Liberty Lost: Podcast Series Exposes Maternity Home Controlled by Liberty University
A new podcast series by journalist T.J. Raphael delves into the Liberty Godparent Home and terrifying tales of former residents.
Flashback to 2001, in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell joined Regent University founder Pat Robertson on Robertson’s show The 700 Club to discuss the tragedy.
According to reporting from Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times at the time:
What Mr. Falwell said on Thursday on The 700 Club, while chatting with the programme's host, Mr. Robertson, was this: "What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve."
Mr. Robertson responded: "Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population."
A few moments later Mr. Falwell said: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "
To which Mr. Robertson said: "I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government."
These comments, which made mainstream national news, were my personal introduction to Falwell and Robertson as a teenager born and raised in Virginia. Since then, I’ve read story after story cataloguing the various scandals involving Liberty University and the Falwell clan.
When I managed Jennifer Lewis’s 2018 congressional campaign in VA-06, which included Lynchburg back then, I couldn’t avoid the deep political and cultural influence of Liberty University over regional politics and business.
Yet, until yesterday, I’d never heard of the Liberty Godparent Home, a home for women with unplanned pregnancies nestled on the edge of the Liberty University campus, a home whose decades of operations are called into question by a new investigative podcast series.
Liberty Lost
Last month, investigative journalist T.J. Raphael released her new Wondery series Liberty Lost, which explores the Liberty Godparent Home through interviews with former residents and their family members, former facility staff, and a local Child Protective Services (CPS) investigator.
I just finished the first five episodes of the series, and I’ll try not to include too many spoilers here for those of you who plan to listen. Andrea Cavallier wrote a comprehensive article in The Independent last month, “A pregnant teen was sent away to a place that promised to help. Then they took her baby,” which gets to the point:
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.
For readers who are advocates and/or lawmakers, Episode 5 (“All the King’s Men”) describes Raphael’s unsuccessful attempts to get useful answers from the Virginia Department of Social Services and the experiences of a local CPS investigator.
Raphael notes that “even though the Godparent Home is still open today, it let its license to house girls from foster care expire back in 2022.” Family Life Services, another entity at the same location, is still qualified for parental placement, foster care, adoption, and inter-country placement according to the Virginia Department of Social Services’ online search portal.
Stephanie McNeal’s Glamour article, “The Liberty Lost Podcast Investigates the World of Modern ‘Maternity Homes’,” includes an interview with Raphael and one of the subjects of the podcast.
Here’s Raphael in the interview:
Through my research for this series, I’ve found that women generally find themselves in a position where they will be placing their child for adoption due to desperation, hardship, and a lack of support. We see the administration cutting vital social services for Medicaid, for food stamps, for housing assistance, and that then places pregnant people who are already vulnerable without a safety net in a position where they feel like they're unable to care for their children, and that will then lead them towards adoption.
Virginia officials should ensure that the facilities in the Commonwealth are actually compliant with existing laws and regulations, and I hope the political class doesn’t ignore this reporting like they (mostly) did The Parham Papers. Especially given the desperate state of the social safety net in Virginia and nationwide.
I’m submitting my own FOIA requests on this matter. As we learn more and more about the Liberty Godparent Home, perhaps we’ll find that the issue isn’t just apparent lack of regulatory enforcement, but deeper, structural problems with how the state approaches foster care, adoption, and families and children broadly.
And for folks inclined to shrug this off as strictly a Liberty/Falwell phenomenon, I’ll leave you with Raphael’s warning:
“People think these homes went away,” says Raphael. “They didn’t. They never stopped existing. If anything, in 2025, they're growing. Since the end of Roe, there has been an effort to grow them across the country.”