Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out.

So if I had sex and planned to use abortion as birth control, that would be unethical (in my opinion), since I have a lot of other options. But I can say that because I know my own situation.

I actually met a girl once whose method of birth control was to get pregnant, because she didn’t like using condoms. It could have been a put-on, but she was pregnant at the time, and was all kinds of stupid for other reasons, so I wouldn’t have been surprised.

It’s a really difficult issue. IBTP has a good post about the blood cube, and the comments are pretty interesting too.

After 2-3 weeks you can hardly call a clump of cells a person.

Well, that’s the debate, right? I respect your opinion on it. Personally I wouldn’t think of it as a person or a baby, but I’d call it alive. I find it unethical to take life for no good reason, and in my view that’s what she’s done. (I don’t think art is a good enough reason.)

What about if a woman deliberately has sex, knowing that if she does get pregnant, she’ll get an abortion. Would that also be wrong?

I can’t make a judgment about someone whose circumstances I don’t know. I know that I have access to birth control and and I’ve had a good sex education. I could also carry a child to term without having to drop out of school or be disowned by my family. Etc. So if I had sex and planned to use abortion as birth control, that would be unethical (in my opinion), since I have a lot of other options. But I can say that because I know my own situation.

I realize that sounds like a double standard since I am passing a judgment on Shvarts’ actions. But I suppose that’s because she put them all out there in a press release for us to think about.

I will absolutely defend Shvarts’ right to have abortions. But I will criticize her for impregnating herself for the purpose of aborting.

That’s true, you are completely free to feel how you want about her project. But even calling it an abortion is kind of iffy. She was deliberately unaware of whether she was passing any fertilized eggs or not. After 2-3 weeks you can hardly call a clump of cells a person. A fetus doesn’t have consciousness or the ability to feel at that point. So it’s not as if she was harming anyone, including herself. When she says abortions this is what she’s referring to.

I also had an initial visceral “ew” reaction to her project, but I can’t come up with a good reason why anything she did would be immoral or unethical, that doesn’t also deny her body sovereignty. It seems like you’re saying women have a responsibility to society to care for their own unborn children from the point of conception. What about if a woman deliberately has sex, knowing that if she does get pregnant, she’ll get an abortion. Would that also be wrong?

If you’re of the opinion that the contents of a woman’s body are solely under her domain, then she’s free to do whatever she likes with them, right?

I don’t get the sense that most people are claiming she’s not free to do whatever she likes with her body. The reaction I’ve seen the most is *disapproval* of what she has claimed to have done with her body. I think that’s different.

I think it’s fair to be of the stance that:
1) a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body, AND
2) we can dislike or disapprove of the choices she makes (particularly if she sends out a press release about them).

I will absolutely defend Shvarts’ right to have abortions. But I will criticize her for impregnating herself for the purpose of aborting.

What she says she did sounds like what pro-choicers are always accused of, anyway–getting pregnant willy nilly and ending the pregnancies for ’selfish’ or ‘trivial’ reasons without any thought about it. - Cara

Maybe that’s the why the anti-choice crowd have been oddly quiet (as far as I’ve seen). Focussing on this woman makes plain that something they claim is common is in fact exceptional, perhaps almost unique.

However, I find it hard to believe that she’s naive enough to think this project wouldn’t invoke “shock value” or that the shock value wouldn’t potentially draw huge amounts of attention. Maybe she had an optimistic idea of what the signal-to-noise ratio would be, with the signal being her point about normative functions of women’s bodies… but still, that’s not the most blatant reading of her work, and I tend to think artists are responsible to some degree for those most blatant readings.

It’s an interesting read, though I don’t see how she accomplished what she set out to do– “recognize [her body’s] potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function.”

The normative purpose, the “biology textbook” purpose — and if the wingnuts had their way, the heavily policed purpose — of a uterus and ovaries is to produce eggs which can be inseminated by sperm and then to carry the resulting embryo to term. It sound like Shvarts’ purpose for her uterus and ovaries was to create something once a month that might or might not have been a fertilized embryo, through the use of sperm-donating “fabricators” and something that might induce a miscarriage. The interesting thing is that really, female reproductive systems get used for this purpose all the time by any number of women who have sex and then run into any number of “abortifacient” situations or substances that can result in a miscarriage. It’s just that Shvarts was doing it much more deliberately and explicitly. It’s simultaneously utterly normal, totally outside the “normative explanation” of what uterus and ovaries are for, and utterly abhorrent to the right wing.

Agreed. Considering how many pregnancies never happen because the fertilized egg doesn’t attach, or is reabsorbed, or attaches and then is detached by miscarriage before one can even see the tissue, early pregnancies have always been pretty abstract, more idea than hard fact.

The anti-choicers’ issue has always been precisely that–how dare a woman CHOOSE whether her pregnancy continues or ends. How dare SHE decide whether to “bring on” her period if it was late, say. Their position is that it’s up to God, her husband, her father, her pastor (heh), but not up to her. It might even be up to “nature”, however that’s defined, but the woman herself is to have NO CONSCIOUS CHOICE OR CONTROL.

What she says she did sounds like what pro-choicers are always accused of, anyway–getting pregnant willy nilly and ending the pregnancies for ‘selfish’ or ‘trivial’ reasons without any thought about it. On that level I don’t know whether to laugh my ass off or be shocked. Probably both. At the same time.

I’m not down with ‘ew’ as a response except for the idea (see?) of saving waste matter. Since the anti-choicers aren’t checking used tampons for fertilized eggs, I think this is part of her point, too. Speaking strictly out of my ass, I don’t believe she really did any more than bring on her periods (if that), thereby making the whole controversy moot except for the discussion it precipitates. I could be wrong, though, since I didn’t see the work and don’t really want to.