Thursday, April 17, 2008

L'Affaire Shvarts

My opinion on the morality of Aliza Shvarts's senior project is exactly what you think it is, but, while she and I aren't friends or even slight acquaintances, in the fall of our freshman year she spent the train ride back from a Blonde Redhead show explaining textual deconstruction to me, so I owe her one for saving me from having to actually read Derrida.

Based on the evidence of her senior project, Aliza Shvarts is not obviously "a bit touched in the head," "the appalling Ms. Shvarts," nor "a deeply, deeply disturbed girl." She simply doesn't believe that inducing a miscarriage is morally wrong. Having taken a class with her and heard her talk about art, I'm willing to say that if the facts of the article point to a Yale senior who is either (1) obsessed with self-promotion or (2) genuinely interested in what happens when you turn your body into an instrument of politics, there's money to be won betting she's the second.

I'm glad that the next most popular response to this story after "Ewww!" has been "This project was broadly offensive — especially to pro-choice advocates who see this as trivializing what is always a very grave decision for a young woman," because pro-choicers who believe that an induced miscarriage is neither No Big Deal nor a Very Big Deal Indeed need to nail down what it means to think of abortion as something of immense emotional but zero moral content. Shvarts has put the pro-choice movement in an awkward position. Good.

In a strange coincidence, the Yale Political Union had already planned to debate abortion next week, so stop by if you want to engage in "some sort of discourse" (Monday at 7:30 pm, SSS 114).

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