Several weeks ago, YouTuber Jesse Ridgway (also known as “McJuggerNuggets”) and his wife, Ashley, went viral for a video capturing the moment the millennial couple discovered that their preborn child had a severe likelihood of being born with Down Syndrome. Later, they announced that they had aborted the baby.1 The decision garnered much critical attention from the pro-life community, and the analysis quickly turned to the question, “What does this act reveal about the perception of children and family within modern society?”
Many philosophers and cultural commentators have observed that we live in an era of “expressive individualism.” The growing interest in faith and religion among Gen Zers is a logical consequence of the untenable position that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to existence within the world. There is no being, only becoming. In terms of personal identity, value, significance, and dignity are a result of not what or who you are. Rather, it is the result of the ego’s self-creation, turning the world into a stage upon which people perform an identity that aligns with their unrestrained inner desires and sense of self. In the digital age, expressive individualism mutates on social media into the commodification of daily life in influencer culture. Even in something as jarring as peering into a private and intimate moment of a young couple learning about the chromosomes of their flesh and blood within the woman’s womb, this moment is great content.
This snapshot of our modern culture provides a window into the necessity of the argument at the center of Katy Faust and Stacy Manning’s recent publication, Them Before Us. Them Before Us is not merely a title. It is a maternal protest of modern culture in the form of a guttural cry. It is a growing civil rights movement that may one day rival those of the 1960s. Them Before Us is based upon a simple claim. For the past several decades, legislation and moral arguments have been centered upon the rights and desires of adults. Gay marriage, no-fault divorce, adoption, surrogacy, and IVF treatments have been judged as moral goods in giving adults the freedom to achieve life satisfaction as each individual deems fit. As the Ridgway fiasco reveals, these debates are framed in a way in which the conversation focuses “obsessively on adult desires” and in which “children are constantly losers” (xxviii). Within the era of expressive individualism, marriage and children do not reflect transcendent and sacred values about life and human dignity. Rather, even the life and value of human beings, such as little Ridgway, is subsumed under the ultimate “rights,” autonomy, and lifestyle preferences of adults.
The Them Before Us campaign is seeking to change that.
As someone who has read many books throughout my years of education, I have observed that most works offer only a few genuinely novel insights into their topic, due to the nature of research and the way different works build their arguments upon one another. Them Before Us does not fall into that category. Rather, the book moves through an analysis of numerous pressing cultural issues that regularly left me thinking, “Why haven’t I thought of that before?” Once one grasps the elevation of adult desires above the rights of children within modern society, this dynamic becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
Take the popular argument concerning LGBTQ+ family and adoption, another instance in which stories of sad gay couples are used as a means to force “moral progress” in modern civilization. “They just want to have the ‘rights’ of heterosexual couples,” the argument goes. Them Before Us brilliantly flips these declarations of “rights” on its head, foregrounding the natural rights of children to the invented “rights” of modern society. Hospitals and governments recognize that, by virtue of natural birth, parents have a natural right to their biological offspring, and children have a natural right to belong to their biological parents. “In other words, there is a widespread legal and cultural presumption that you will raise the children you’re responsible for making, and you will be punished if you fail to do so” (5). Therefore, whether in the idea that the gender-specific role of “mother” or “father” can be supplemented with the unsex category of “parent,” or in the growing practice of surrogacy that is the closest real life practice of “the Handmaiden’s Tale” in women offering up their eggs and wombs to the highest bidder—including LGBTQ+ couples—in the name of “equality,” Faust and Manning are correct that every time family “rights” are created to fulfill the desires of adults that bypass the natural pathway of marriage and conjugal union, it is children who suffer.
Faust and Manning summarize this point in the following quote:
Here’s the gist: in the context of family, children have a right to their mother and father. When this right is ignored, children are commodified; they become possessions to be cut and pasted into any and every romantic adult relationship. Of course, deadbeat biological parents and heroic stepparents do exist, but they are a rarity, and social scientists on both the left and the right acknowledge the leading factor that stacks the deck in favor of a child’s ability to thrive are married biological parents. (xxix)
At this point, readers may be wondering why an institute devoted to pastoral care and discipleship is recommending a book on public policy issues. There are several reasons. First, this book will expose Christians for the first time to many practices with major ethical issues that are growing in popularity in Western society. For example, international surrogacy is a growing practice that preys upon poor women in underdeveloped countries to produce children for buyers, lacking all the safety and accountability of traditional adoption (205–206). While many pastors and counselors would recognize the sensitive issue of IVF technologies, it is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the reality that the technology itself has unleashed a Pandora’s box of ethical problems once procreation is removed from the sexual union of a man and a woman within the context of marriage. As this one example demonstrates, this book provides counselors with an overview of many ethical issues that will eventually end up in their counseling rooms.
