WORLD Magazine has begun a series of articles that examine the presidential candidates’ positions on key campaign issues. In the current issue, Jamie Dean takes a look at where John McCain and Barack Obama stand on abortion:

In a campaign season dominated by the economy, the war, and the price of gasoline, pro-abortion and pro-life groups agree on one thing: The stakes in the abortion debate remain high, and the two presidential candidates largely represent opposite ends of the spectrum.

Read Jamie’s entire analysis here.

Popular blogger La Shawn Barber has tried to move away from political blogging on her “Corner,” but today she said she had to “alleviate the growing pressure inside [her] head” about Barack Obama’s candidacy, and she doesn’t mince words:

I feel no “racial pride” that he’s the first black major party nominee or that he’ll be the first black president of the United States, because values trump race in my world. Anyone who believes it’s OK for “doctors” to crush the heads of infants in the birth canal isn’t getting my vote. If you’re black and pro-life but feel “torn” between racial pride about his nomination and disgust for his pro-death stance, shame on you. Get your priorities straight.

She also discusses her disenchantment with John McCain.

In the contentious and unreconcilable world of the abortion debate, new books don’t mean changed minds.  They just mean that one or the other side grows more confident in its arguments.  That, I imagine, will be the net effect of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen.  It’s supposed to be an intellectually rigorous and defensible book, as George and Tollefsen are not crazy nutball ministers or activists.  They are philosophers, and their argument is based in rationality.  They “defend the proposition that the embryo - the organism that comes into being as the result of fertilization, the union of sperm with oocyte - is in fact a human being. And that means that an embryo has ‘absolute rights.’”

In other words, they are making a logical deduction based on logical principles, with legal implications.  This kind of rigorous thinking, unfortunately, doesn’t work in the abortion debate.  This review is great, though, and a great encouragement to read the book, which takes scientists to task for their unreasonable disbelief in natural law.

So our most confident scientists think about human beings in a way that denies dignity to us all. They let their dogmas blind them to what-or who-we really are. George and Tollefsen are perfectly correct that the tradition of “natural law” is much more empirical than most of our scientists in contending that the natural capabilities given to members of our species alone-most of all, the capability to acquire and develop infinitely complex language-provide the real foundation of our dignity.

Our natural gift of being able to break into the daylight of language or speech is at the core of all our personal qualities. This is why only human beings can be physicists, poets, patriots, political leaders, priests, preachers, and philosophers. Not only do so many of our scientists deny us our true dignity, but they also do it for no good reason. Our physicists, for example, can seemingly explain everything in the cosmos-everything, that is, but the strange, perverse, and genuinely wonderful behavior of the physicist.

Read it yourself.

My post of yesterday, “Abortion as Art” started off with the caveat: This is not a joke, where Yale art student Aliza Shvarts impregnated herself and aborted fetuses for an art project.  Apparently, though, it was a joke.  Or at least a “creative fiction.”  The Yale Office of Public Affairs posts this announcement:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art.  Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.  She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages.  The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

Thanks, Yale.  Does lying also violate basic ethical standards, too?  Oh, I don’t know.  The whole thing still testifies to the dereliction of universities and contemporary art into the realm of the absurd.

A Yale art major got slathered with bucketfuls of scorn yesterday after The Yale Daily News reported that the subject of her senior project was “miscarriages”—self-induced and videotaped, as they occurred. In her bathtub. Then exhibited in an installation piece, scheduled to debut next Tuesday, where a cube would be wrapped in plastic sheets lined with blood from the miscarriages, which she induced by “legal and herbal” abortifacients after artificially inseminating herself. Onto the cube, footage of the miscarriages would be looped.

Aliza Shvarts coyly summed up her project’s purpose for the News as “a private and personal endeavor, but also a transparent one for the most part.” Smelling a publicity stunt, no one really bought that line, though, including pro-choicers, one of whom even called Shvarts a “self-aggrandizing fool” bent on “throw[ing] the pro-choice movement under the bus.” Shvarts assured the paper she wasn’t going for “shock value.”

