Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro ripped apart a Friday op-ed in The New York Times which sought to justify abortion citing the difficulty and trauma of adoption.
Democratic digital strategist Elizabeth Spiers wrote a piece in the Times published on Friday arguing that the process of adoption is “infinitely more difficult, expensive, dangerous and potentially traumatic” than aborting an unborn child.
“This article from Elizabeth Spiers in the NYT is true, bats*** lunacy,” Shapiro tweeted on Friday before launching into a rebuttal of the Times essay. “Bearing a child and giving it up for adoption is significantly less difficult, expensive, dangerous and potentially traumatic for the child than, you know, stabbing it in the head and sucking it into a sink.”
Spiers, who was given up for adoption and raised in a stable, two-parent household, says her adoption experience “was what many would consider idyllic” as she “grew up in a home where I knew every day that I was loved.” She cites the heartbreak her birth mother, who she has since reconnected with, has suffered since putting her up for adoption, however.
“Adoption is not always an unalloyed good. It’s a complicated choice in a situation that has no right or wrong answer,” she says.
Spiers’ birth mother and adoptive mother both oppose abortions, which Spiers appears to attribute to their religious beliefs. Spiers says that her birth and adoptive parents often use her own story as a “political football” as an example of what an abortion could kill.
“Both Maria and my mom, Alice, oppose abortion on religious grounds. My mom is white and Southern Baptist; Maria is Hispanic and Pentecostal. Both like to point to me to justify their beliefs, saying that had Maria gotten an abortion, I would not exist,” she writes. “It’s a familiar argument: The anti-abortion movement likes to invoke Nobel Prize winners who might never have materialized, or potential adoptees who might have cured cancer, if they hadn’t been aborted at eight weeks.”
Later in the article, Spiers attributed the attraction between mother and child developed during pregnancy to “biological brainwashing,” which she says leads to much heartache for mothers who chose to give their children up for adoption. She also cites the “relinquishment trauma” adopted children may have after bonding with their mothers during pregnancy.
Adoption “is life changing, irrevocable, and not to be taken lightly,” Spiers concludes. “It often causes trauma, even when things work out, and it’s a disservice to adoptees and their families, biological and adopted, to pretend otherwise in service of a neat political narrative.”
Shapiro dissected the article in a lengthy twitter thread, unloading on Spiers’ justification for abortion in a 17-point response. Shapiro wrote, citing passages of Spiers’ article along the way:
This article from Elizabeth Spiers in the NYT is true, bats*** lunacy. Let us examine the ways.
1. Bearing a child and giving it up for adoption is significantly less difficult, expensive, dangerous and potentially traumatic for the child than, you know, stabbing it in the head and sucking it into a sink.
2. Adoption is often a pretty good thing, as the author acknowledges. But wait…she’ll buy it back momentarily.
3. Your birth mom wanted to give birth to you and give you up for adoption, and you benefitted from that. Now you argue that your birth mom is upset she missed years with you. You know what would have stolen all of the years? ALL OF THEM? Killing you in the womb.
4. Both your birth mom and adopted mom are happy with the adoption decision. But you’re paternalistic enough to doubt their happiness.
5. You also resent being “used as a political football” because you were adopted. Glad you’re here to resent things. You know what would have prevented that? You being aborted.
6. You say that you think abortion is a form of health care. But this entire article is an acknowledgement that abortion takes a life, because you’re here to write the article.
7. You say that Maria still feels the pain of adoption and you say that adoption is traumatizing. You know what could be painful for the mother and is certainly both painful, traumatizing and deadly for the child? You guessed it.
8. You say adoption is not an “unalloyed good,” that there are no “right or wrong answers.” I’m pretty sure I found the wrong answer, though: killing you in the womb.
9. This take that human biology is an imposition is completely pathological. “Forced to give birth” implies that the intervention is the pregnancy rather than the abortion. And the “biological design” by which you become attached to your child is not an evil. This is sick.
10. 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. It rhymes with shmabortion.
11. Adoption is certainly less traumatic for the child — remember, the person writing this is a woman who was adopted — than being killed.
12. She says there’s a difference between 40 weeks and 4 weeks, but it is doubtful she would be fine with late term abortion restrictions.
13. BIOLOGICAL BRAINWASHING???!!!! To love your kid????!!!!!
14. More “biological brainwashing” insanity. And you have to love the argument that a mother can’t choose to put her child up for adoption because of that biological brainwashing but can choose to kill it.
15. Then she makes the utterly specious argument that pro-lifers ignore the problems of child-rearing. That argument is always idiotic[.] Pro-lifers do care about raising kids. But the argument itself is nonsensical. It is like arguing that we should not ban murder of the homeless unless we also provide them state-subsidized housing. You can argue for the housing, but the ban on murder is non-negotiable.
16. Only Democrats talk about women being “punished” with a child, a la Barack Obama. No pro-lifer talks this way.
17. I can think of a trauma for a child far worse than relinquishment trauma. Can you?