Adoption Should Also Be a Choice. In Post-<em>Roe</em> America, It’s Increasingly Not.

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It has been three years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the right to legal abortion in the United States. While the results of that decision have been counterintuitive—abortions have actually gone up, they’ve just gotten more complicated to access legally—in many pockets of the country, there has been a return to a pre-Roe environment, with women suffering the consequences of doctors being unable to help them in medical crises and bearing pregnancies they might have otherwise forgone. In her new Wondery podcast Liberty Lost, T.J. Raphael digs into one of those particular manifestations: the return and rise of the maternity home.

Maternity homes were popular before Roe as a place where usually teen mothers went to secretly have babies that were conceived out of wedlock. These children were almost always placed for adoption without much input from the birth mother, and the trauma that resulted was often lifelong. When Raphael began to investigate maternity homes after the fall of Roe, she was shocked to realize that not only had they not gone away, they were making a comeback.

Liberty Lost is a deeply personal story that centers on one couple’s devastating experience with a maternity home on the Liberty University campus—and the complicated ways in which the women who often end up in these homes are coerced into placing their children for adoption, even when they deeply want to parent. I spoke with Raphael about how she uncovered this story, what she learned about reproductive justice in her reporting, and where things might be going next. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Susan Matthews: I learned about maternity homes when I was doing research on my season of Slow Burn on the history of Roe v. Wade. The version of maternity homes that I learned about was the version that existed in the 1950s and the 1960s. Could you start out by telling us a little bit about the maternity homes in that era?

T.J. Raphael: I had first learned about the maternity homes of the pre-Roe era when I read Ann Fessler’s book The Girls Who Went Away. Those stories were heartbreaking. It’s a lot of firsthand accounts from birth mothers who were often sent there as pregnant teens as a way for their families to be able to hide their pregnancies. A lot of baby boomers might have known somebody in high school who was gone for a semester, maybe staying with an aunt in another state, or maybe they went away to a boarding school for one semester. Oftentimes, they were actually secretly gestating pregnancies that they had out of wedlock. Often, after they gave birth, their children were immediately separated from them. So they never even got the opportunity to see the infants that they gave birth to.

I started working on Liberty Lost initially in the weeks following the end of Roe v. Wade. I knew that the pre-Roe era was one of dangerous back-alley abortions, but I also knew that was just one part of the story. It was also one of forced birth and coerced adoption. So I put out a call to speak with women who had gone through maternity homes. I thought maybe something about our past would hold some information for our future.

Once I put the call out, I got a lot of emails from women—baby boomers in their 60s and 70s. I also got an email from the woman who would become my main subject, Abby Johnson. She reached out to me in 2022, and she was 31 at the time—just a few years younger than I was. She told me that she was sent to a maternity home in 2008. Her story wasn’t pre-Roe, it was modern. And when she told me that this maternity home was on the campus of Liberty University and started by Jerry Falwell, alarm bells started to go off.

I wanted to back up and talk about the end of Roe v. Wade in particular. When the justices heard the case that ended it, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that one thing that had changed since Roe is that all 50 states have safe haven laws now, and a safe haven law essentially means that after birth, a woman can place her child for adoption. There aren’t repercussions. Justice Barrett’s question really was: If all states have safe haven laws now, doesn’t that essentially obviate the need for abortion? Just place the child for adoption. One thing that I remember realizing when I was reporting my series is that three of the current nine justices have adopted children. I think that is something that is really telling about how they perceive this as an option.

Your series delves very elegantly into this question about choice and adoption. One of the things that your show gets into is how the adoption industry and these maternity homes specifically present adoption as a choice. But in so many cases, the reality is much darker—with women and girls often coerced into forfeiting their parental rights. What did you learn about the industry that made you rethink your understanding of adoption in reporting this show?

I really came to understand that a place like the Liberty Godparent Home is a symptom of a much larger problem. Up to 80 percent of infant adoptions in the United States are done through religious institutions. More than a third of maternity homes in the United States have ties to one of the world’s largest anti-abortion groups, Heartbeat International. And the tactics that are used at adoption agencies and maternity homes are often using a Christ-centered message. And that messaging says that it’s not right that you’re about to be a single mother. It’s not right that your baby does not have a mother and a father, and the best thing for you to do to give your child the best possible life is to surrender them to a couple who is better equipped to raise them. Adoption among these organizations is still talked of as a being a redemptive choice.

That language really ties back to these evangelical values that premarital sex, sex outside of marriage, is an unforgivable sin. And that in order to correct for that mistake, you need to be sacrificial. My main subject, Abby, she articulated it so well for me. She said that in a Christian’s mind, the baby is thought of as pure and sinless, and the mother, since she got pregnant out of wedlock, is thought of as sinful. For the pure and sinless baby to stay with the sinful mother, that would equate in a Christian’s mind to celebrating sinful behavior. So we need to make sure that baby goes to “good people.” Those values are heavily prevalent at faith-based adoption agencies and maternity homes, which often work in tandem with crisis pregnancy centers and with anti-abortion counseling centers.

I think that this series has really made me think very deeply about the ways that adoption is a reproductive justice issue that we on the left don’t often talk or think about. I think obviously it’s so important to protect the right to choose to end a pregnancy, but I think that when somebody wants to make a choice to become a parent and we don’t have social state safety nets available for them, the only places they have to turn to in those circumstances are often places like crisis pregnancy centers.

We talked about how there were so many of these homes in the 1950s and the ’60s before Roe, and then they kind of weren’t needed anymore. But one of the things you found is that now there’s a rise in these homes. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

So there are currently 500 maternity homes operational across the United States. They’re in 48 states, so really there might be one where you live. We see in Project 2025 that there’s an explicit call to promote adoption as an alternative to abortion. And there are also calls to divert funding to faith-based adoption agencies. And so I think we’re going to continue to see this increase in maternity homes. Actually federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was the judge who initially was going to overturn the FDA approval of the abortion pill, he sat on the board of a maternity home.

I think these organizations are going to continue to grow, because there’s a need. Maybe the child’s father is out of the picture. Maybe it’s a domestic violence situation. Maybe their family doesn’t support them, or the safety net they had suddenly goes away, or they’re working a job where they don’t get parental leave or maternity leave. And now we’re also seeing the Trump administration slashing policies like Medicaid, like food stamps.

People go to maternity homes because they are pregnant and they need shelter. These people are really in the most vulnerable point in their lives. Their lives are falling apart and they’re pregnant at the same time. So it kind of creates this perfect storm. Because theoretically these maternity homes are filling a need—they’re taking in more pregnant women who need shelter—but the values systems behind them make everything very ethically murky.

Right now we’re three years out from Dobbs and the thing that I feel increasingly worried about is that the post-Dobbs universe is just starting to feel extremely normal. So I was hoping you could tell me something that you learned from this project that gives you hope that that is not the case—that this is not the new normal.

One thing that makes me feel hopeful is that when people hear this series, they walk away from it with a broader understanding of reproductive justice, a broader understanding of choice, and a feeling that if somebody wants to choose to be a parent, we need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to support them so it doesn’t feel like a false choice.

I also hope it sparks a larger conversation. We’re seeing so many millennials not having kids, and they’re trying to roll out programs to incentivize us to do that. And I think a lot of people feel like it’s not a choice for them because of an affordability crisis. We see the same things among birth mothers, but they just also happen to be pregnant and then are forced into a situation where they have no options. So my hope is that we start thinking about choice in a bigger, more encompassing way that can help us have this empathy and understanding for people that maybe we weren’t thinking about so deeply before.

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