A guest essay in The New York Times asserting that adoption can be more traumatic than abortion received heated criticism from pro-life media pundits, who said that living life as an adoptee is considerably more favorable than not living a life at all.
Democratic consultant Elizabeth Spiers, referencing Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's suggestion in recent oral arguments that women could turn to adoption as an abortion alternative, wrote in her piece, published Friday, that, as an adoptee, she was "floored by Justice Barrett’s assumption that adoption is an accessible and desirable alternative for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant."
She argued that 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."
The article prompted a slew of criticisms from notable conservative commentators that Spiers described as "callous" opinions.
The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro penned a 17-point Twitter thread outlining the "lunacy" of Spiers' article.
"If you're worried that the biological bond between mother and child will be 'taken away' by adoption, I know of something else that will take away that bond. Permanently," he said, referring to a paragraph of the article in which Spiers states that a pregnant mother will "undergo the bonding with a child that happens by biological design as an embryo develops into a living, breathing, conscious human" that will then be "taken away."
Meghan McCain, currently a columnist for the Daily Mail, responded to the article by saying that her sisters, who were adopted, would prefer living as adoptees over being dead as a result of an abortion.
"I can assure you my sister prefers being alive than dead," she said in a tweet Friday. "And would prefer a life outside of an orphanage in Calcutta. 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."
Spiers' essay came as the Supreme Court hears the case of Mississippi's abortion law that prohibits the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a case widely viewed as a direct challenge to the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a woman's right to an abortion.