The Baby-Stealers of the Christian Right

A conversation with Liberty Lost creator TJ Raphael

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash

Last month, I listened to a podcast that radically shifted how I think about adoption and its place in the movements for reproductive rights and justice, and in our conversations about family more broadly. To be clear, I am far from anti-adoption; I know many happy adoptees and wonderful people with adopted children, and in theory, adoption is wonderful. But in practice, adoption is much more complicated. It is often extremely painful, especially for the birth mother. It is often not much of a choice at all. And the overwhelmingly laudatory and flowery way with which we discuss it? That’s really not accurate — least of all for the women and girls who place their babies for adoption.

Every adoption begins with pain. Every adoption starts with a mother who cannot parent her baby, or believes she cannot parent her baby, and that is a tragedy. That doesn’t make adoptive parents bad; plenty of adoptive parents are wonderful people raising beloved children. It doesn’t even make every adoption unethical; plenty are entered into openly and transparently, and really are in the best interests of all involved under the circumstances. But it does make the adoption industry one ripe for exploitation. It means that all of the arguments about how women should “just” choose adoption over abortion are not just deeply dishonest but profoundly dismissive of what it means to carry and birth a baby, what it means to have a child out in the world who you are severed from. And it should make us all look sideways at people who enthusiastically promote infant adoption as a happy and easy choice or try to tell a tidy and joyful narrative about adoption as a gift rather than one of the most complex and fraught human relationships one can engineer. That infant adoption in America is so often the work of a Christian movement that sees adoption as a form of evangelism — a way to raise more Christians — and that divides “bad” mothers who should place their babies from “good” families who deserve to raise them should make us all the more wary.

In the new podcast Liberty Lost, journalist T.J. Raphael looks at a maternity home on the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, an Evangelical college. Women and girls in the home show up pregnant and scared; Raphael’s reporting documents how they are pushed into adoption through shame, isolation, religious abuse, and flat-out lies. I cannot overstate how powerful this podcast is, or recommend it highly enough. It tells a powerful story. And I suspect it will challenge how you think about adoption, too.

T. J. was kind enough to lend us some of her thoughts about the project. A conversation with her is below.

Jill: This is such a shocking story — especially the foundational fact that not only do maternity homes still exist, but that one exists on the campus of America's most recognizable Evangelical college, Liberty University. How did you find this story? Is this the story you initially set out to tell?

T.J.: I first started working on this story back in July 2022, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. When most people think of the pre-Roe era, they think of a climate that produced dangerous back alley abortions. But that was just one part of the story — the pre-Roe era was also dominated by maternity homes, forced birth, and coerced adoption.

I wondered if our past held clues for our future, so I put out a call to speak with women who had gone through maternity homes. I expected to hear from Baby Boomers - women in their 60s and 70s. And I got a lot of emails from them. But I also got an email from Abbi Johson. When she reached out to me, she was 31-years-old, and she told me she had gone through a maternity home as a pregnant teenager in 2008. That’s the same year Beyoncé and Jay-Z got married. Her story wasn’t pre-Roe, it was modern.

And when Abbi told me that the maternity home she went to was on the campus of Liberty University, one of America’s most powerful institutions, and was founded by controversial preacher Jerry Falwell, alarm bells started to go off.

After working with Abbi over two years, I learned that her story was part of a much bigger web of deceit, coercion, and religious manipulation that can put vulnerable pregnant people in jeopardy of losing their children.

One of the most widely-embraced ideas in America is that adoption is a beautiful thing: Loving couples get a baby, and a baby in need gets a home. Your story complicates that narrative. What assumptions about adoption did you come into this story with? Did reporting it change your mind about adoption?

My assumptions about adoption have changed dramatically since I started working on this story. Adoption is often treated as a universal good — when we think about adoption, we typically think about happy adoptive parents, and beautiful babies. It’s one of our few bipartisan issues.

But when we start to think critically about why adoption happens — why someone chooses to permanently separate from the child they gave birth to — things begin to unravel quickly.

Most women who place their infants for adoption do so due to desperation, hardship, and a lack of support. Often they are pregnant and believe that, by the end of nine months, they will figure out what they need to be able to keep and parent their children. But then things don’t materialize, and they feel like they have no choice but to place their baby for adoption.

In that way, adoption is a reproductive justice issue. Because if someone is giving up their child due to financial constraints or a lack of support, is that really an active reproductive choice, or a choice made out of desperation, and therefore a reproductive injustice?

I think we on the left don’t often think about adoption as a reproductive justice issue, despite the fact that Norma McCorvey — the woman who would become famous under the pseudonym Jane Roe — was a birth mother herself.

McCorvey had gone through adoption, and didn’t want to do it again, which is why she sought to have an abortion and eventually led Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court. She absolutely has a complicated legacy, but I think it’s so often overlooked that the rallying cry of Roe has ties back to a birth mother.

A core takeaway from the podcast is that for many anti-abortion Evangelical Christians, there is a "right" kind of mother and family, and a "wrong" kind of mother and family, and that it's a moral decision to transfer children from the "wrong" families (like teenage moms) to the "right" ones (married Christians). How did you see that dynamic play out in your reporting? What feels relevant about it now, in this particular political moment? Have you seen any evidence that this is a model that's fraying or being challenged on the Christian right, with the rise of so many single-mother families, including Christian conservative ones?

