"Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement.
Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process…"
She’s doing her body, pro-choice politics, art, Yale, and the general public a disservice with this concept.
Abortion is currently interpreted by the courts as a right under the Constitution. This in turn means that it cannot be abused, only used. Her actions, however, pull the “squick” switch in my brain, and it probably does the same in most people.
I suspect that she is either a pro-lifer using a subterfuge or she is a very, very disturbed individual, and her teachers should insist that she seek help, not support her in displaying her pathology for everyone to see.
I can’t get your link to open, FriarTed, but my first thought upon reading your OP is…is this safe to do? I don’t know much about the health effects of abortion drugs, but it sounds risky to me. And slightly crazy. I’m sure a doctor wouldn’t recommend this course of action.
As far as it being art, or a political statement, I guess I get it, but it seems kind of foolish and misguided to me. Doesn’t seem to support the idea of “safe, legal, and rare” to me.
I don’t see how this is supposed to work as a “pro-choice” piece, except maybe on the “nyah nyah you can’t stop me!” level. That’s hardly constructive… but who says art has to be constructive?
Hmm… the more I think about it, the more I think it’s interesting.
She’s succeeded in doing something that both sides of the debate can legitimately and relevantly point to as a paradigmatic example of something they are struggling against.
I don’t think that finding it disturbing is mutually exclusive with it being art, as your title and other posters have suggested. Isn’t the opposite more likely to be true?
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole thing is faked, and the intended piece of art is the performance piece that follows.
FWIW, women don’t get pregnant that easily. The mention of “nine months” is evocative and suggestive of full-term fetuses. But my guess is that even a young, fertile woman could only get pregnant once, at most twice, during a nine month period. Maybe she had one miscarriage, maybe even quite a while ago, and then another, happened to film or photograph and save it. And then she thought: “Hey, if I subtitle those private filmed events with an outrageous story, I have an “art”-project that is guaranteed to raise controversy, attention, and get me a good grade!”
Hey, she’s in Yale, she’s smart enough to come up with such a gimmick.
Well we can all thank this girl for being the ultimate example of the Pro-Life nightmare. It’ll be hard to say to Pro-Lifers that there aren’t people who genuinely just want to murder babies, and then get support from their liberal university.
The artificial inseminators should tell her to kiss off, they have real patients who want to have babies to tend to.
I mention this because miscarriage is a common (though typically unwanted) occurrence. It is a common consequence of trying to have a kid in the first place.
Other than the ‘squick’ factor, I don’t get the issue.
First, she didn’t state that it was meant specifically as a pro- (or anti-) abortion piece. I don’t know that it needs to be one or the other.
But it does raise the question, ‘what exactly is (generic) your problem with this?’ What about it makes you uncomfortable? This is truly a worthy question when the issue of even ‘morning after’ pills is one of controversy.
Does she have positive pregnancy tests, at least? That can somehow be linked to her? She didn’t see a doctor to confirm the “pregnancies”, she didn’t use abortifacient drugs, she didn’t have the expelled contents verified by a doctor to ensure complete expulsion of the fetuses…I think she’s displaying her menstrual blood, is all.
There’s no safe, effective herbal abortifacient I’m aware of that wouldn’t leave you unable to function for at least 2 days with abdominal cramping, nausea and weakness. And most of them have about a, oh, I’m guessing here because no one has real numbers from large studies, but probably about a 60-70% chance of working. Many women who try an herbal abortion find it’s failed, and need to go on to have a surgical abortion. And, of course, people have died using herbal abortifacients.
I agree that it sounds like a big troll. It’s just not that easy to get pregnant, and as WhyNot says, herbal abortions don’t just magically make the pregnancy disappear in a cloud of rainbows and pixie dust. There are plants that are abortifacients, but they will be brutal on your system. Whenever I read a historical novel where the protagonist uses magical herbal birth control, I want to throw the book across the room. Up until the pill in the 1960s there simply was no such thing, that’s what made the pill so revolutionary.
Now wait a second, now you’re talking something else entirely. There *are *herbal **contraceptives **that do not work primarily by abortifacient means and are fairly anecdotally effective on thin active women without ill effects (Wild Yam (Dioscorea Villosa) being one, pomegranates, seeds, rinds and all, perhaps being another), and it’s entirely possible that there were more of them in the past than there are now (since it’s not unlikely that they’d be in high demand and overharvested.) Let’s not throw out the never conceived baby with the aborted fetus’ bathwater, okay? But in all honesty, we just don’t know. We don’t have modern testing or the funding to do it.
But in all honesty, we just don’t know. We don’t have modern testing or the funding to do it.