Circling the Drain

Perhaps you heard about this. Well, turns out, Rach called it.  It’s all just a put-on as part of an “performance art project.” 

Yale Officials Conclude Student’s Shocking Claim of ‘Abortion Art’ Was ‘Creative Fiction

 Let’s take a quick look at all the myriad ways that this whole thing is just amazingly, appallingly, disturbingly wrong.

First of all, let’s examine the basic premise of this individual’s “art.”

Yale University officials issued a strongly worded statement Thursday night explaining that a student’s shocking claim that she had artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” and then took drugs to induce miscarriages for her senior art project was “creative fiction.”

Let that sort of sink in for a minute.  Someone within the vaunted halls of academia, those hallowed bastions of higher learning and enlightenment, decided that this was a legitimate foundation for her senior art project.

“She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” Klasky wrote.

And then, the school administration BACKS HER UP ON IT!

Sure, there’s freedom of speech, but then there is also public censure.  There still exists (though it is becoming increasingly blurred) that line between what you CAN say and what you SHOULD say.  Even if I grant that this student has a right to “perform” this, that doesn’t mean that we, collectively, as a society should accept, condone, or encourage it.  Social censure is a valid and effective tool for keeping nutcases like this under wraps.  Rather than being lauded or defending for her “daring vision” or some other such poppycock, she needs to be booed, and mocked and laughed at, pitied, and most definitely referred for psychiatric evaluation.   Because clearly, this woman is a deeply disturbed individual.  Given the new sensitivity to closet crazies on college campuses after Virginia Tech, why is someone who is clearly this deeply conflicted and psychologically unstable not being handled with much greater concern?

The stomach-turning display will be showcased next week — complete with depictions of blood samples and videos purporting to be from the terminated pregnancies…Shvarts described her project to the Yale paper as a huge cube hanging from the ceiling and swathed in plastic sheeting smeared with her blood from the reported miscarriages. Videos taken of what the college student claimed were self-induced abortions in her bathtub will be projected both on the cube’s sides and on the gallery walls.

This sounds like something right out of some insane asylum or B-movie horror flick!!  A woman is smearing blood everywhere, posts photos of herself nominally have abortions in a bathtub, assuming, I’m sure that she’ll be covered in all manner of vileness herself to “make a point.”  Folks, does this realllllly sound like anyone you want walking the streets, or hanging out at the local coffee shop with your daughter?  Maybe dating your son?  YEEEIKES!!!

But Shvarts has said the goal of the project is to encourage debate and discussion about the connection between art and the human body.

That’s like me saying we should start gassing Jews again in order to open a discussion about the connection between the release of natural gas and global warming.

Or that I’m going to drown a bunch of kittens and string their sodden corpses from trees to highlight the various types of animal representations used in Pre-Columbian art.  I’ve taken quite a few art appreciation and art history classes in my day.  They talked plenty about the treatment of the human form in art, from Reubens and Degas to Michealangelo and friends.  Never really saw the need to stage mock abortions to get the point across, you know?

Oh, but then it gets REALLY rich.  First we have the freedom of speech and expression argument.  Which then gets deftly hijacked even further into the “woman’s right to chose” meme.

“This ‘project’ is offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage,” NARAL’s communication director Ted Miller said in a statement.

Ah, yes.  The sensitive, caring souls at NARAL, so concerned about the emotional impacts this might have on those who have suffered the pain and loss of a miscarriage.  While certainly valid and commendable, it seems to ring a bit hollow to me.   This artist didn’t say she was using miscarriages.  She said she was using material from ABORTED FETUSES.  See, this is how bass-ackwards and screwed up these people are.  If you lose a baby from a miscarriage, it’s a tragedy, because the baby was probably wanted.  If you destroy a baby with an abortion, it’s a woman’s right, and socially responsible to boot because clearly the baby was unwanted, and is better off never having been born, k?  In the first case it’s a “miscarriage.”  In the second case, it’s a “removal of tissue.” 

Moral relativism at its finest.

Alvarez, who spoke about the project before the university had announced it was a work of fiction, said a real endeavor of this kind in the name of art would be offensive, harmful and insensitive, especially to women who face difficult choices about pregnancy or who aren’t able to conceive.

“Anybody who trivializes a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy is really not contributing anything positive to these matters,” he said.

“Trivializes” the choice to have an abortion?!  Coming from the spokesman for that very industry?! From the people who brought us “fetus” and “mass of tissue” and “removal procedure?” to help softcoat what’s really happening down there?

That this mentally unbalanced student is permitted to go forward with this project, even in its not-really-abortions phase, is both alarming and deeply saddening.  That people like this ass from NARAL see it only as being “disrepectful” or “trivializing” abortion is both infuriating and all too predictable. 

There are some days I’m just embarrased to be a human.  On a related note, I’ve decided that the Category tag “Religion of Pieces,” which I had formerly used to describe the religion of beheadings, female circumcision and suicide bombers, will now be much more appropriately used for abortion topics instead.  Or, as the apologists at NARAL and such like to call it, “Dilation and Curettage (D&C)“.

This society is sooo heading for the frickin’ bilge sump.