She probably couldn't find any volunteers.
Posted on 04/18/2008 7:45:50 PM PDT by wagglebee
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, April 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - News outlets exploded yesterday with the story that a graduate art student at Yale University had deliberately impregnated herself multiple times and then used chemical abortifacients as an art project. Shvarts had said that the blood from the "project" would be displayed along with video recordings of the "forced miscarriages". LifeSiteNews reported the development.
Soon after the story broke, however, Yale University issued a statement that the announcement of the project by graduate art student Aliza Shvarts had been a hoax meant as a piece of "performance art". Helaine S. Klasky, a spokesman for Yale said that the hoax was the project. She said that Shvarts had not in fact impregnated herself and did not "induce any miscarriages" and that to do so would be a violation of ethical and health principles. LifeSiteNews accordingly changed its report of earlier in the day to reflect the Yale statement.
But in a guest column that ran in today's Yale Daily News, Shvarts insists that she did indeed conduct artificial inseminations and carry out self-induced "miscarriages" using abortifacient drugs. However, she also adds that she couldn't be sure if she was ever actually pregnant, because she took the abortificiant drugs on the 28th day of her menstrual cycle, the day on which bleeding would occur anyway.
"The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading."
"For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages," Shvarts wrote in the column. "Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization."
"On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding....Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there (sic) was ever a fertilized ovum or not."
Shvarts claimed that her project was "university sanctioned".
"I'm not going to absolve [the university] by saying it was some sort of hoax when it wasn't," she told the Yale Daily News. "I started out with the university on board with what I was doing, and because of the media frenzy they've been trying to dissociate with me. Ultimately I want to get back to a point where they renew their support."
The incident came as no surprise to pro-life advocates who had previously observed Yale's enthusiastic support for legal abortion and the school's frivolous attitude toward it. In January this year, during "Roe v. Wade week", the Reproductive Rights Action League at Yale (RALY) staged a presentation in which students conducted mock-abortions and demonstrated abortion techniques.
At the event, Rasha Khoury, a member of Medical Students for Choice, demonstrated a vacuum aspirator, telling assembled students, "It's not as scary as it seems. It's just blood and mucus." Khoury said, referring to the foetal remains in the device, "You'll be able to see arms and stuff, but still just miniscule."
In addition, Yale University medical school requires abortion training for ob/gyn residents established by Planned Parenthood's Connecticut branch (PPC). Second year ob/gyn residents must complete two four-week rotations with PPC for training in abortion techniques such as vacuum suction, medical abortions, and other "family planning" services in a program entitled Family Planning/Ambulatory Surgery.
Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the pro-life Family Institute of Connecticut, an anti-abortion group, told the media that his anger was not mitigated by the university's claim that Shvarts was never pregnant.
"I'm astounded by this woman's callousness," he said. "There are thousands of women in this country who are dealing with the pain of having had an abortion, with the trauma of having suffered a miscarriage. For her to make light of that for her own purposes is just beyond words."
Given the University's history and the tenor of some recent "art projects" from avant-garde US artists, the project was taken seriously by the news media, pro-life and pro-abortion groups and by Catholic writers alike. "After all, if embryonic human beings can be destroyed for the sake of science, why can't they be killed in the name of art?" commented a spokesman for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
Elizabeth Scalia, a New York freelance writer and contributor to the Inside Catholic weblog, said it "demonstrates that our society has succeeded in creating a real disassociative mindset within ourselves."
"I am appalled also that the Yale newspaper continually refers to this as an 'induced miscarriage' or 'miscarriage' throughout. This is not a miscarriage it is intended as an abortion," she wrote.
Silent No More's Georgette Forney said that the entire incident is a "natural extension of the abortion mindset's utilitarian view that unborn children are expendable."
"The lie that unborn children are not children is a cancer that has resulted in the kind of calloused hearts and minds that would conceive and approve of a project like this. It's not just that the project is offensive, it diminishes human life."
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Revealed as HOAX: Yale Student Did Not Impregnate Herself or Have Multiple Abortions for School "Art" Project
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/apr/08041701.html
"Roe v. Wade Week" at Yale Features Do It Yourself Abortions
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/jan/07012503.html
The REALITY is that YOU are a seriously screwed up human being, that's my reading.
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Just an update, the deranged “artist” isn’t sure if she had multiple abortions for no reason whatsoever, but she WANTS it to be true.
She probably couldn't find any volunteers.
Just about all of us know women (and their husbands) who have dealt with the heartache of miscarriage or infertility and this selfish brat treats it as a joke.
What a crazy freak. However, I predict many NEA grants in her future.
What she NEEDS is A LOT of psychiatric treatment. (And I have no clue why any of her type of “artists” would EVER need a grant, everything they need for an art project can be pulled out of either a dumpster or a sewer.)
That’s even worse.
I still think it was a serious mistake to allow women at Yale.
There was Hillary, and this whackjob...
This the new face of the Culture of Death.. Yale..
God help the man or woman who gets involved with anyone this ill. She may just be the single most selfish human this side of the Clinton family.
I know this just extends her pathetic 15 minutes..but check out her own words. All I have to say is, HUH?
Aliza Shvarts, in her own words.
“For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.
To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms — copies of copies of which there is no original.
This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.
It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading.
This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term “miscarriage” or “period” to that blood.
In some sense, neither term is exactly accurate or inaccurate; the ambiguity is not merely a matter of context, but is embodied in the physicality of the object. This central ambiguity defies a clear definition of the act. 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.
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.
Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.
When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.”
I posted a link to the faculty adviser on an earlier thread. She is also a total nutcase, whose specialty is in-your-face performance art. And obviously Yale hired her because that’s the sort of “art” they want to teach their students.
So, as this article suggests, this kind of thing is absolutely typical of Yale. I don’t doubt for a minute that the adviser approved of her project. This young woman may be indifferent to how many babies she conceives and kills, but I’m sure she is not indifferent to what sort of grade she gets for all the perverse work and time she put into this performance art project.
As I am a man, perhaps you or some of the other women here could enlighten me as to any other POSSIBLE purpose for ovaries and a uterus besides reproduction.
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