The women I interviewed in this series grew up in strict Evangelical homes, and were repeatedly told that the carnal sin was sex outside of marriage. When they became pregnant as teenage girls, they were made to feel like they had “heathen pregnancies” and that their sinful behavior would be damaging for their child. In order to “save” the baby, they were told the infant needed to be placed with “good” Christian parents.

For decades there has, unfortunately, been some disdain for single mothers in the United States. We often only see motherhood as a good thing in the context of marriage. And that comes from deeply rooted misogynistic and patriarchal values that are often tied up in religion.

That is changing – we see many more single mothers by choice, and single mothers generally — but there are large parts of society who don’t want to see that change; that still believe men and husbands must be the heads of households, especially if there are children involved, and that single mothers are bad for society.

Just last month, a pregnant woman in Tennessee said she was denied prenatal care because she was unmarried. The physician said treating her went against the doctor’s “Christian values.”

I think this administration and the conservative right is actively pushing policies that are misogynistic in nature and are designed to make sure women’s reproductive choices are controlled, whether that’s through abortion restrictions, or attacking birth control.

And we see other policies that often hurt low-income pregnant women and single mothers — whether that’s through Medicaid cuts (which covers 40% of births in the U.S.), or through the cutting of food assistance or housing programs. Those services can be the difference between a woman keeping her child, or feeling like she must place them for adoption due to poverty and hardship.

And at the same time, in the Project 2025 agenda, they’re explicitly calling for adoption to be an alternative to abortion, and calling for the funding of faith-based adoption agencies.

4. I have to tell you that I found this podcast so devastating — there were moments that felt like a stab to the heart they were so painful, and cut so strongly against our human instinct to protect and care for our young. This is only a light spoiler, but the moments when parents made their own daughters give away their babies against their will, it felt unimaginable — that you would have had a child yourself, felt that indelible bond, and then forced the person you allegedly love most in the world to hand over a very wanted newborn to a stranger. It felt unfathomable to me, the same kind of this-is-not-normal-for-humans horror I feel when I read articles about families in desperate and deeply misogynist nations marrying off their 8-year-old girls. You are not from the world of Evangelical Christianity. Can you talk a little bit about some of the cultural differences / norms you encountered, and how you navigated them?

A culture of shame was the dominant force surrounding all of the women I interviewed. Many were required to do purity pledges, a ritual where they made promises as young girls to remain virgins until they got married, often making these pledges to their own fathers.

As young girls, they were told by religious leaders and family members that if they had sex before marriage, they would go to hell. Youth pastors expressed that they needed to control how they dressed, how they spoke, and how they moved through the world so that they would not tempt boys. They were responsible for protecting men… from themselves.

And this purity culture and culture of shame was carried into the maternity home they were sent to. The women I spoke to said they were told by staff that it was likely that no man would ever want them because they had sex before marriage. They were told they needed to redeem their bodies that had been violated by the sin of premarital sex, and that path to redemption could be achieved through adoption. One former staffer told me: “Guilt and shame were tools of the trade.”

Purity culture was not something I grew up with, but needed to understand. So, in my research for this series, I connected with Dr. Laura Anderson - an expert on religious trauma. She outlined how purity culture itself can be a form of sexual abuse.

She explained that purity culture emphasizes a person’s worth as tied to their virginity, and it is a form of brainwashing and control that can be extremely damaging. Research is increasingly showing that those who emerge from purity culture often have the same symptoms as victims of sexual assault. And sadly, these values were present in the upbringings of many of the women I spoke to.

5. Another light spoiler: I was also shocked by the Liberty University policy of offering a scholarship to pregnant girls who go to their maternity home, where those girls are then pressured to place their babies for adoption. This is more a point of clarity, but are girls who keep their babies eligible for the scholarship? Does Liberty allow single unwed mothers to attend? What does the existence of that scholarship tell you about how Liberty sees adoption and their role?

I looked through hundreds of original documents related to the Godparent Home in the Liberty University archives, but there was never any written information about the scholarship. And one former staffer told me that was intentional. Outlining in black and white that young women could get a scholarship for placing their babies for adoption — it could be seen as a transaction. It seems they did not want a paper trail on that.

One source I spoke to had tried to suss out if it was possible to keep her child and obtain the scholarship. She was close to giving birth, and her mother asked the Liberty Godparent Home if she could take care of her daughter’s baby — her grandchild — while her daughter attended school on the scholarship. The grandchild would live with the grandparents while the young woman attended school.

But the Liberty Godparent Home told this mother that, for some reason, her daughter would be required to keep the baby with her, which meant room and board for the scholarship were off the table. The mother could not figure out how they would be able to afford an apartment for her daughter and the baby, in addition to childcare while her daughter attended classes, as well as an additional budget for food, etc. Because of this, she would not be able to take full advantage of the scholarship.

