Inside Liberty University’s Secret Maternity Home

Former residents say Liberty’s Godparent Home used shame and faith to force adoptions.

Liberty’s Godparent Home began under the direction of Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher and televangelist. (The Liberty Godparent Ministry / Instagram)
Imagine you’re a pregnant teenager in 1972. Abortion isn’t an option, and you’re not ready to get married … so you might turn to a maternity home for unwed mothers. You’ll live there until the baby is born, then give it up for adoption to redeem yourself from the so-called sin of premarital sex.

While they’re not well-known today in modern America, some people remember maternity homes from the 1950s through 1970s as places where mostly white, middle-class teenage girls gave birth in secret, then were forced to surrender their babies for adoption.

What even fewer people know is that these homes are not just a part of America’s Christian conservative past: They’re alive and well today. Many shut down in the 1970s after access to abortion became more widely available with Roe v. Wade. However, in the three years since the fall of Roe, the number of maternity homes in the U.S. has grown by 40 percent and now surpasses 450, according to reporting from The New York Times.

On June 23, podcast studio Wondery released the new series Liberty Lost, which investigates the well-kept secret of Liberty University’s Godparent Home, which opened in the 1980s and is still operating today. In the podcast, reproductive rights journalist T. J. Raphael explores the history of the maternity home on the campus of Liberty University, a private evangelical college in Lynchburg, Va. There, staff members coerce young girls into surrendering their babies for adoption by affluent Christian parents in exchange for a full-ride scholarship at Liberty.

Raphael told Ms. about her experience speaking with birth mothers Abbi Johnson, Toni Popham and Zoe Shaw, who lived at Liberty’s Godparent Home in the early ’90s and as recently as 2008, in Johnson’s case.

“They report a culture of shame, fear, religious manipulation and coercion that drove them to try and separate them permanently from their children despite their repeated expression that they wanted to keep and parent their babies,” Raphael explained. “And I think that a lot of people believe that maternity homes were a thing of the past, but in some communities, they never went away.”

Liberty’s Godparent Home began under the direction of Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher and televangelist who founded the Moral Majority, a conservative political organization that helped elect Ronald Reagan. Liberty University has come under fire in recent years for dismissing and blaming women students who came forward after being sexually assaulted and raped (a series of scandals that led to Falwell’s resignation as Liberty’s president in August 2020). A ProPublica piece from 2021 described how some of these students were warned they had violated the school’s “Liberty Way” honor code for premarital sex, drinking and being alone with a man on campus.

According to Liberty’s Godparent Home’s website, “The Liberty Godparent Ministry is a program for young, single, pregnant women. Located in Central Virginia, we offer a beautiful, modern, safe and secure home-like environment for women who may be faced with emotional, financial, or relational challenges.”

In the process of researching her podcast, Raphael expected to hear from women in their 60s and 70s, part of the baby boomer generation most commonly associated with mid-century American maternity homes. But when she put out a call for testimonies from former maternity home residents, she was startled to get responses from women like now-31-year-old Abbi Johnson, who lived at Liberty’s Godparent Home well into the 2000s.

“Maternity homes are on the rise,” Raphael told me. “There might be one near where you live, and maternity homes play a larger role within the wider antiabortion movement.” The last few years’ rise in U.S. maternity homes seems undoubtedly linked to 2022’s Dobbs decision and the end of the right to abortion in all 50 states. For decades, antiabortion advocates have pushed for adoption as an alternative to abortion (often ignoring the exploitative aspects of the adoption industry, which can prey on vulnerable young mothers and is nowhere near as regulated as abortion is in this country).

Raphael also pointed to a connection between maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers or fake clinics, which currently outnumber real abortion clinics in the U.S. by about three to one. “A lot of women who are uninterested in abortion might find themselves going to a crisis pregnancy center for information, for help, and then they’re pushed towards maternity homes if they’re rejected by their family,” she said.

