Mara Gordon | Risking women's rights for art

It may have slipped under the radar, what with all the election news dominating the headlines - but at a little school to the north of here, a very different sort of controversy has been brewing.

My friends at Yale haven't been talking Barack vs. Hillary. They've been talking about Aliza Shvarts, a Yale senior with a very perverse interpretation of performance art.

A fine-arts major, Shvarts catapulted to national infamy last week as news of her final senior project broke in the Yale Daily News and across the blogosphere. She claimed that she has spent the past year repeatedly inseminating herself, using sperm from anonymous donors. She then took abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages, along the way filming herself and collecting the blood - all in the name of art.

"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," Shvarts wrote in a guest column in the Yale Daily News. "It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership."

Yeah, that was my response, too - what?

Pretentious art-student speak aside, Shvarts' project is fundamentally unethical - not because she shouldn't be allowed to do it but precisely because she should.

In the past week or so, there's been a fair amount of debate on Yale's campus about whether or not Shvarts actually impregnated herself and actually induced miscarriages.

In her op-ed piece, she maintains that the whole thing is true. She says that she personally inseminated herself each month, then took an abortifacient drug - which she will not name - at the end of her menstrual cycle.

Her art project, which opened yesterday, features video footage of the miscarriages and what she says is blood preserved from the process.

In the uproar, Yale University officials have scrambled to defend the fact that her exhibit has been part of a year-long, faculty-approved project.

A university spokeswoman issued a statement that said Shvarts confessed to three Yale administrators that the abortions never actually took place - not a hoax, per se, but a "creative fiction" that used the fabricated news as part of a wider piece of performance art.

It's unclear whether or not Shvarts is telling the truth - but given the response to her project, it's sort of beside the point.

Let me be clear: I, along with many pro-choice groups on Yale's campus, believe that Shvarts is well within her rights. Her body is her body, and inducing abortions is a constitutionally-protected option, no matter how personally repellent I find her project.

Just as she is exercising her right to free expression, however, so am I. And I think she owes the millions of women for whom abortion is an important option a little more respect than this.

Shvarts isn't an activist. She hasn't claimed that her project is a pro-choice (or anti-choice, for that matter) statement.

But it's inevitable that a series of self-induced abortions will be associated with the pro-choice cause.

For example, National Right to Life Committee President Wanda Franz told Fox News, "It's clearly depraved . She's a serial killer."

Of course, being pro-choice doesn't mean running around having abortions for fun - or even for art.

But Shvarts' project has given fodder to pro-lifers and helped fuel the anti-abortion fire. Just a quick Google of her name brings up hundreds of hits on pro-life sites.

It isn't a profound artistic statement. It's a trivialization of a controversial procedure, one that may cost the pro-choice movement respect and credibility.

Our right to choose is tenuous, at best, and it's selfish for Shvarts to put it at risk.

Mara Gordon is a College senior from Washington, DC. Her e-mail is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears on Wednesdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.