When she became pregnant at 12 years old, Tori Popham’s mother made the same decision parents around the country have made since the Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the Liberty Godparent Home in 1982.
By the time Popham turned 13 in 1991, she was on her way to the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She would spend the next several months living in the Godparent Home, a residential maternity home on the campus of the evangelical university.
“My dad wanted me to get an abortion, and I was very against it,” Popham recalled on St. Louis on Air. “I was from St Louis, and this was all the way in Virginia. I was very scared, very worried about it. I did not want to go.”
Popham’s account of her time at the Godparent Home is among several featured in the new podcast “Liberty Lost.” The series explores the experiences of women who were sent there as pregnant teens in the 1990s and 2000s. The women in the podcast allege they faced heavy pressure, even coercion, to give their babies up for adoption.
However, with support from her grandmother, Popham kept her baby. Today, she is a mother of six and is living in Missouri.
During her time in the maternity home, “you don't form a whole lot of relationships because the girls just disappear once they have their babies,” she said. “You don't get to really say goodbye. You don't get to see anything that happens afterwards.”
After her pregnancy, Popham tried to put the experience behind her. But decades later, she connected with “Liberty Lost” creator and host T.J. Raphael. Raphael is a New York City-based journalist whose previous work includes a podcast series about the history of the abortion pill.
Raphael said she began investigating the Godparent Home after meeting a former resident, Abbi Johnson.
“Abbi had described to me a climate of pressure, coercion and religious manipulation,” she said. “I realized that this was a much bigger story about these [maternity] homes. And now in 2025 there is a resurgence in a post-Roe America.”
In Missouri, maternity homes often advertise their services in religious language, promising a Christ-centered approach or placement with Christian families. A recently expanded state tax credit benefits about 20 maternity homes, which under state law is defined as a facility that “does not perform, induce, or refer for abortions … and that does not hold itself out as performing, inducing or referring for abortions.”
Raphael sees the spread of maternity homes as a sign of a larger effort from the anti-abortion movement. She added that maternity homes’ fixation on adoption puts young girls in positions where manipulation may affect their choice to become a parent or not.
“A former staffer of the Liberty Godparent Home told me that the mission was to save babies from abortion. But over time, she came to see how distorted that mission was,” Raphael said. “So many of the women who came into the [Godparent Home] were not considering abortion, that’s not what they wanted. I think that if you believe that adoption is a solution to unplanned pregnancy, that can naturally snowball into pressure.”
To hear the full conversation about maternity homes with “Liberty Lost” creator T.J. Raphael and Toni Popham, including how pregnant residents of the Godparent Home were used to raise funds for Falwell’s ministry, listen to “St. Louis on the Air” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube, or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. The production intern is Darrious Varner. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
