**UPDATE, 4/18, 4:55pm: A Yale spokesperson says Shvarts’ project was a hoax. Shvarts disagrees. There has already been a lot of reaction among pro-lifers to the news that a Yale student, Aliza Shvarts, plans to display for her senior art project “a documentation of a nine-month process” during which she repeatedly got pregnant and took drugs to induce abortions on herself. An article in the Yale Daily News also reports:
[Shvarts] said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.
Kristan Hawkins, executive director of Students for Life of America, has issued a challenge to the major pro-abortion groups:
“I call on Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW and all other so-called pro-choice groups to condemn this. Abortion should never be trivialized as a matter of ‘art.'”
It will be hard for them to do that, as these groups have been saying for decades that women should be able to have abortions for any reason at all. In all honesty, for me personally, I’d have to say I’m not surprised by the news of this “art project”. After all, when a culture teaches that morality is something to be determined by each individual, and that there’s no such thing as right and wrong, it shouldn’t surprise us when someone actually says there’s nothing wrong with something everybody knows is very, very wrong. My other reaction to this news is one of deep sorrow and pity for Aliza Shvarts. I’m no psychologist, but if this isn’t a cry for help on her part, I don’t know what is. Clearly, her actions are wrong. And clearly, Yale has a lot to answer for by not stopping her from—at the very least—putting her health in serious danger. But I would say this: Please, please—resist the temptation to judge her (see Luke 6:37-42) and to say nasty things about her personally. Instead, pray for her.
