When Abbi Johnson became pregnant at 16, no one offered her a baby shower. Instead, she got sent away to a maternity home for young, unwed mothers.
In her evangelical household in North Carolina, premarital sex wasn’t just taboo — it was a sin. The mentality of “saving yourself” until marriage was the most consistent thread throughout her upbringing, she told The Independent.
Her father gave her a purity ring, proudly announcing to others that she had “promised him her virginity” until she was married. That expectation is a ritual many evangelical girls go through, reinforced by youth pastors who preach modesty and obedience, warning girls not to “tempt” boys with the way they behave or dress.
So when Abbi got pregnant back in 2008, her devout parents, ashamed and desperate to hide the fallout, sent her to the Liberty Godparent Home — a little-known maternity facility on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
There, she was told she would be safe. Supported. Guided. What she didn’t know was that she was entering a system that many women now say was built on coercion, control, and a quiet transaction: her baby in exchange for her future.
The home for young mothers was a place that, in hindsight, felt eerily reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale — not in costume, but in control. There were locks on the windows and doors. The girls were required to attend church services together, taught to obey without question, and then they were punished when they rebelled. Their pregnancies were treated as moral failures that needed to be atoned for.
At the end of their time, a ceremony was held — there was cake, gifts, and family. But this wasn’t a celebration of motherhood. It was a goodbye. This is when they handed over their babies — whether they truly wanted to or not.
The twisted transaction is the center of Liberty Lost, a powerful new investigative podcast from Wondery, that dropped Monday. Hosted by journalist T.J. Raphael, the six-part series pulls back the curtain on the Godparent Home and the culture of forced adoption inside America’s most powerful evangelical university.
Raphael reveals the dystopian reality behind a secretive institution on campus, where pregnant teens have come forward years later to report feeling pressured and coerced into giving up their babies for adoption.
At the heart of the story featured in the podcast is Abbi — now in her 30s with a family, living on the opposite coast from the Bible belt – who is determined to tell the truth she says has been buried for nearly two decades, along with the trauma that never left her.
After giving birth, Abbi continued her time at Liberty University to fulfill her expected role of a “normal” college student.
But while other teenage girls were “listening to Taylor Swift and working at Forever 21,” she found it hard to care about any of it. Instead, she was consumed with the loss of the son she had handed over to a “affluent, married Christian couple” because she was told it was “God’s plan.”
“I was raised to understand that this was the path … I’d been hearing it my whole life, the rhetoric that a baby deserves two loving parents and married households, you know,” Abbi told The Independent.
What Abbi experienced stems from a dark history that began with Jerry Falwell Sr, who created these maternity homes in response to Roe v Wade back in the 1980s. But what many do not know is that some of these homes still exist today.
