Aliza Shvarts, for her Yale University “art” project, engaged in a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortion pills and herbs to cause miscarriages each time; her final “project” will feature videos of her bleeding in the bathtub during each “abortion;” preserved blood from the process; and plastic sheeting layered with a mixture of Vaseline and the post-abortion blood.

Any sane person’s reaction to reading the above statement should be a mixture of horror, disgust, and outrage.

But then, just hours after announcing her “project,” Shvarts recanted, telling Yale officials that her alleged abortion-ific project was simply a work of fiction, designed (of course) to stimulate a “discourse.”

An associate dean at Yale, Helaine Klasky, defended Shvarts by stating, “She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.”

How about this: “She is an absolute freaking idiot and has the right to be ridiculed, mocked, and jeered for her so-called ‘performace art’.”

I don’t care if you are pro-life or pro-choice, for or against any type of reproductive freedom or restriction, an artist or feminist, a sensitive male or macho bully: this Shvarts person is a disgrace - to her school, to her supposed academic aspirations, to herself, and to her gender.

Quite a sobering - and largely accurate - article from Emily Yoffe at Slate.com about the enormous rise in out-of-wedlock births, and some of the causes and resulting problems. At the end comes this justified slap at oh-so-progressive types - think Murphy Brown - who are loathe to criticize, condemn, or otherwise judge:

But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers.
There is a scene in the teen pregnancy movie Juno in which the title character, a 16-year-old who has decided not to abort her unplanned baby but to give it up for adoption, is having an ultrasound. The technician, thinking she has on the examining table another knocked-up teenager planning to raise her child, makes disparaging remarks about children born into those circumstances.
We are supposed to loathe this character and cheer when Juno’s stepmother puts her in her place. But I found myself sympathetic to the technician. Why is it verboten to express the truth that growing up with a lonely, overwhelmed mother and a missing father is a recipe for childhood pain?

Dan Quayle was right, for the most part. And notice that Wolf Blitzer, when interviewing Quayle, tries to somehow get Quayle to regret his remarks about the Murphy Brown issue, and asks him if he would like to “rephrase” them. Quayle, smartly, says that he would not.