8mm
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
Harvard has been liberal for a long time, but I can remember when Yale and Princeton were pretty conservative. Unfortunately, almost every university in the country has gone this way, except the ones that are specifically dedicated to staying sane.
I had a good friend at Yale, Louis Martz, who for a while ran their British art institute as well as the Beineke Library of rare books. They have some wonderful art there. What a shame that it has decayed into this decadent, immoral cr*p.
“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.”
Maybe it’s a hoax...maybe not. It makes absolutely no difference. The product of a seriously mentally ill dreck-artist, sanctioned by a dysfunctional university. The enstupidation of the United States continues....
Just wow. How terribly sad.
her Mom must be so very proud of her (and all her martyred grandchildren)
mrs
Hooray, I just learned a new word
“...heteronormative..”
Well, humble has this midget he keeps in the shed...
I'll pretend that this mishmash means that "I left myself an out you don't have: since you will think that these COULD HAVE BEEN abortions, they will make you just as sick as if you positively knew they were. And it'll be your own fault."
I got news for her. Reality don't work that way. And I can explain it in Anglo-Saxon, too.
To wit: If you think that even one of them might have been a real abortion, then it doesn't matter if none of them were. You did it. Guilty as charged.
“Go sell crazy somewhere else.”
Ahh, I screwed it up by saying Gatorade. I saw it once and have it scheduled to record in a few days. :-)
I would have expected Brawndo to be more like Monster, Rockstar, or one of the other super-caffeinated, taurine-loaded energy drinks that are all the rage. But then I suppose we’d wind up with agitated amnesiacs instead of the lazy, mindless, walking corporate billboards of “Idiocracy.”
At least the info is out there now, and her name. I wonder how many employers will even consider her for employment after her appalling behavior.
What if she changed her mind and bore a child? How much anonymity would the "fabricators" have then, after DNA tests? If the fabricators are real, they are idiots. If they knew hat was happening with their sperm, they are much worse than idiots. My guess is that they don't exist, that she is lying.
What on earth did her folks do to her to make her project such sad neurosis on the world?
One can only hope all the abortions have now made her sterile. The only positive that could come out of this.
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