Inside Liberty University's Secret Maternity Home
(and the WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
Inside Liberty University’s Secret Maternity Home
PUBLISHED 7/10/2025 by Ava Slocum
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.”
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President Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell leave after Trump delivered the keynote address during the commencement at Liberty University on May 13, 2017, in Lynchburg, Va. Trump is the first sitting president to speak at Liberty’s commencement since George H.W. Bush in 1990. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
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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.
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A mobile billboard parked outside Caring Hearts, a crisis pregnancy clinic in Little Rock. (Courtesy of Mayday Health)
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.”
https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/liberty-university-maternity-home-unwed-mothers-teenagers/
= new reply since forum marked as read
For over 50 years. Jerry Fatwell couldn't even control how much food he stuck into his fat face. His son? With the cabana pool-boy?
Makes perfect sense. Dystopian. 