When Abbi Johnson turned pregnant at 16, nobody supplied her a baby bathe. As a substitute, she was sent away to a maternity home for young, unwed mothers.
In her evangelical family in North Carolina, premarital intercourse wasn’t simply taboo — it was a sin. The mentality of “saving your self” till marriage was essentially the most constant thread all through her upbringing, she informed The Unbiased.
Her father gave her a purity ring, proudly asserting to others that she had “promised him her virginity” till she was married. That expectation is a ritual many evangelical ladies undergo, bolstered by youth pastors who preach modesty and obedience, warning ladies not to “tempt” boys with the way in which they behave or costume.
So when Abbi acquired pregnant again in 2008, her religious dad and mom, ashamed and determined to cover the fallout, sent her to the Liberty Godparent Residence — a little-known maternity facility on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
There, she was informed she could be protected. Supported. Guided. What she didn’t know was that she was coming into a system that many ladies now say was constructed on coercion, management, and a quiet transaction: her baby in alternate for her future.
The house for younger moms was a place that, in hindsight, felt eerily harking back to The Handmaid’s Story — not in costume, however in management. There have been locks on the home windows and doorways. The women have been required to attend church providers collectively, taught to obey with out query, after which they have been punished when they rebelled. Their pregnancies have been handled as ethical failures that wanted to be atoned for.
On the finish of their time, a ceremony was held — there was cake, presents, and household. However this wasn’t a celebration of motherhood. It was a goodbye. That is when they handed over their infants — whether or not they actually wished to or not.
The twisted transaction is the middle of Liberty Lost, a powerful new investigative podcast from Wondery, that dropped Monday. Hosted by journalist T.J. Raphael, the six-part collection pulls again the curtain on the Godparent Residence and the tradition of pressured adoption inside America’s strongest evangelical college.
Raphael reveals the dystopian actuality behind a secretive establishment on campus, the place pregnant teenagers have come ahead years later to report feeling pressured and coerced into giving up their infants for adoption.
On the coronary heart of the story featured within the podcast is Abbi — now in her 30s with a household, residing on the alternative coast from the Bible belt – who is decided to inform the reality she says has been buried for practically 20 years, together with the trauma that by no means left her.
After giving delivery, Abbi continued her time at Liberty College to fulfill her anticipated position of a “regular” faculty pupil.
However whereas different teenage ladies have been “listening to Taylor Swift and dealing at Forever 21,” she discovered it onerous to care about any of it. As a substitute, she was consumed with the lack of the son she had handed over to a “prosperous, married Christian couple” as a result of she was informed it was “God’s plan.”
“I was raised to perceive that this was the trail … I might been listening to it my entire life, the rhetoric that a baby deserves two loving dad and mom and married households, ,” Abbi informed The Unbiased.
What Abbi skilled stems from a darkish historical past that started with Jerry Falwell Sr, who created these maternity properties in response to Roe v Wade again within the Eighties. However what many have no idea is that a few of these properties nonetheless exist in the present day.
“It isn’t even about needing that historic context to know that is what’s taking place,” she stated. “It is what occurred to me.”
A historical past hidden in plain sight
The Liberty Godparent Residence was established in 1982 and sits on Liberty College’s sprawling campus, based by Falwell — a man who helped construct the trendy Christian Proper, advocating for a “pro-family” agenda centered on points like abortion, college prayer, and conventional household values.
“One man for lady for one lifetime and no intercourse — interval — exterior of marriage,” his voice booms in one of many snippets from the podcast. Falwell died in 2007, however his legacy and his mission lived on.
Now, Godparent House is one in every of a rising variety of faith-based maternity properties that declare to supply assist to younger pregnant ladies.
However as Raphael discovers, the actual message contained in the partitions was typically way more punishing.
If these ladies full the Godparent Residence’s program, they’re eligible for a full-ride scholarship to Liberty, Raphael says.
Liberty Misplaced attracts from intimate interviews with Abbi and three different ladies who lived within the Residence between 1991 and 2008, weaving collectively tales of isolation, manipulation, and loss.
‘God’s plan’
Abbi wasn’t bodily pressured to hand over her baby.
However after her dad and mom refused to let her return house with the baby, with no monetary assist — and with the prospect of a full faculty scholarship dangling in entrance of her — she felt her choices have been restricted.
“It wasn’t what I wished to do in any respect,” Abbi informed The Unbiased.
“However it was extremely complicated. I might ask, ‘Why do full strangers get to have my son, and I’ve to earn a relationship with him?’ I hadn’t accomplished something fallacious. However they laid down the legislation — this was the punishment, and I was anticipated to stay it gracefully.”
