Abbi became pregnant by Nathan when she was sixteen and he was eighteen. Abbi’s parents, deeply religious conservatives, decided that she would spend her pregnancy at the Liberty Godparent Home — and that she would give the baby up for adoption as soon she gave birth.
Nathan had hoped to marry Abbi and together raise their child. Yet Abbi’s parents used the age gap to threaten statutory rape charges and dissuade him from any attempts to alter their plans for their daughter. Abbi, overwhelmed and lonely, at first didn’t know what to think. Gradually, she became sure that she wanted to keep her child. Nevertheless, pressured by her parents and the Liberty staff to continue with the adoption, the teenager relented. That was just the start of a long, painful journey for Abbi and Nathan, whose story serves as the narrative center of Liberty Lost, a new Wondery podcast series hosted by reporter T.J. Raphael.
The Liberty Godparent Home was the creation of notorious televangelist Jerry Falwell. It’s part of Liberty University, which he co-founded — and the offer of a full ride scholarship there for the mothers, once their children have been successfully placed for adoption, is the Home’s biggest selling point. In many cases, the reason that babies are given away is that their parents cannot afford to keep them. To have that financial burden removed, and have a scholarship thrown in? For those in dire straits, it’s an appealing prospect.
But even when parents remain resolute that they want to keep their children, the Godparent Home continues pushing. Officials for the organization like to claim that the reason for its existence is simply to provide an alternative to abortion. But when abortion was never on the table, their argument falls apart, as Liberty Lost proves so deftly. These birth mothers, young and unmarried, are not considered “deserving” enough to raise their own kids. The “parenting plans” they’re provided with consist solely of long lists of the financial hurdles they’ll have to overcome, and no mention of the organizations that exist to help them do just that. Scaring them is the goal, not providing assistance.
When Abbi was pregnant, she and her fellow mothers-to-be were paraded in front of the congregants of Falwell’s church, as he pleaded for donations to support them. That experience was dehumanizing enough, but as the show progresses, we learn that these donations were used to make prospective parents feel like they were placing themselves at the front of the line for the babies that are on the way. Multiple interviewees refer to the whole set-up as a “baby-selling” operation, and considering the financial incentives Raphael reveals are at play in various stages of the process, it’s hard to disagree.
While the heart of Liberty Lost lies with the young women who were pushed into separating with children they wanted, it doesn’t lack empathy for the aspiring parents manipulated by a system that played on their deepest hopes. In the later episodes, we follow Abbi and Nathan outside of the maternity home, as they try to negotiate the awkward bounds of an “open adoption” — where the child’s birth parents still play a part in their lives — with their son’s new family. The couple who adopted Jay, as Abbi’s son is pseudonymously known, declined to be interviewed for the podcast. Although the way they held the threat of withholding contact with Jay over Abbi and Nathan’s head does not make them sympathetic, they aren’t villainized, either. They’re scared that the son they’ve raised for years will be taken away from them, too. For the most part, it’s the system that’s the bad guy here, not the people trapped within it.
The existence of maternity homes, and the shame placed on “unwed mothers,” all sounds like the stuff of decades ago. Not so. Shockingly, the Liberty Godparent Home is still in operation today. And with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade taking abortion off the table for many desperate women in the U.S., these maternity homes are getting more common, not less.
With that being the case, as well as telling a heart-wrenching central story, Liberty Lost is also a clarion call for change. Adoption can be a good thing for all of the parties concerned, but not if it is centered around shame, deceit, and greed in the way it is at the Liberty Godparent Home. With reproductive rights being peeled away from women all over the country, it’s vital that such organizations are subject to strict oversight. Otherwise, stories like Abbi’s are about to get a whole lot more common.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.