Democratic digital strategist Elizabeth Spiers, who was adopted as a baby, penned an opinion piece in which she said that adoption can be more traumatic than abortion.
“The right likes to suggest that abortion is a traumatic experience for women — a last resort, a painful memory. But 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.
She noted that her biological mother Maria “remains heartbroken about the years we missed together.”
Her biological mother and adoptive mother both oppose abortion for religious reasons.
“Both like to point to me to justify their beliefs, saying that had Maria gotten an abortion, I would not exist. 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,” Spiers said.
“I’m no Nobel Prize winner, but I still resent being used as a political football by the right. I believe that abortion is a form of health care, and that every woman should have access to it if she needs it,” she wrote.
Spiers, who has a son, said that she resents the notion “that adoption is a simple solution, and I resent it on behalf of Maria, who found the choice she made traumatizing and still feels that pain, 44 years later. Even when an adoption works out well, as it did in my case, it is still fraught.”
The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether to uphold a Mississippi law that prohibits most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A decision to uphold the law would run contrary to the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion case.
Former U.S. congresswoman Katie Hill recently tweeted that being pregnant has bolstered her belief that women who do not wish to be pregnant should be able to get an abortion.
“I didn’t think it was possible to become more pro-choice than I already was, but after 7 months of pregnancy all I can think about is how wrong it would be to make someone do this who doesn’t want to,” Hill tweeted.