ORANGE, Va. — On the wall of the maternity home is the motto: "Saving Babies, One Mom at a Time." For founders Randy and Evelyn James, the home started with one baby — their own.
Paul Stefan was the last of their six children, born with a fatal condition. They did not abort the pregnancy as doctors advised. He lived for just over 40 minutes, long enough to be baptized and named after their Catholic priest.
Randy and Evelyn James sit for a portrait Jan. 5 at their maternity home, the Paul Stefan Foundation, in Orange, Va. In the nearly two decades since, the Jameses channeled their son's memory and their anti-abortion beliefs into running maternity homes.
Evelyn James said they knew they "were going to do something for women in crisis pregnancies." This month, their Paul Stefan Foundation plans to open a new floor with seven more rooms at its headquarters in a former hotel in Orange, Virginia. There has been a nationwide expansion of maternity homes in the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade and the federal right to abortion. "It's been a significant increase," said Valerie Harkins, director of the Maternity Housing Coalition, an anti-abortion network of 195 maternity homes that grew 23% since the court's ruling. Jasmine Heriot, a former Mary's Shelter resident, plays with her son Jan.
5 in Fredericksburg, Va. In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to abortion, there has been a nationwide expansion of maternity homes.
There are now more than 450 maternity homes in the U.S., according to Harkins; many of them are faith-based.
Anti-abortion advocates want to open more of these transitional housing facilities, believing they are the next step in helping women who carry pregnancies to term. The reasons for the surge in interest in maternity homes are complex and go beyond abortion restrictions. Harkins said unaffordable housing, paychecks cut by inflation and higher birthrates in some states contributed.
"It created a perfect storm," she said. "There's quite a need." The heyday of American maternity homes came during the three decades before Roe, when more than 1.
5 million infants were surrendered for adoption during the "Baby Scoop Era." Many unwed pregnant women were sent to maternity homes, where they were often coerced into relinquishing their babies. "Our children were stolen," said Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, who lived in a Washington, D.
C., maternity home in 1966. Harkins said the Maternity Housing Coalition takes ownership of this history.
"We are very intentional about what happened and want to ensure we don't get to that point again," she said. Meryem Bakache lays her child in his bed Jan. 5 at Mary's Shelter maternity home in Fredericksburg, Va.
Most residents in modern maternity homes choose to keep their children. They are there to receive housing and financial support. Still, there are homes that continue to prioritize adoptions, which can result in painful outcomes.
Abbi Johnson was 17 in 2008 when her parents sent her to Liberty Godparent Home, founded by the late evangelical leader Jerry Falwell. The Lynchburg, Virginia, home was connected to an adoption agency. From a conservative Christian family, Johnson felt her unplanned pregnancy was treated as "the most cardinal sin," but she still desperately wanted to parent her son.
"But everyone told me this isn't playing house," she said. "He's not a doll. He deserves a married couple who has their life together.
" The home said every resident is educated on parenting and adoption "and has the freedom to choose." In the end, Johnson felt pressured into placing her son up for adoption. She hopes one day he might know how much she misses him.
"Half my head resides in that maternity home," she said, "playing the memories again and again and again." Meryem Bakache, a mother at Mary's Shelter maternity home, comforts her child Jan. 5 in Fredericksburg, Va.
There are more than 450 maternity homes in the U.S., many of them faith-based.
Anti-abortion advocates see them as the next step in preventing abortions and providing long-term support for low-income pregnant women and mothers. Meryem Bakache considered an abortion. Newly arrived in the U.
S. from Morocco, she spoke little English and lived in a crowded apartment with family in northern Virginia while her husband attended college. "Where can I live with this baby?" she recalled thinking.
"What can I give him? I don't have nothing." Without health insurance, she looked for medical care and found an anti-abortion counseling center — often called a crisis pregnancy center — which provided her with an ultrasound. "When I see my baby, just like everything changed," she said.
Through a friend, she found Mary's Shelter , a maternity home in Fredericksburg. Jasmine Heriot, left, a former Mary's Shelter resident, talks to the child of Meryem Bakache on Jan. 5 at the shelter's maternity home in Fredericksburg, Va.
