Abort this

The latest media controversy over women’s right to control our own bodies involves Yale University student Aliza Shvarts, whose senior art project, according to the Yale Daily News involved artificially inseminating herself and then inducing miscarriages using abortofacient drugs. A media uproar ensued, and despite voiced concern over Shvarts’ physical and mental health, something tells me simple self-harm is not the core issue here. After all, artistically, it’s been done.

The story was picked up by national media, inciting sufficient outrage that Yale officials have since denied the project, saying that the it was a “creative fiction” and “[h]ad these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.” But Shvarts disputed the University’s claims in her own statement, in which she emphasized the purposeful ambiguity of the pregnancies (since she did not take pregnancy tests, and used herbal abortofacients during the time of her normal menstrual cycle, there is no way to determine whether she in fact was pregnant).

This apparently did not provide much comfort to the pro-life movement, which has predictably denounced Shvarts as a “serial killer”.

The fact that the president of the National Right to Life Committee thinks that Shvarts is “clearly depraved” is not remarkable. What is more surprising is the lack of support Shvarts has received from women’s rights groups. NARAL actually joined the right in condemning Shvarts’ project, which is “offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage,” according to NARAL spokesman Ted Miller.

Sure, I get that this project might be offensive to women who have had to undergo abortions and/or miscarriages. The idea that some privileged art student at Yale has nothing better to do than simulate acts that for many are painful and traumatic is fairly absurd. I would expect it to provoke anger and bewilderment.

What I would not expect is for it to provoke censure and finger wagging by the leading national organization for reproductive rights. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought that reproductive rights meant women’s right to control our own bodies. This means that we don’t have to have a baby if we don’t want to. It means we can’t be sterilized against our will. It also means if we are crazy enough to spend a year self-inseminating and self-aborting, we have the right to fucking do it.

In denouncing Shvarts’ project, NARAL is sending a clear message to women: reproductive rights are conditional, and they will only defend our right to control our own bodies when they approve of how we are using them.

I don’t care if you think Shvarts is crazy, offensive or gross. But if you believe in reproductive rights, you have to acknowledge her right to do what she wants with her body.

It’s a hard concept to affirm, since it involves giving up our own power (through social opprobrium, if nothing else) to exert influence over the behavior of others. Our culture does not actually grant decision-making autonomy to everyone (certainly not minors, the elderly, or others we consider “incompetent”). Women suspected of harboring a fertilized ovum are considered particularly incapable of making an informed decision about what to do with it (hence mandated abortion counseling).

Shvarts’ project brought the uterus into relief as a site of contestation, and incited controversy because she dared to exercise complete control over her uterus in order to produce an abstract and utterly un(re)productive result: art. By self-inseminating and self-aborting, Shvarts refused the social imperative to “responsible” reproduction espoused by the left and right alike.

Yes, she is provoking, offending, and even angering. That’s what artists do. But she is also making a strong statement that her uterus belongs solely to her, to do with what she wants, and I gotta give her props for that.

The Yale Women’s Center puts it well:

“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.”