The Mormon Church Made Me Give Up My Baby w/ Myndee Tollefson | Ep. 2047

The Church's Role in Adoption Coercion: What Myndee Tollefson's Story Reveals About Mormon Institutional Pressure

When a young woman discovers she is pregnant outside marriage within the Latter-day Saint community, she faces not only a personal crisis but an institutional one. The LDS Church made me give up my baby, this phrase, spoken by Myndee Tollefson in a recent Mormon Stories podcast episode, echoes a pattern documented across hundreds of similar testimonies. Her narrative exposes how religious messaging, shame-based culture, and institutional pressure can systematically channel vulnerable young people toward adoption, often without full informed consent or genuine alternatives presented fairly.

This is not merely a personal story. It is a structural one that raises critical questions about the Church's historical role in shaping reproductive outcomes for its unmarried members, and how the gap between official doctrine and lived experience has created lasting trauma for birth mothers.

The Context: Purity Culture and Institutional Messaging

Tollefson grew up in a deeply orthodox Mormon environment during the 1970s and 1980s. Her father was a church employee, a seminary instructor and principal, which meant religious messaging was not confined to Sunday meetings but woven throughout her entire social ecology. According to the Mormon Stories podcast episode featuring her testimony, this context matters enormously.

The LDS Church's historical emphasis on sexual purity created what scholars call "purity culture", a system of messaging that equated premarital sexual activity with grave sin. Church leaders repeatedly taught that chastity violations ranked second only to murder. Tollefson recalls internalizing this messaging so deeply that when she eventually became sexually active as an adult, the shame was paralyzing. She had been a "good girl" by every external measure, yet felt like "a terrible, terrible person."