I did learn that one resident who did keep her baby faced the same challenge. But her mother wound up relocating to Lynchburg so they could live together while her daughter attended Liberty on scholarship. That is not something, practically speaking, most people would be able to do — leave your home to move across the country so your child can go to college, while you take care of your grandchild. So in that way, yes, technically someone could get the scholarship if they didn’t place their child, but there were so many huge hurdles to do so, it did not feel like a real option for many.

Additionally, one former staffer told me that the scholarship was used “as a leverage point” to encourage women to place their children for adoption.

6. Do. other maternity homes like this one exist? In our post-Roe nation, are you seeing efforts to build more of them?

There are now nearly 500 maternity homes in the U.S, across 48 states, according to the National Maternity Housing Coalition (NMHC), an organization for maternity homes that is run by Heartbeat International, the world’s largest anti-abortion organization. About one-third of all maternity homes in America are affiliated with Heartbeat.

The NMHC has an explicit Christ-centered value system, and often that means espousing the messages of purity culture and the idea that sex outside of marriage is a sin. In Heartbeat’s so-called Pregnancy Help Podcast, one of the organization’s leaders explains how adoption is “the greatest redemptive choice ever,” and that it is a "sacrificial choice” in line with Biblical values.

That language feels very familiar to me as someone who spent two years investigating the Liberty Godparent Home. To me, it’s no coincidence — a former director of the Godparent Home was a founding member of the NMHC, and sat on the group’s leadership council for years.

The current head of the NMHC said that one of their affiliates — Lamb of God Maternity Home in Utah — was reporting a 45% adoption rate amongst residents after being in business for just over a year. That is a huge number when considering that, nationally, less than 1% of women place their infants for adoption. So this one facility is reporting a 4,500% increase over the national average in just one year.

It makes me wonder what’s driving that.

In recent years, states have funneled $250 million into crisis pregnancy centers, adoption agencies, and maternity homes. And up to 80% of infant adoptions in the United States are through religiously-affiliated adoption agencies.

7. Toward the end of the series, you get into all of the ways in which there is virtually no oversight on maternity homes, even though they bring together vulnerable young women needing medical care. Why are there such big gaps in regulation and oversight? What does that mean for girls and women who wind up in maternity homes? What might fix it?

There is no national regulatory system for maternity homes in the United States. Many of them function as private, faith-based programs. I think lawmakers believe these facilities can help bridge the gap as government-run social services are slashed — that it’s a net-good to let private charities step up to help pregnant women.

And in theory, maternity homes are good. A person who goes to a maternity home needs shelter, food, and security while they are pregnant. Maybe they go there because they’re in a domestic violence situation, or because they don’t have the support of their family. Maybe they lost their job and can’t pay rent, and they’re pregnant at the same time.

But the challenge is the value systems behind these facilities. Depending on the views of the people running them, vulnerable pregnant women may be pushed to place their children for adoption because they are not financially stable and because they don’t have a partner. If you’re living in a place and hearing that message day-in-and-day-out, it can be very powerful, especially if you lack support elsewhere. That message can push women to make a permanent decision based on temporary circumstances.

Places like Planned Parenthood are a household name for someone who wants access to abortion, for someone who wants STD testing or cancer screenings. But there is no household name for pregnant women in crisis who need help to keep and parent their children. In that way, there’s been a vacuum that the conservative right has been able to co-opt with things like faith-based maternity homes and adoption agencies.

8. What surprised you the most about reporting this story?

I don’t think I realized how much adoption is about choice, or the lack of it. Nearly 70% of relinquishing mothers say they wish they’d known more about their legal options and rights before signing their adoption papers, according to Gretchen Sisson, an academic who studies adoption in America.

In my own interviews, and in examining research on adoption, I’ve come to see that a huge number of birth mothers experience grief, loss, and extreme pain after they place their infants for adoption – and the wound stays open and raw for decades to come.

This is something I’ve seen from birth mothers who actively choose adoption. One source featured in Liberty Lost, Sarah P. — she became pregnant as a result of sexual assault. After growing up in an Evangelical household, she knew abortion was not an option, and it wasn’t something she wanted. She had absorbed the message that she would be a “murderer” if she got an abortion.

So at 18-years-old, Sarah decided to place her son for adoption. She was not pressured by anyone to do that. She truly believed it was the best option for her and her baby. She chose her son’s parents, and 16 years later, they have open contact and a great relationship.

But Sarah still feels that emotional pain. She’s in her mid 30s today and hasn’t had other children, but every day she looks at her body and is reminded of the child she placed, with its stretch marks and c-section scar. She’s conscious that there’s a piece of her out there in the world. She dreams about her son, and thinks about him everyday — even though they have contact, it's a different kind of relationship.

Maybe I was naive when I started reporting this story, or maybe our media environment does not center the stories of birth mothers, but the life long pain that goes with relinquishment was something that surprised me in a way that I did not fully understand previously.

9. What do you hope listeners take away from it?

I hope listeners come away with a deeper understanding of reproductive choice. And that we must not only protect the right to choose to end a pregnancy, but the right to parent a child, should that be something someone wants to do.

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You can listen to Liberty Lost wherever you get your podcasts.

xx Jill