Maternity homes, many run by churches or Christian organizations, have historically operated under a culture of shame that tells young unmarried women they’re not fit to become parents. The first Florence Crittenton home opened in New York in 1883 as a place to reform unmarried “fallen women.” (The Florence Crittenton maternity home network still operates today.) Most modern faith-based maternity homes “explicitly have to share a Christ-centered message, and that often looks like espousing traditional values, conservative family values, that say that single women should not be parenting,” Raphael said. “The only right way to have a child is to have it grow up in a two-parent household, often heterosexual.”

Many former maternity home residents share that staff told them—either implicitly or directly—that the best thing for them and their child would be permanent separation.

Of the 40-plus former Godparent Home staff members Raphael contacted, only two were willing to speak on the record. One said, “Guilt and shame were tools of the trade,” explaining to Raphael how the home promoted the idea that the pregnant teenage girls living there had sinned by violating their “purity pledges.”

The former staffers also told Raphael that whenever a resident expressed a desire to parent, Godparent Home staff would take her through a “parenting plan” that was actually designed to dissuade her from wanting to be a parent.

Abbi Johnson told Raphael that, over the six months she lived in the Godparent Home, she repeatedly asked for information about what she could do to parent her son. Staff also worked to separate her from her boyfriend Nathan, who also wanted to raise their child, not allowing the couple to speak together privately when he visited. When Popham and Shaw, the other women Raphael interviewed, also expressed their wishes to keep their babies, Godparent Home staff told them that God had a plan for them and that plan was to have their baby and give it to someone else. Staff members also told them that they needed redemption for their sins and one path to redemption was giving up their baby for adoption by a Christian couple.

Neither Godparent Home nor Liberty University have responded to Raphael’s multiple requests for comment.

Most maternity homes work with religiously affiliated adoption agencies (which, according to Raphael, organize 80 percent of U.S. infant adoptions). “I really view it as sort of a pipeline of crisis pregnancy center to maternity home to faith-based adoption agency,” Raphael said. “And I think in our present moment, we see in Project 2025, which is championed by the Trump administration, we see very explicitly in that document that they call for adoption as an alternative to abortion, and also call for state and federal funding to be diverted toward faith-based adoption agencies.”

As of February 2025, 18 states have authorized some form of funding to abortion alternatives, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute (the research arm of the far-right antiabortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America). These “abortion alternatives” often include crisis pregnancy centers, maternity homes and Christian adoption agencies.

Other women Raphael spoke to said they were desperate to be connected to housing programs, food stamps or Medicaid, but Godparent Home staff never gave them any information about these services. Staff also made it impossible for residents to find this information on their own by keeping them away from cell phones and the internet and monitoring any phone calls.

Although Liberty’s Godparent Home follows the more traditional model of housing pregnant teenage girls and making them place their babies for adoption, many modern maternity homes such as Hannah’s Home, Sunlight Home and Genesis House, all in Florida, house mothers along with their young children. Some only accept mothers over 18 instead of minors, partially because maternity homes that house teenagers are subject to greater state regulations and oversight. Many homes, especially the more religiously oriented ones with mandatory religious programming, are unregulated and require little training for employees.

Former residents of these homes describe intense rules and restrictions, including needing to ask for permission before leaving the property, attending mandatory morning prayers and handing over food stamps to pay for communal groceries. Other policies, such as requiring residents to surrender their phones before bedtime and download tracking apps, are in keeping with the censorship and scrutiny that former Godparent Home residents describe.

By shining a light on American maternity homes—an industry that frequently flies under the radar—Raphael’s podcast Liberty Lost highlights the grim reality of adoption coercion, an important and often overlooked topic in the national conversation surrounding reproductive rights.

According to Raphael, the podcast explores “the ways that adoption in the United States is also about choice, but oftentimes the lack of it. I don’t think that in this country, we really think critically about why a woman would permanently separate from the child she gave birth to. It’s often a result of desperation, a lack of resources and support.”