Dr. Zoe Shaw, 51, never forgot the trauma of handing over her newborn as a 16-year-old in 1991. However, her world became whole again after reconnecting with her 34-year-old daughter, Sara Valentine, in 2010, nearly two decades after they were separated. 

Shaw told People that when she learned she was pregnant in 1990, all she could focus on, as a high school honors student, was the “disappointment that I’d let my family and God down.”

Her mother, Miranda, forced her to live at the Liberty Godparent Home for the final four months of her pregnancy. Shaw described the home as a “prison”. It was established in 1982 by Dr. Jerry Falwell, the political activist and Baptist televangelist who founded Liberty University.

Miranda told the five-month-pregnant Shaw, “This is where you’re going, and you’re going to come back without the baby.” 

At the facility, located near and then on the Liberty University campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, Shaw’s communication was monitored, and windows and doors were locked. She later discovered she was one of hundreds of mostly teenage girls who went through their pregnancies at the home.

Shaw recalled how she and others were “paraded” before Falwell’s congregation twice weekly. She felt they were being “on display to get people to donate.”

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She described choosing her baby’s adoptive parents from a book containing photos and brief biographies as the “most disturbing” part of the process.

Shaw said, “I remember thinking that my mother wouldn’t even pick out a babysitter for me by looking at some pictures and a paragraph about them, and I’m supposed to choose the parents of my child based on this?” 

Shaw noted the strange pattern of housemates seemingly vanishing after they had given birth, stating: “You never saw them again.”

Two weeks before her May 1991 due date, Shaw’s traumatic experience escalated when she was hospitalized for labor and never returned home. 

She said she was told hours later, “You don’t need to spend time with [your baby girl] and make it harder on you.” 

Shaw remained emotional after the final kiss shared with her daughter, Kaiya, and the numbness felt upon leaving the hospital. Despite building a successful life, marrying, raising other children, earning a doctorate in clinical psychology, and starting a practice, she still felt the void left by her lost daughter.

Shaw said of the closed adoption, “I spent years fantasizing about her, and how I was going to go kidnap her and raise her.”

In 2010, Shaw was contacted by 19-year-old college freshman Sara Valentine, the girl Shaw knew as Kaiya. Valentine found Shaw’s ex-boyfriend, who is her biological father, Vinnie, on Facebook after tracing him through an old letter with redacted contact details, which he had written to her and had been passed on by the adoption agency.

Valentine held the note up to the light, hoping to find clues about her birth family beneath the hidden markings.

After Shaw’s former boyfriend, Valentine’s dad, took Valentine to lunch, he put Valentine in touch with Shaw. 

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Shaw vividly recalled the moment Valentine called, saying, “I literally dropped to the floor. All I could think was, ‘I missed my chance to go back and get her.’”

The mother and daughter saw each other again at the Las Vegas airport later that year.

“We both locked eyes and we were just looking at each other smiling,” Valentine said, recounting seeing Shaw for the first time as she came down the escalator at the airport. 

It was emotional. 

Though Valentine was raised in a loving family alongside her parents and twin brothers, meeting her birth parents “means everything.”

“I act like Zoe, and I act like Vinnie,” she revealed, “and it’s amazing to be able to see myself in them.”

Shaw found a new kind of freedom from shame when she was reunited with her first child. Her daughter is now a substitute teacher in Maryland and a mother of four, including a daughter named Kaiya in Shaw’s honor. 

This reunion helped Shaw realize that not everything is lost forever. Last year, Shaw shared her journey in a memoir, Stronger in the Difficult Places. 

Now a mom of five and grandmother of four, Shaw said, “I’m so thankful that I get to know her as a woman and be part of her life.”

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