“Art”

Here’s a story from the Yale Daily News about a Yale senior, Aliza Shvarts, who decided to, as an art project, artificially inseminate herself and then use herbal drugs to intentionally miscarry. Repeatedly. There are some other interesting details, but I’d rather not write about them. It’s all in the story.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the strongest and most important plank of the pro-choice argument is that abortion is — pretty much definitionally — a serious issue, one that no woman takes lightly. It strikes me, then, that Ms. Shvarts has gone a long way towards undermining said plank.

When Ms. Shvarts, an Art major at a prestigious university, decides to start aborting babies like hotcakes as an “art project,” it makes it easy for nuance-challenged folks to conflate her willy-nilly approach with the genuine moral struggles of women who are, well, less artistically inclined.

Ms. Shvarts hopes that her project “inspires some sort of discourse,” but, in my case, all it has done is make me sad and give me a stomach ache.

Let me know what you think.

(h/t: Douthat and McArdle at the Atlantic)