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Critics on Saturday ripped the “sheer viciousness” of a guest essay in The New York Times by Democratic consultant Elizabeth Spiers who argued that abortion is a potentially less traumatic alternative to adoption.
“Adoption is often just as traumatic as the right thinks abortion is, if not more so, as a woman has to relinquish not a lump of cells but a fully formed baby she has lived with for nine months,” Spiers wrote in the piece published Friday.
The incendiary article landed like a bomb among conservatives and anti-abortion activists, who denounced both the “callous” essay and Spiers.
“Each and every human life is precious, including the lives of unborn children. It is absurd to say adoption is less humane than killing an unborn child,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican senate candidate in Pennsylvania told The Post.
“That callous argument is dismissive of the children who have grown up with adoptive parents, the lives saved, the millions of adoptive families, and to prospective adoptive parents,” Oz added.
Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza said the piece reflected “the sheer viciousness of the Left’s pro-choice stance.”
The broadsides continued on Twitter, where DailyWire publisher Ben Shapiro dedicated a 17 point thread denouncing the story. “Glad you’re here to resent things. You know what would have prevented that? You being aborted,” he snapped.
“I can assure you my sister prefers being alive than dead,” added television host Meghan McCain. “Of all the grotesque woke commentary to emerge in the past few years – the anti-adoption fringe intellectuals are by far the most vile and sick.”
In Friday’s piece, Spiers, a former muckraking journalist, also criticized US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for suggesting in recent oral arguments that adoption was an alternative.
“As an adoptee myself, I was floored by Justice Barrett’s assumption that adoption is an accessible and desirable alternative for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant,” Spiers wrote.
But that assessment was also challenged by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.
“Pro-choice advocates made specific use of the burden of raising a child in their arguments. Barrett was simply asking why such a burden should be assumed when a mother elects to raise a child rather than put the child up for adoption,” he said.
The Spiers essay came as the Supreme Court considers the case of a Mississippi law that outlaws abortion after 15 weeks. In oral arguments this week, the conservative majority on the bench seemed poised to uphold the statute.
The hearing sent liberals into a panic about the future of abortion rights in the United States which have been guaranteed since the high court’s 1973 decision in Roe V. Wade.
Spiers also drew passionate responses from supporters of abortion rights such as author Molly Jong-fast, who called the piece “a beautiful beautiful important essay.”
“It’a annoying to see right wingers willfully distort my argument because they have no intention of engaging with it,” Spiers told The Post, commenting on the firestorm. “On the upside I’m gotten so poignant letters from adoptees and their families, both biological and adoptive.”
