Aliza Shvarts is the grossest human alive.
As the Yale Daily News, IvyGate, and now the DP’s very own Mara Gordon report, for her senior art project at Yale, Shvarts artificially inseminated herself multiple times and herbally induced nine abortions in nine months. Film of the possible miscarriages, as well as the blood Shvarts collected from them, will constitute the art project.
The universal reaction to this news was: BLEEEARRRGH!
After everyone wiped the puke off their chins, naturally, they started arguing. “Is it art?” “Is it pro-choice?” “Is it pro-life?” Mara asks, “Is it ethical?” Her take, as I understand it, is that Shvarts’s work is unethical because it trivializes abortion and provides fodder for the pro-life cause.
My take’s a little different.
As disturbing as it is, I think Shvarts’s work is brilliant and highlights a key point in the abortion controversy that people don’t address enough.
Abortion is gross. Partial-birth abortion is really gross. And people who are pro-choice should have to acknowledge that grossness when they defend their stance. Pro-choicers too often elevate the argument to the abstract philosophical realm. All a pro-lifer has to do is show a huge diagram of a fetus getting its proto-brains sucked out to bring things back to the physical.
I’m pro-choice, but I’m willing to frame myself as anti-life. I don’t care whether or not a fetus biologically or spiritually “has life” or not. Its existence is way less important than the well-being of a fully grown woman.
I think by looking at Shvartz’s work, other pro-choicers will have to formulate a more solid opinion on what exactly a fetus means, and whether the process of inducing abortion entails murder. Mara mocks Shvartz’s statement that her art project “creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership,” but I think it’s meaningful.
Shvartz’s art basically thrusts gross stuff in our faces, asks us to give a reason why it’s gross, and makes us decide whether that reason is problematic — or even fatal — for the pro-choice position.
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April 25th, 2008 at 11:17 am
There is nothing brilliant about Shvartz’s display (I cannot bring myself to call it art). Every human who is killed by an abortion (including the 9 babies that Shvartz murdered) will eventually become a “fully grown” man or woman with their own important “well-being.” It is completely illogical, unethical and inhumane to regard one person’s “well-being” as more important than another person’s life. Who are we to determine who should live and who should die? Because unborn babies are defenseless and relatively easy to ignore, we convince ourselves that it’s OK to kill them, and call it “choice.” However, if it were any other group than unborn babies, we’d call it “discrimination”…
April 25th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
and by “discrimination,” I think former fetus means “genocide”
April 26th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
yeah, that’s a better word…it is genocide to murder so many people.
April 27th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Yawn…
Tired Pro-Life arguments aside, I think the important issue Shvarts’ work raises is closer to Schrodinger’s cat than Schindler’s list — if any of you paid attention to the Op-Ed piece she wrote in the YDL, you’d know that there is no way to know whether the ‘abortions’ she performed were miscarriages or regular periods (due to the way she temporally structured her ingestion of her herbal ‘abortives’). The fact that we don’t know whether she miscarried or not is significant, as is the fact that IF she miscarried, the ‘being’ miscarried was, at most developed, an embryo NOT a fetus.
This artwork, whether or not it is genuine (many believe the whole ‘miscarriage’ aspect of it was a hoax, and that the real project lies in the media aspect), plays on this idea of distinction. I HIGHLY recommend that those interested in this project, especially those Puritans who find it thoroughly offensive, read more about it before forming their own aborted opinions. Though I do not personally agree with Miss Shvarts on all facets of her project (I eagerly followed her argument until about 5/6ths of the way through, when it took leaps even I would not follow), I will gladly defend her thoroughly conceived art against troglodytes who don’t know the difference between an embryo and a fetus.
April 27th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
With all due respect, the terms “embryo” and “fetus” are just that: mere terms that scientists conceived to describe various stages of human development. Just because we stop calling a human an “embryo” and start calling him or her a “fetus” at a certain point in his or her lifetime, doesn’t mean that they have undergone some sort of essential change that alters their right to existence. The fact that a human life is ended in its earliest stages does not make that death any less horrific. Again, not to sound rude, but would you not have found it “thoroughly offensive” if the aborted “embryo” had been you?