Liberty Godparent Home

There is this podcast series called “Liberty Lost” in 2025 that alleges that many woman who’ve gone through the home felt pressured to place their babies for adoption. I will let you listen their podcast… but I also will make a some statements here.

Let’s do deep dive into Jerry Falwell, Sr…

The Liberty Godparent Home is a maternity home that was put into place by the late Jerry Falwell, Sr. He died in 2007. [That was 4 years before I started blogging.] He was a Baptist minister (SBC), ordained in 1956, who founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy which became Liberty Christian Academy in 1967 and he founded Liberty University in 1971. He hosted a TV show “The Old-Time Gospel Hour”. His title for Liberty University was Chancellor. The congregation that he served was Thomas Road Baptist Church which he founded at age…………….22.

He started the Moral Majority. He was pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral [Well, I am not so sure about that one], and he delivered 2/3’s of the white evangelical vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 Presidential election.

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PTL (Praise the Lord)

Then, uh, some scandals hit 😂.[ Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh.] In March 1987, Jerry replaced the Pentecostal televangelist Jim Bakker in the PTL ministry. I won’t get into why he replaced him…ok, I guess I need to… Jim raped a 21-year-old church secretary and paid for her silence. People weren’t giving any 💸 to them,[Gee ! I wonder why 🙄] so Jerry resigned in October 1987.

His Legal Mishaps

Starting in the 1970s, uh, yea, he was involved in several legal matters.

The SEC charged him with fraud and deceit in the issuance of $6.5 million in unsecured church bonds..[Ya! ]The church won the 1973 court case but only because while “technical violations DID OCCUR”, there was “no proof the church intended any wrongdoing.”

He sued Penthouse. That case was dismissed. He sued Hustler . He won $200,000. In 1984, he was ordered to pay gay rights activist, Jerry Sloan, $5,000, and then he had to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.

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Now the article that came to light in summer 2025.

“Abbi Johnson, got pregnant at only 16 years old.”

“Johnson’s parents sent her across the country to Liberty Godparent Home with the promise of a scholarship to Liberty University after all was said and done.”

“Johnson said she wanted to keep her son. However, she felt the home had already decided to go the adoption route.”

“ABC13’s Rachel Branning asked, “Did you ever really feel like you had a choice?”

“No,” Johnson replied. “I felt that I was put in really terrifying moments of being given an opportunity to explain to an adult that had a different opinion how I thought I could pull it off. That was the situation that they would set me up in, and normally, with more than one adult at a time, saying, ‘How do you plan on doing that?’ Then, coming back at me with, like, negativity… It never felt like they were saying, ‘Here are your options. What’s your choice?’ It was like an attack against me at all times from everyone, ‘How do you think you’re gonna do this?'”

“Johnson said that while she had a caseworker, she didn’t feel supported within the home.

I felt endlessly put off,” she said. “Basically, I understood from the way that I was treated, being put off so regularly, that the decisions about my pregnancy were going to occur towards the end of pregnancy. They had all these reasons they would give me about why that was, one of them being, ‘There’s a lot of girls and not a lot of staff. You have to wait your turn. There’s a procedure and you’re in line. You’re not at the front of the line.'”
During her time in the home, Johnson said 20 girls came through, sharing two caseworkers.

“It wasn’t very frequent that you got time to speak with someone about your situation, and you weren’t allowed to speak about your situation with any of the other staff or the other girls,” Johnson said. “Getting care about your pregnancy, specifically, someone talking to you about your baby, you, your situation was an infrequent occurrence. The only person that I really felt showed me care about how I was feeling was the doctor. I remember it so distinctly, it was the first time someone said, ‘How are you doing? Are you okay?”

Raphael said in theory, maternity homes can be good, especially in the post-Roe era. However, the home should not have ties to any adoption agencies.

“I want to raise awareness of the ways we do and often do not support vulnerable pregnant women. All of the women that we feature in ‘Liberty Lost,’ they had already made the decision not to end their pregnancies, they wanted to keep and parent their children, and they were continually hit with roadblocks to be able to do that. As we see maternity homes grow across the country, I think in theory, maternity homes are a wonderful idea, but when they’re tied to an adoption agency, when they espouse values that say that ‘No single woman should be parenting,’ when they have values that say ‘It’s not right that you need government assistance. It’s not right if you end up being a single mom,’ I think that’s where everything gets very ethically murky,” she said.

According to city records, the Godparent Home shares an address with the Family Life Services Adoption Agency. According to Thomas Road Baptist Church’s (TRBC) website, they founded Family Life Services in 1983.”

“ABC13 reached out to TRBC multiple times for comment about the allegations in the podcast, but we never heard back. We also asked the Godparent Home if they would put us in contact with residents who had a positive experience at the home, but we haven’t received a response.”

‘Liberty Lost:’ Podcast alleges coercion and manipulation at Liberty Godparent Home
[WSET ABC13 7/25/25 by Rachel Branning]

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