Blood art at Yale

One of the pro-choice gang's standard regurgitations is that women never take abortion lightly and only have them for the most agonizing and legitimate of reasons. With pro-choice people, it is not always easy to distinguish when they are lying from when they are simply misinformed – but such is not the case here. They are lying, and several of their fellow travelers have admitted as much.

In an interview published in the March 9, 1989, edition of the communist publication Revolutionary Worker, Marilyn Buckham, who was the director of Buffalo GYN Womenservices Clinic, was asked about the reasons women have abortions. In her answer, she stated, "Women don't do this lightly. I'm sick and tired of hearing this. Nighty-eight percent of women do it lightly in here. … they think of abortion like brushing their dime teeth, and that's OK with me."

The reality is, if you go to any abortion clinic waiting room in America you will certainly find women who are there for what they perceive to be difficult circumstances. But make no mistake – you will also find many who are having their second, third or fourth abortion as well as those who are there for reasons that could never be legitimately described as serious.

But going beyond that, a recent episode at one of our nation's "most prestigious" universities has raised the question of whether women ever have abortions after getting pregnant on purpose. In early April, a pro-choice student at Yale, Aliza Shvarts, claims that she artificially inseminated herself repeatedly during the previous year and then self-aborted using various chemicals and herbs. This was all done as part of a school art project. It seems that she had videotaped herself sitting in a bathtub doing these abortions on herself, and her plan was to project this video onto a cube that had been covered with blood she had saved from these abortions.

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I will concede that my knowledge of art is not very sophisticated. My main experience in this field was in junior high school when I drew my own state inspection sticker for my Cushman scooter. Evidently, it was not very good, as a local police officer picked up on the forgery right away. Needless to say, I was lucky to escape with only a ticket.

But even though my credentials in this area are suspect, I still have to say that Aliza's art sounds like it would make those Elvis on velvet things you see sold at abandoned gas stations seem like the Mona Lisa. I'm also more than a little concerned that we will one day discover that this fiasco was paid for with tax dollars through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In any event, the university tried to extricate itself from this public-relations nightmare by informing Shvarts that she would have to publicly state that her story was a hoax before they would allow it to be displayed. They wanted her to say that the blood was not from abortions but from her menstrual flow. Apparently, menstrual blood paintings are an approved form of artistic expression at Yale. (Wouldn't you love to read the minutes of the meeting where this conclusion was reached.)

Naturally, like any other proud but misunderstood artist, Shvarts refused to compromise and stuck to her story. She did, however, enter something different in the art show so she would not fail the class. I don't know what form the replacement "art" took and I'm pretty sure that I don't want to know. Let's just say that Aliza and I probably have different tastes.

Surprisingly, the idea that women would abort intentional pregnancies is not a new one. In the Aug. 18, 1991, edition of the Austin American Statesman, rock singer Sinead O'Connor said she wrote the song "My Special Child" just two weeks after having an abortion. She also said, "It was a planned pregnancy, which I was very happy about. I was completely in love with the father of the child. ... But things didn't work out between us, and we were both unhappy. It was too much for him to be able to handle. He was young and I was on tour, and I was feeling ill all the time because I was pregnant, and I was feeling so awful and I made the decision that it would be better for everybody if I had the abortion."

About the same time, Oprah Winfrey had a show about women who get pregnant as a ploy to trap men into marriage. One of the guests stated, with no hesitancy or sense of remorse, that when her attempt at this did not work as planned, she had an abortion.

There were also revelations about the Olympic committee that oversees enforcement of drug policies discovering a trick some female athletes were using to circumvent the organization's prohibition against blood doping. These women were found to be intentionally getting pregnant prior to competition to increase the amount of oxygen in their bodies in order to heighten their performance. After the competition was over, they would abort. Olympic officials eventually determined that not only was this happening, it was not an uncommon practice among teams from certain countries.

So how common is it for women to abort an intended pregnancy? Obviously, no one knows, but we do know that it is common for women to abort intentional pregnancies when their baby turns out to be handicapped. For example, in America today, over 90 percent of Down syndrome babies are executed before birth, and it would be illogical to think that those were all unplanned pregnancies. On a personal level, through the Life Dynamics abortion malpractice campaign, I have spoken with many abortion-injured women over the years who told me that they had intentionally become pregnant but aborted when something changed in their lives. One case I remember involved a woman who was forced to have a hysterectomy because of her injury. She said that she had been trying to get pregnant for two years but aborted after being offered a promotion at work.

From a pro-life perspective, I think we need to keep all of this in context. In a certain sense, the fact that a woman would have an abortion for frivolous reasons or to end a pregnancy she intentionally sought, is irrelevant. Some justifications might make us angrier than others, but for the child that's killed, the reasons don't matter. The Down syndrome child carried by a 40-year-old welfare recipient who got pregnant on purpose by a man whose name she doesn't even remember is no less valuable than any other child.

In the final analysis, if the excuses for abortion don't matter to the children being killed, they shouldn't matter to us. Our job is to protect every child in every circumstance. And that must always be our focus.

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Mark Crutcher is president of Life Dynamics Incorporated of Denton, Texas.