for family life. This book makes the case that marriage matters - it’s the only proper context for sex, and the original “safe space” for children. It makes the case that biology matters - men and women are different in complementary ways, and there are deep reasons why God designed for children to ordinarily have both a mom and dad who are permanently and exclusively committed to each other. Children need paternal, masculine love and maternal, feminine love poured into their lives. A child has a right to the man and woman who created him, and the man and woman who create a child have obligations to that child. There is no substitute for the God-ordained natural family. Faust shows that legitimate concerns from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum could be met with a renewed emphasis on the vulnerability of children and the importance of marriage/family.

This book has also has some penetrating insights into adoption - what adoption means, how it should work, and why anything other than a child-centric approach to adoption is highly problematic.
Pro-life advocates will also be pressed to recognize that they have had a massive blind spot in not challenging the travesty of “Big Fertility,” that essentially uses technology to turn children into commodities, for sale to any who have the necessary funds. Child trafficking is going on all around us, and yet no one seems to care.
 
This book will inform, enlighten, and challenge you. I could raise a few quibbles - mainly because I think the alliance of child rights advocates Faust has assembled, composed of evangelical Christians, gays, Muslims, atheists, etc. - seems unstable to me. She needs to apply the same natural law reasoning she uses in defending the traditional nuclear family to the issue of homosexuality. But the overall content of the book is outstanding. This book does for children’s rights what “When Harry Became Sally” by Ryan Anderson does for transgenderism and what “Eggs Are Expensive, Sperm Is Cheap” by Greg Krehbiel does for sex roles. It is a natural law argument that uncovers how and why God has designed the world the way he has. It does not appeal to Scripture, but coheres with Scripture and fills out why Scripture teaches what it does about family life.