Yale Student's 'Abortion Art' Jeopardizes Reproductive Choice
Art. vs. Reality
Here's what Shvarts should think about - the story of Gerri Santoro, who unfortunately became 'the poster child' of the abortion rights movement.
In the days before Roe v. Wade, this mother of two was about to finalize her divorce from an abusive husband, and was building a new life with a boyfriend when she became pregnant. Terrified that her violent soon-to-be ex-husband would kill her if he found out, she and her boyfriend attempted a self-induced abortion in a motel room. Santoro began to bleed uncontrollably, the boyfriend panicked and left her, and she died alone, terrified and in pain, crouched on the floor with a blood-soaked towel folded beneath her.
Police photos of the crime scene - with Santoro naked and curled up in death - were carried by abortion rights activists for years as a reminder of what life before Roe was like.
An Academic Exercise
Shvarts' stupid, stupid callousness has nothing to do with why women fought so hard for choice. Gerri Santoro is the reason, and Shvarts would have better served choice and reproductive freedom had she not pushed the envelope in a way that no one on either side of the debate could morally support.Shvarts may have wanted to start a conversation, but the academic detachment of her language in her Yale Daily News op-ed shows that even she is emotionally distant from what she has done:
The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming — an authorial act.Shvarts can afford to ask these theoretical jargon-laced questions because abortion is safe and legal. But her actions threaten its legality. In contrast, Gerri Santoro's "normative understanding of 'the real' and its accompanying politics of convention" was all too grounded in reality. Her understanding of 'the real' in a pre-Roe world resulted in her death.It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.
As an intervention into our normative understanding of “the real” and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are “meant” to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are “natural” (while all the other potential functions are “unnatural”) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives.
Putting a Hurt on Choice
With the story changing from day to day, I don't have enough accurate information to know whether or not Yale administrators should be held accountable, although in a previous post I called the Shvarts story and another incident "Yale's Pro-Choice Debacles."
I used this phrase because these two events - both the result of thoughtless actions of individual students - have set the pro-choice movement back by giving ammunition to anti-choice forces who know exactly how to utilize these incidents to their advantage.
Arrogance in the Name of Art
In the first case, Shvarts' youth, naivete, and utter arrogance in thinking she has the right to express herself in any way she sees fit blinded her to her own inhumanity in trivializing conception and miscarriage. I've witnessed the deep grief of friends who've miscarried time and time again by accident, not by intervention. Shvarts does not have the right to make a mockery of these women's lives and their pain. And she does not have the right to begin and end life - or create an ambiguous situation around those two thresholds - under the guise of artistic exploration.
Insensitivity in the Pursuit of Information
In the case of the second event, the Yale Medical Students for Choice attempting to demonstrate abortion techniques, the students' intent was to answer questions and explain what happens during the process as part of a campus-wide observation of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The inability of the student reporters on the Yale Daily News staff to cover the event with sensitivity and respect for the medical students - and the medical students' own unfortunate choice of language to describe the abortion procedure - again created a situation which cast pro-choice actions in an unfortunate light.No More Gerri Santoros
The truth is that in a perfect world, no woman would choose abortion. But this is not a perfect world, and even if the right of a woman to choose her own reproductive destiny is taken away, that will not end abortions. The only thing it will end is the safety of the procedure and legal access to it. More women will die like Gerri Santoro did, and no one should.Aliza Shvarts does not have the right to experiment with any of our hard-won reproductive freedoms. By doing so, she spits in the face of every woman who has ever fought for, lived because of, or died before Roe v. Wade.
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Comments
“And Aliza Shvarts does not have the right to disregard any of our hard-won right reproductive freedoms.”
Actually, she does–she literally has every right to do it. It was stupid and offensive, but reproductive freedom means giving women the power to sometimes make stupid and offensive decisions if they so choose.
Besides, if she really artificially inseminated herself multiple times and then chemically induced multiple abortions, all in a nine-month period and without medical supervision, then she put her own body at extreme risk. So I don’t think anyone could accuse her of not taking this seriously enough. However distant her remarks might sound, however weird and offensive the results might be, she risked her life multiple times, and caused considerable permanent physical, emotional, and hormonal damage to herself, not even to speak of the damage to her reputation, by doing all of this. So I wouldn’t say she’s making a mockery of anything. Rather it sounds to me like there are some serious personal issues in her life history that haven’t made it to the front page.
I think the phrase rich spoiled brat sums this “artist” to a tee.
The Guttmacher institute estimates that 42 million induced abortions occurred worldwide last year, and of those over half were considered “unsafe.” Some of the unsafe ones used herbal abortifacients like what Shvarts is claiming to have used to encourage her menstruation. Over 21 million women worldwide can personally relate to Shvarts’ experience this year alone.
Shvarts’ art does not jeopardize reproductive choice, it brings it back into the mind as a basic experience of women, and divorces the western mindset from its xenophobic outlook. Aliza Shvarts is extremely intelligent, and not afraid to use her own body to wake up the populous.
If you cannot respect and recognize Aliza Shvart’s right to do this to her own body (for the simple hope of encouraging thought about the subject) then I do not think you are really for freedom of expression and choice for women.
“Shvart does not have the right to disregard our… freedoms”? Is her speech not protected by the 1st amendment? I find it ironic that the author of this piece believes that the constitution grants the right to murder one’s own child (in the 14th amendment) but cannot see the right to free speech in the 1st amendment. I guess we see what we want to see.
I think that this case, and article bring up a very interesting issue. Not the standard issue of abortion, but the tendency of many people from the pro-abrtion camp to dislike the abuse of abortions.
From a philosophical Human Rights perspective, abortion can only fit into a system in which a fetus is not considered to be a human being. Human Rights are not absolute, they are limited to the extent in which they infringe upon other rights, such as our right to freedom of expression being limited when it harms another human being and infringes their fundamental human rights. The same goes for wommen’s rights; if the fetus is in fact considered a human being upon conception, then abortion is an infringement on the right to life of that growing human being within the mother.
If the fetus is not a human being than this art project should theoretically not be too far removed from an art project using toe nail clippings or a removed appendix.
The fact that something like this upsets pro abortionists leads one to wonder whether the political/rights paradigm is on shaky grounds, and that in fact the movement (or at least a segment of it) is not quite set in the belief that fetus’ are not human beings. If so, one might assume that these people are being driven by a view of women’s rights in an absolute form, which in fact infringes on the rights of others.
Jeff, there are a range of viewpoints on whether a fetus is a human being. Not to plug my own stuff, but I wrote a piece specifically on that issue (titled “Does the Fetus Have Rights?”).
But I would hasten to add that what this art student did does not actually require abortion to be illegal. Under most abortion bans proposed or dormant at the state level, only medical abortions are banned. Self-induced abortions, such as those practiced by Shvarts, would remain legal regardless of the status of Roe v. Wade.
“…require abortion to be illegal…” –> “…require abortion to be legal…”
In a “perfect world”, some of us would still choose abortion – unless of course the world was so perfect that birth control was free, widely available, completely without side efefects, and infallible.