Crackerwax

Aliza Shvarts is an art student. An art student who, the Huffington Post reports, has, as part of her senior arts project plumbed new depths. Read.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

I know I’m probably meant to be shocked by this, and I am, but it’s not the art that’s doing the shocking, it’s her disregard for life and the very womanhood she probably thinks she’s defending that shocks me.

Where does a woman’s body stop and another life start? It’s a big question and one that I could never hope to answer. Abortion is an emotive subject and rightly so but inseminating yourself in order to purposefully induce miscarriage a few months later just for shits and giggles is morally reprehensible.

I hold true the fact that a woman, just like a man, has the right to do whatever they want to their body, that right carries with it responsibility though. With this act she has treated the entire process of conception like it were a body piercing, something to be used to make a statement. It is deeply saddening.

This is not art. Neither is it self expression. It is mental illness.