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?