So, what happens when a culture embraces death with open arms as our own has done? What happens when we seek a secular foundation for human rights? What happens when “the will of the majority” or the pronouncement of black-robed gods becomes the arbiter of life?
I found an answer to those questions today.
The Place: Yale University, alma mater of Jonathan Edwards. The Person: Art major Aliza Shavarts.
Ms. Shavarts has prepared a unique senior arts project. Over the last nine months, she has been artificially inseminating herself, waiting for conception, then taking abortion-inducing drugs. She’s done it several times. Enough times, in fact, to produce sufficient tissue and blood to be pressed between two layers of plastic wrap and strung round a huge cube, suspended from the ceiling of a room that will display her work. Along the way, she has chronicled the pain of her bathtub-abortions on video.
The Yale Student Newspaper described her project:
The display of Schvarts’ project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts’ self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.
Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.
For those who think abortion should be a legal option yet find themselves rightly shocked by such a cavalier approach to life, I have a question: What is the basis of your indignation? If a person has the right to determine whether another person may or may not live; if abortion is a “difficult matter between a woman and her physician”; if the individual is the only one who may appropriately weigh factors for or against carrying another individual to term, then who are you to say that this artist has inappropriately exercised her right to choose?
AND NOW THE REST OF THE STORY
About twelve hours after this post was made, the following news was made public. Apparently, the Yale establishment rushed to get to the bottom of the story. The following is from Fox News:
Yale University officials issued a strongly worded statement Thursday night explaining that a student’s shocking claim that she had artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” and then took drugs to induce miscarriages for her senior art project was “creative fiction.”
The student, Aliza Shvarts, told three senior Yale University officials, including two deans, that she did not do the things she claimed in her art project, according to the statement.
“The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body,” said Helaine S. Klasky, associate dean and vice president for public affairs in a statement sent to FOXNews.com. “Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.”
“She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” Klasky wrote.
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