Many homes receive referrals from similar centers, which exist to divert women from getting abortions. The Maternity Housing Coalition, to which both Paul Stefan and Mary's Shelter belong, is a project of Heartbeat International, a large association of anti-abortion counseling centers . Holding her infant son this winter, Bakache described her relief at seeing the beauty of the quaint blue home where Mary's Shelter assigned her to live.
Her housemate Jasmine Heriot also was looking for a safe living space before the birth of her second child. She lost her job and housing after a life-threatening first pregnancy and premature birth. Across the country, maternity homes are sprouting up.
In Nebraska, an old college campus is becoming maternity housing. In Arizona, a home added to one property and opened another. In Georgia, lawmakers recently made it easier to open maternity homes.
Kathleen Wilson, founder of the maternity home organization Mary's Shelter, sits for a portrait Jan. 5 at one of the homes in Fredericksburg, Va. Mary's Shelter also recently expanded by opening another house.
Founder Kathleen Wilson was inspired by her Catholic and anti-abortion beliefs to begin the ministry, which includes more than 30 bedrooms in six houses and four apartments. She is aware the anti-abortion movement is often derided as championing only unborn children, but she thinks maternity homes are one answer to that criticism. "They defy that lie that we only care about the baby in the womb," she said.
Danielle Nicholson lived at Paul Stefan for almost five years. She is one of its success stories, now raising a soon-to-be sixth grader. But she had arrived as a surly 20-year-old, six months pregnant and feeling abandoned.
“You don’t end up in a maternity home because you have a big, huge, loving village of a family,” she said. Evelyn and Randy James became and remain like parents to her. “Women are not numbers here.
Or case files,” she said. She found not everyone was well suited for the facility or parenthood, though. “Living with the not-so-fantastic moms put something in my heart,” Nicholson said.
“Like I need to help. How do I help women not create abused and neglected children?” It inspired her to become a social worker after she finished college. Her time as a case worker for vulnerable families has complicated her views of the anti-abortion movement, even though it’s foundational to the maternity home that did so much for her.
“My heart was really broken when Roe v. Wade was overturned,” she said later. She didn’t choose an abortion, and still wouldn’t.
But she doesn’t judge those who do. Abortion is “one of those choices that women have to face every day, for whatever reason,” she said. “There’s grace for those women too.
” For years before the Supreme Court upended Roe v. Wade, the landmark precedent protecting abortion access, a network of conservative Christians was slowly and methodically stacking the courts through political means. "[W]hat Trump and his Republican allies had done was to change the country by leveraging political force to conquer the courts," Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer wrote in their recent recounting of the network's maneuvering for The New York Times Magazine.
"Their policy arms churned out legal arguments and medical studies. Their lawyers argued their cases, and their judges ruled on them," Dias and Lerer explained. This strategy helps to decode the ever-changing post-Roe legal landscape.
With Roe out of the way, and with many courts stacked in their favor, conservative state legislatures have continued to pass increasingly restrictive and punitive abortion laws. At least 14 states have banned abortion with limited exceptions since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision ended Roe in 2022.
Another seven states have banned the procedure before 18 weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute , a research organization that advocates for reproductive rights, including abortion. Nearly two years after Dobbs, the legality of abortion in the United States is still being debated in court. A total of 40 cases have challenged abortion bans in 23 states as of January, according to the think tank Brennan Center for Justice The Marshall Project has been tracking the ripple effects of these laws and lawsuits, particularly in Southern states in which most pregnancy-related prosecutions are concentrated.
We wanted to understand how reproductive rights lawyers, advocacy groups, abortion providers and their patients are responding to this new legal reality and what new risks they face. Over the course of several weeks, we heard from seven organizations in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. The end of Roe ushered in a climate of fear and confusion, many of the organizations told us.
New laws and novel prosecutorial tactics have raised critical questions about free speech, interstate travel, telemedicine and more. All while the reproductive rights legal community has scrambled to keep up. Here are other important takeaways: A set of lawsuits in Alabama, where abortion is banned, illustrates the new dynamics.