The adoption was bought to her as “open,” however when Abbi tried to advocate for extra contact, she was denied. Her monitored visits ended.
The connection with her son — already fragile — light. That loss, she says, finally freed her to converse.
“If my son was searching for this info, I wished it to be there. And when the opposite ladies began coming ahead, it was like the largest hug — emotionally, it was validating and gratifying. I wasn’t alone.”
She posted movies of herself telling her story and started receiving messages from different ladies who had comparable experiences. Some had no assist from anybody, others had household assist, however the monetary burden was an excessive amount of to do on their very own.
Abbi’s personal expertise was formed not solely by the employees on the house however by the deeply rooted non secular tradition she grew up in.
Each of her dad and mom admitted to being influenced by their non secular tradition when making the choice to ship their daughter away, after which expressed remorse in response to the podcast.
“When our daughter turned pregnant at 16, I made errors in my steerage that resulted in lifelong penalties,” her mom, Debbie Blanzy, wrote in a statement shared with the podcast. “Influenced by a tradition that believed infants developed greatest in two-parent properties, I embraced this philosophy and didn’t join with our daughter’s earnest need to father or mother her baby son.”
She defined that their medical insurance wouldn’t cowl any of the bills incurred through the delivery. However the Godparent Residence, on the college the place she is an alum, had promised her bills could be lined – on the situation that she full this system.
“In different phrases, if she left early with out employees approval, we might have to reimburse the Residence for the bills incurred for our daughter’s time there…..that scared me.”
“There was a lot I didn’t notice again then about adoption, adoptee trauma, and the injurious aftermath suffered by delivery dad and mom,” she stated, including that she has come to “see issues concerning the observe of adoption within the U.S. that are in want of reform.”
Abbi’s father, Don, echoed the remorse in his assertion:
“Understanding what I do know now, I might not have allowed the adoption course of to proceed,” he stated. “I ought to have merely stated, ‘We’re having a baby. Allow us to have fun and go house,’” he added, admitting that he had been “wrongfully influenced by the tradition round me.”
A harmful resurgence
What occurred to Abbi isn’t simply historical past — it’s prophecy.
Because the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there was a 23 p.c enhance in maternity properties throughout america. And Liberty’s Godparent Residence sits on the middle of this rising motion.
“Individuals suppose these properties went away,” says Raphael. “They didn’t. They by no means stopped current. If something, in 2025, they’re rising. Because the finish of Roe, there was an effort to develop them throughout the nation.”
Via her analysis, Raphael discovered that $50 million in state and federal funding has fueled the growth of anti-abortion counseling facilities, adoption companies, and maternity properties.
The previous director of the Godparent Residence sat for years on the management council of the Nationwide Maternity Housing Coalition — run by Heartbeat Worldwide, the most important anti-abortion group on the earth.
That’s why this story issues now, Raphael says.
“I wished to inform a story that may converse to our current second. And what I discovered is that the post-Roe panorama isn’t nearly banning abortion — it’s about controlling the outcomes of delivery. That features who will get to be a father or mother.”
The Unbiased has reached out to each Liberty College and the Godparent Residence for remark, however has not obtained a response. They didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark by Liberty Misplaced.
Greater than a story — it’s a warning
Liberty Misplaced isn’t nearly one maternity house, or one woman.
The collection asks a chilling query in a post-Roe America: Who will get to resolve who’s worthy of turning into, or remaining, a father or mother?
“There’s a want, in principle, for these locations – locations that present protected housing, meals, assist for susceptible ladies,” Raphael stated. “That’s a great thought in principle, however when it’s intertwined with doubtlessly problematic values about single motherhood, that’s the place the issue is and that’s when ladies face the danger of being separated from their kids.”
For Abbi Johnson, the wound has by no means healed.
However talking out, she says, is a part of the trail ahead — not only for her, however for others.
“My largest hope is that folks suppose a lot extra concerning the circumstances a lady finds herself in that she would even be contemplating adoption,” she stated. “Who’s placing that possibility in entrance of her and the way is it being introduced and the way is she being made to really feel when it comes to assist?”
“And never simply in that second – of that traumatic expertise of being pregnant while you really feel like you haven’t any assist and no sources – however take into consideration each issue that goes into discovering your self in that scenario,” she continued.
“Take into consideration what we provide ladies and why we provide these choices and why this concept that there are higher ladies suited to another person’s baby is such a culturally accepted thought.”
Liberty Misplaced debuted June 23 on all podcast platforms.
