God & Woman at Yale: Abortion Art
This past January, Yale University’s Reproductive Rights Action League (RALY) and Yale Medical Students for Choice commemorated the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision by demonstrating abortion procedures on papayas, displaying surgical tools and discussing the “emotional fallout” some patients experience.
Rasha Khoury, MED ‘08 and member of Medical Students for Choice, brought internet attention to herself and the project by saying, “It’s not as scary as it seems. It’s just blood and mucus,” referring to the fetal remains in a manual vacuum aspiration device. “You’ll be able to see arms and stuff, but still just miniscule.”
The Yale Daily News, which had covered the event, pulled its report after it attracted attention on the Catholic Answers Forums and the blog GODSBODY.
Less than three months later, Yale has attracted controversy again, just yesterday, this time because an art student, Aliza Shvarts, claims to have impregnated herself artificially several times over the last 9 months, then taken herbal medicines to induce abortion — all for an art project.
According to the Yale Daily News, “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.”
Today Yale officials have called the whole thing a hoax, “performance art” and nothing more. Hmmm. True or damage control?
Well, according to today’s Yale Daily News, the artist is sticking by her story.
Yale students, for the most part, are not happy. Prospective freshman are arriving soon. What are they going to think? But one group on campus is just fine with all this:
“The Yale Women’s Center stands strongly behind the fact that a woman’s body is her own,” the statement read. “Whether it is a question of reproductive rights or of artistic expression, Aliza Shvarts’ body is an instrument over which she should be free to exercise full discretion.”
All this puts me in mind of something Pope Benedict XVI said yesterday:
“When nothing beyond the individual is recognized as definitive, the ultimate criterion of judgment becomes the self and the satisfaction of the individual’s immediate wishes. The objectivity and perspective, which can only come through a recognition of the essential transcendent dimension of the human person, can be lost. Within such a relativistic horizon the goals of education are inevitably curtailed. Slowly, a lowering of standards occurs. We observe today a timidity in the face of the category of the good and an aimless pursuit of novelty parading as the realization of freedom.”
Is anyone listening?
Sherry Tyree, 66, a graduate of John Burroughs School and Washington University, is a founding member (1984) and Vice President of Women for Faith & Family, a national Catholic women's organization that supports and defends traditional church teachings. Sherry is married to Dr. Donald A. Tyree, professor emeritus, School of Business, St. Louis University. 
Oh, I’m listening, and many fellow Christians, pro-lifers and such people are incensed. That being said, some pro-choice individuals aren’t too happy either. Basically, the “artist” is a flippantly crass moron with a sick sense of what would be “art”. This goes way beyond crucifixes in urine - that’s mildly insensitive to this.
Discussing this topic with a non-Christian, atheistic individual on a message board, he had this to say:
“I’m not sure what it is about this that absolutely sickens you. Taking these kinds of drugs would induce extremely early-term miscarriages - at the stage where the embryos are literally just a tiny, almost microscopic clump of a few cells. We can argue back and forth over whether late-semester embryos have any consciousness or awareness, but with a clump of maybe sixty-four cells, the answer is an unqualified no.
And even taking into account that you subscribe to a theology that says those microscopic clumps of cells have souls, it’s my understanding that you do not believe those souls are, say, sent to hell as a result of never being born.
So where’s the harm? (Besides, of course, to the woman’s health - which I doubt is your concern.)
Granted, this piece is pretty “sickening” on a visceral level. I see it as pretty much the moral and artistic equivalent of taking emetics and vomiting every day for a year: I don’t have a moral problem with it, but it’s just not a kind of “art” I’d want to look at or that I even understand.
“Art” means two very different things: to some, it means “making aesthetically pleasing decorations,” and to others, it means “doing utterly absurd things just for the experience of having done them.” I sort of understand where the latter group is coming from, but, honestly, it’s nothing I get too excited by.”
What is so saddening is that there are a large number of people who feel themselves on good ethical and moral foundations and have no problem with such actions.
A pro-choice group wasn’t too happy, but they were more concerned about pr for abortion rights and practices.
What it boils down to is that there are quite a lot of people in the world with a very twisted idea of morality and acceptability.
Welcome to relativism.
Romans 1:28 And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
As a Muslim and as a physician, I see legitimate reasons for abortion. As I mentioned in a previous post on this blog (“Why do Muslims vote Democrat?”) abortion issues are not as black and white in Islam as it is for some ardent pro-lifers. Still, what was described as art in this posting makes me SICK. To get pregnant repeatedly just to abort for the sake of an art project is CRIMINAL in my mind. To me, abortion is justifiable for higher good (the welfare, emotional and physical) of another life. But for an art project, it is disgusting. An embryo may be tiny, or even few cells stuck together, but it is life, and has to be treated with respect.
There is talk that this episode is a hoax, which I dearly hope turns out to be the case. However, the callousness involved in even thinking of something like this, much less putting it to fruition, shows neither artistic talent nor merit. I’ve heard it said that the only artists who feel the need to be controversial or edgy are failed artists. This young woman apparently has done this for her senior project. I hope her professors have the moral courage and intellectual honesty to flunk her.