The idea of sending a pregnant person to a “maternity home” might sound like a relic of the 1950s. But, as the Liberty Lost podcast explains, these homes are still operating today, and could impact even more mothers and babies in the post-Roe era.
The Wondery investigative series, which came out last week, has rocketed up the charts with its gripping report about the Liberty Godparent Home, a maternity home for pregnant people operating on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Since 1982, the home at the university, which is one of the most powerful cultural institutions in the right-wing evangelical movement, has housed women with unplanned pregnancies. Some people may associate these types of facilities with the bygone and horrifying “baby scoop” era of nearly a century ago.
The home states that the women they house have a choice whether or not to parent their child or relinquish them for adoption. But the women interviewed by show host and investigative journalist T.J. Raphael say they felt pressured to choose adoption.
In response to the claims made in the podcast, the Liberty Godparent Foundation, which runs the home, tells Glamour that it rejects “claims of this tabloid podcast as irresponsible journalism designed to undermine this important work and to minimize the importance and effectiveness of pro-life organizations.”
“Since 1982, the Liberty Godparent Foundation has supported hundreds of young women to offer housing, counseling, and educational resources that empower informed parenting and voluntary adoption with compassion and care,” the statement reads. “Its vital role in serving Central Virginia has been widely recognized for decades. Our staff and volunteers work tirelessly in this ministry and have built a reputation of being a trusted voice and ministry resource in the community. They have treated every individual who has sought assistance with compassion and integrity.”
But the podcast is about more than just one maternity home. It challenges the entire American construct of adoption, asking difficult questions about how we view birth or natural mothers, who “gets” to parent in this country, and the dismissal of the trauma these mothers say they faced after separating from their children.
The podcast’s most prominent subject, Abbi Johnson, attended the home as a teenager and gave birth to her son in 2008, describing on the podcast that she felt pressured to relinquish him from both home staff and her evangelical parents. Her experience has led her to feel compelled to speak out about the ongoing trauma she says she has faced from feeling pressured to relinquish her son, first on social media and then in the podcast. She tells Glamour that sharing her story so publicly has been “empowering.”
“For me, living without access to my own child has been so dehumanizing…it’s been a really painful experience my whole life,” she says.” Not anonymous, being just myself, it felt like I had nothing to lose.”
Johnson and Raphael chatted with Glamour about the Liberty Lost podcast, why they think so few people know about these types of maternity homes, and how the issue is even more important in the post-Roe era.
Glamour: The podcast has had an immediate impact. Were you expecting such a response?
Abbi Johnson: For me it’s unsurprising because when I share my story, I tend to get this response of people being like, “Wow, I’ve always been confused about adoption, I’ve been curious about it, and you’ve given me so much information to kind of satiate from curiosity I’ve always had.” So I’m not surprised how many people are finding it compelling and important to listen to, but it’s giving me a lot of hope.
T.J. Raphael: I’m thrilled with the response that we’re getting so far. When I first connected with Abbi back in 2022, I think I was in that camp of “Wait, what? Do these homes still exist?” And it’s been wonderful to work with her to help tell this story over the years. I was scouring Reddit the other day and it’s really interesting to see people starting to talk about adoption as a reproductive justice issue. I feel like it’s often left out of the conversation around reproductive justice, and so that’s been exciting to see people thinking more deeply about this.
The fight for equal reproductive rights is even more acute right now under the Trump administration than when you started this project in 2022 after the fall of Roe. How do you feel that this podcast plays into that larger conversation?
TR: The Project 2025 agenda championed by members of the Trump administration explicitly calls for adoption to be an alternative to abortion. It also calls for the funding of faith-based adoption agencies, very much like Family Life Services, which is attached to the Liberty Godparent Home. But reproductive rights and choice are taken away for so many people across the country, most women who get pregnant, even if they’re denied abortions, do not pursue adoption. It is always the least popular choice among anyone who will become pregnant.
Through my research for this series, I’ve found that women generally find themselves in a position where they will be placing their child for adoption due to desperation, hardship, and a lack of support. We see the administration cutting vital social services for Medicaid, for food stamps, for housing assistance, and that then places pregnant people who are already vulnerable without a safety net in a position where they feel like they’re unable to care for their children, and that will then lead them towards adoption.
AJ: I swear people on the left don’t even think about the natural mother, the woman who relinquished. It’s like they’ve never even considered it. That’s even the feedback that I get, that they “never thought about that before.” I don’t feel like it’s a part of conversation. I think they’re so concerned for a woman to have the right to choose an abortion that they almost feel like you’re just getting in the way of the pro-abortion conversation to even mention how the right is promoting adoption.
How would you like to see that change?
TR: I think protecting the right to choose means supporting people in whatever choice they want to make. For some people that is going to be a choice to end a pregnancy, but for lots of other people that will be the choice to continue with that pregnancy and want to parent that child. And I think for a lot of people it can feel like a false choice.
AJ: From my point of view as a birth mother in our culture, I see that people in positions of power who don’t want to talk about this, it’s almost always because they’re an adopted parent themselves or someone they know has adopted. So they have this bias to want to protect the person in their life who has benefited from gaining from the construct of adoption. I don’t know of any birth mothers in positions of power politically in our country, but I regularly hear politicians and find out that they’re adoptive parents. So I think there’s just a strong bias in our country for that reason.
The number of maternity homes across the country has increased by nearly a quarter since Roe v. Wade ended. What else did you find out about these homes during your reporting for the podcast?
TR: I found that this one maternity home [not the Liberty Godparent Home] is reporting a 45% adoption rate, which is incredibly high when considering the national average for [all pregnancies] the last 20 years has hovered around 1%. It’s hard to get a good look into the industry at large because…they don’t put out an annual report detailing all the adoptions taking place at maternity homes. It’s sort of just anecdotal information that we get from the media put out by the groups running them. But many of them are religiously affiliated or faith-based, and those institutions espouse traditional family values that say that a child deserves a mother and a father, that sex outside of marriage is wrong, and that can then snowball into pressure.
Especially when you’re vulnerable or you are homeless and that’s why you’re living at a maternity home and you’re getting this kind of messaging day in and day out. It can lead a woman to question herself and believe what she’s being told by the people who allegedly are supporting her. I think we need better oversight and regulation into these institutions.
What is the main thing that you want people to take away from the show, and what can people who are learning about this for the first time and reconsidering their views on this issue do going forward?
TR: I hope that people think more deeply about adoption and about choice and the ways we do and don’t support pregnant women and other people in the United States. I would suggest that everybody check out Saving Our Sisters, we featured interviews from the founders, but they do a lot of amazing work that we didn’t even get to scratch the surface of. They have this program called Sisters on the Ground, which is if a woman is in crisis and maybe being coerced into adoption, they will actually deploy a volunteer to go help her in person. So that would be my suggestion and just keep your eyes peeled for what’s happening around reproductive rights.
AJ: I do believe in most people’s desire to see women feel empowered in their motherhood. And if anything, I want people to take away that most women who relinquish do so from a place of feeling disempowered and that they have no support and no encouragement and love and the things that they need to successfully parent. So I hope that’s what people take away.
The post The Liberty Lost Podcast Investigates the World of Modern ‘Maternity Homes’ appeared first on Glamour.
