Inside Liberty University’s Secret Maternity Home
Published By admin
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.”
Content retrieved from: https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/liberty-university-maternity-home-unwed-mothers-teenagers/.