Second, it is becoming increasingly difficult for Christians to cut through the fog of ideas circulating in our culture about the modern family. When a blended family shows up at your church, it is right and good to show them compassion and understanding. At the same time, pastors must be able to discern trends and common obstacles that often confront these non-traditional family structures.
Take the story of Cinderella, for example. The Cinderella story is not ultimately based upon a European myth but an unfortunate reality for countless children suffering under novel approaches to marriage and family. The spiritual and moral values of the stepparents aside, it is an undeniable phenomenon that parents have greater biological incentives to invest in their own children rather than others. In a blended family, equal treatment in both attention and provision is a difficult outcome to achieve. “For a new spouse, stepchildren can represent replacement of and/or competition with the child’s birth mother or father, a dynamic which invariably impacts an adult’s ability to love and connect with his or her spouse’s children. This is true no matter how much we would rather it be false” (36). As many people know, the most dangerous place in America, especially for developing girls, is a home “that includes an unrelated male boyfriend” (32).
In light of these factors, the safest environment for the physical and emotional growth of children is in a home with their biological parents. In other words, a stable marriage. Now, it is important to acknowledge that there are many families and individuals that are unable to fulfill this arrangement because of factors outside their control, such as bereavement, abandonment by a spouse or parent, or a child in need of an adoptive family. But while options such as adoption or remarriage after the loss of a spouse seek to remedy a relational wound to a child or family, many parents are consciously inflicting harm upon their children in decisions that, at their root, are about adult fulfillment and happiness. Adoption, for example, “is born of brokenness” (207). “Donor conception,” on the other hand, “begins with brokenness by choice. Unlike with adoptive parents who seek to mend a wound, the purchase of third-party procreation creates a wound” in order to satisfy adult desires for a family (207). Children forced to endorse the sexual identity of their parents, “knowing you would face certain excommunication from your social circle if you spoke honestly about your natural longings for a mother and father” (136). Or consider the emotional havoc inflicted upon children by parents who separate or pursue no-fault divorce.
In considering divorce further, Faust and Manning describe the dissolution of a marriage as a “transference. It’s the act of swapping adults’ short-term misery for their child’s long-term physical and emotional health” (102). If two adults are mature enough to create life, they should be challenged to exhibit the maturity to nurture that life through putting their own desires to death and pursuing what is best for their spouse and child. Divorce or separation from an unmarried partner is not a one-time event, but the first link in a chain of cascading moments that continue to inflict emotional and psychological harm upon the child of that broken union. Therefore, the counsel of Faust and Manning is appropriate: “Yes, you should stay in your marriage. Put on your best big-kid pants and make it work” (116). The research by Faust and Manning in Them before Us will help many pastors and counselors grow in discernment as we begin to receive more data on the early returns on these novel approaches to the modern family in this brave new world.
Finally, Them Before Us is an unexpected apologetic for the traditional approach to marriage and family found within the Scriptures. As a concession, the book is a public policy book. Thus, the authors seek to appeal to a broader audience, including the LGBTQ+ community (144), to bring about legal reforms that would protect the most vulnerable among us. But the recommendations they advance to protect children have been proclaimed from Christian pulpits for centuries, having their origins in the opening pages of Scripture. God created man, male and female. God called his creation very good. God gave to man the institution of marriage as a lifelong covenant for the mutual benefit of a man and a woman, consummated with a physical union powerful enough to bring forth new life.
Our culture loves to parade the pleasures of unrestrained sexual desires with pride. But the psychological toll of a schizophrenic culture that approaches casual sex as both meaningless and irreversibly traumatic is a self-evident factor in the decreasing mental health of the rising generation. But what about the emotional and spiritual health of today’s children? Children born out of wedlock. Children with two addresses. Children with two Christmases, birthdays, and graduation parties. Children who cannot vocalize their natural longings for a mother because that would “offend” their dads or moms.
Hear the voice of one young and anonymous donor-conceived individual:
Am I the only one who feels this way? Am I a bad daughter because I wish I had a Dad? Is there anyone else who has 2 Moms or 2 Dads who wonders what it would be like if they were born into a normal family? Is ther anyone else who wants to be able to use the word normal without getting a lecture on what is normal??? I don’t know my real father and never will. Its weird but I miss him. I miss the man I will never know. Is it wrong for me to long for a father like my friends have? (135)
Can we claim to be wiser than God in claiming to know what a family should look like and not be surprised when there are consequences? But, then again, we should not be surprised. The impulse to prioritize adults’ desires over children’s stems from the desire to exalt ourselves above one another and above God. In other words, sin.
Them Before Us reveals that God’s design for sex, marriage, and family is the best design for human flourishing after all.
- Hannah Sacks, “YouTuber Jesse Ridgway and Wife Made ‘Difficult Decision to Terminate’ Pregnancy After Down Syndrome Diagnosis: ‘Gut Punch,’” People, June 4, 2026, https://people.com/influencers-made-difficult-decision-to-end-pregnancy-after-down-syndrome-diagnosis-11991316. ↩︎