State Attorney General Steve Marshall threatened to prosecute anyone helping residents get an out-of-state abortion. The threat extends to organizations, such as Yellowhammer Fund, that provide information about where to go and what to consider when seeking an abortion in a state where the procedure is legal. Yellowhammer Fund and another organization filed suit, questioning the constitutionality of the state ban.
Such prosecutions would violate Alabamians' right to free speech, they argued. Marshall "has threatened to criminalize in a way calculated to chill the speech, expressive conduct, and association of helpers, and to isolate pregnant people — a known tactic of abusers — to make it more difficult for them to travel and access needed medical care," lawyers for the case explained in their initial complaint . Marshall moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing the state could prosecute people using its anti-conspiracy laws .
But earlier this month a federal judge ruled the lawsuit can proceed. Many of the reproductive rights organizations we spoke to across the South said they've also struggled with what information they can legally share. Most lawyers won't give them guidance, one group told us, saying the laws are too untested and too risky.
Many of the recent state laws take aim at people helping someone seeking an abortion or those looking to leave a state where abortion is illegal. Several states have focused on aid to minors. Take, for example, a soon-to-be-enacted law in Tennessee that would punish adults for taking minors across state lines to end a pregnancy.
A law in Idaho that did the same has been temporarily put on hold by a federal court. These laws are copycats of Texas' S.B.
8, which allows anyone to sue people aiding or abetting an abortion. In her ruling blocking the Idaho law from taking effect, U.S.
District Magistrate Debora K. Grasham wrote that the case was about much more than abortion. "Namely, long-standing and well recognized fundamental rights of freedom of speech, expression, due process, and parental rights," she wrote.
"These are not competing rights, nor are they at odds." Challenging these laws legally is complex because there is limited legal precedent. Last year, the Department of Justice sought to clarify the constitutionality of the travel bans.
"The right to travel from one state to another is firmly embedded in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence and the Constitution," the department noted. Even before the Dobbs decision, labor and delivery wards in rural hospitals were shutting down , citing costs and financial uncertainty. By 2020, half of rural community hospitals stopped providing obstetrics care, according to the American Hospital Association.
About 60 million , or 1 in 5, Americans live in rural areas. Adding to the strain, rural hospitals are also experiencing a "brain drain." Some doctors, wary of restrictive abortion laws, are leaving in droves .
That has created maternity care deserts — where access to reproductive health care, including abortions, is nearly impossible. Women in these regions often have to travel hundreds of miles to find care , if they can afford to do so at all. For people in states with abortion restrictions, and where health care is scarce, access to telehealth medicine is also up for legal debate.
In Ohio , the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are suing the state Department of Health because of laws that make it hard to get abortion medications using telehealth services. A court there previously recognized telehealth medication abortion services as a safe and effective option. Now, the fight has grown bigger as the ACLU and Planned Parenthood challenge more Ohio laws, including those that prevent certain health care professionals, like nurse practitioners, from providing medication abortions.
The case extends beyond Ohio; it shows how people in rural areas, already facing limited health care, are hit hardest by these restrictions. This is even more true for low-income women, who are six times more likely to have an abortion and twice as likely to lack health insurance compared to higher-income women, per a Guttmacher Institute study . "So many people across the country had questions," said Clara Spera, senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center, where she helps lead the Abortion Access Legal Defense Fund.
"What can I do? What can I not do? What's different today than it was yesterday? There was just a real need to navigate the chaos." The laws are not only changing rapidly — so that legal guidance that is relevant today could be out-of-date only weeks later — but these laws often change locally . For example, in Texas last year, Lubbock County passed an ordinance that would bar pregnant people from driving through Lubbock County to get an abortion in another state.
Meanwhile, the city council of neighboring Amarillo has yet to approve the travel ban . To solve this issue — and provide legal expertise to attorneys navigating the uncertainty — nonprofit legal organizations have banded together to form coalitions. One such example is the Abortion Defense Network , launched last year by several organizations, including the Lawyering Project, the ACLU and the National Women's Law Center.
"The Abortion Defense Network leverages the resources and expertise of six leading reproductive rights organizations, and a number of very well respected nationwide law firms, to provide legal help, assistance and support to those who provide abortion care, those who help people obtain abortion care, or want to do one of those things," Spera explained. This story was produced by The Marshall Project , a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S.
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