As it turns out, that’s all she was going for: Outraged callers, playing their part, hounded the university all day about Shvarts’s project. Many dubious reporters, meanwhile, questioned its veracity, and the News’s reporting of it—namely, the ability to induce as many miscarriages as possible over a nine-month period (chosen for its symbolism) and know they were, for a fact, miscarriages while not suffering other medical maladies or feeling the need to consult a doctor. Yale’s Office of Public Affairs eventually released a statement by day’s end explaining that Shvarts worked in the medium of “performance art,” acknowledging that “[h]ad these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”

Before this gotcha, debate ensued everywhere on the Right about whether pro-lifers should deny her “the satisfaction of the publicity she craves,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat. His reckoning was no, defending it, and its prominent treatment on blogs and even The Drudge Report, as “too helpful to the pro-life cause to be ignored.” Others argued it didn’t matter: Real or hoax, either belied serious problems of its own. Many argued the faculty members responsible for approving the project should be sent packing. Some used the issue to probe pro-choicers who said they were disturbed at what they characterized as a wanton plea for publicity to explain why, if they do believe fetuses aren’t humans, there should be any outrage at all. Criticism was heaped on the campus pro-life group for not taking an official position.

Yale, for its part, called the projective “a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.”

UPDATE: The Yale Daily News has reported that Shvarts is still standing by her original story. She called the university’s statement “ultimately inaccurate” and went on to tell the paper she did “repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding.” She screened portions of the miscarriage videos for News reporters and concluded by saying: “No one can say with 100 percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Except one thing is certain: At this point, her words, which seem most at ease, whatever their claim, so long as they’re stirring publicity, aren’t likely to carry much credibility.

This post is graphic - and not a joke.  Aliza Shvarts, a senior art major at Yale, is mutilating her body, and the bodies of her unborn children . . . for her senior thesis. 

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body.

I don’t even know what to say.  The idea of this is so beyond the realm of anything that belongs in the world. 

Shvarts insist her project was not for “shock value.” “I hope it inspires some sort of disclosure. Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone,” she said.

What do you do about something like this?  Weep, wonder, what?

HT: Phi Beta Cons

Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s wrote about the American tendency to use “crisp, clear and unadorned language” in business dealings, only to turn to “bombast” and “relentless pomposity” when indulging in supposedly-poetic public speaking. But de Tocqueville thought that realism would eventually win out—and so it has in most presidential elections of the past 30 years, even when the campaigns initially were full of air. Obama’s brilliant oratory so far has allowed him to escape specifics, but he eventually will have to go beyond the question of who opposed the war in 2003: the real question now is what to do in 2008. An article by Angelina Jolie in The Washington Post late last month, with the surprising headline “A Reason to Stay in Iraq,” was worth a thousand bombastic speeches.

Jolie argued that the U.S. should not squander what the troop surge has achieved, an opportunity to make “humanitarian progress” that will be lost if American forces pull out precipitously. Although Cosmogirl.com readers voted Angelina Jolie #3 on their list of desired presidential candidates (behind Oprah and Jon Stewart, ahead of Bono), she apparently is not on McCain’s list of possible running mates—but he should run with what she wrote.

If the race is McCain vs. Obama, the older senator will needs to pop the younger’s halo of humaneness. One way is to listen to Jill Stanek, the whistle-blowing nurse who saw close-up at an Illinois senate committee hearing Obama’s opposition to protecting even babies born alive after failed abortions: “Obama’s clinical discourse, his lack of mercy, shocked me.” The Chicago Sun-Times ran a cartoon of Obama holding a sign with “LIVE BIRTH ABORTION” on it, God reaching down from heaven to a baby in front of the state senator, and Obama yelling at God, “You keep out of this!”

Is McCain up to criticizing Obama (or Clinton) on abortion? Perhaps not, but GOP honchos should talk with Clarise McFarlen, a 16-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, who—like Obama—is of a mixed racial background. At first excited to hear of Obama’s candidacy, Clarise changed her mind when she learned of his position on partial-birth abortion: “My heart just stopped. If you support killing babies, there’s no way you can have true compassion.”

The Royal College of Psychiatrists has issued a warning that women are at risk for mental health breakdowns if they have an abortion. The Times of London reports that this professional and educational body for psychiatrists in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland has recommended that abortion information that’s distributed should be updated to include details of the risks of depression. “Consent cannot be informed without the provision of adequate and appropriate information,” the group said.

Meanwhile, the British Parliament will soon vote on a proposed reduction on the number of weeks into a pregnancy a woman can have an abortion from 24 to 20 weeks.

Stateside, Planned Parenthood’s eugenic and racist roots are showing in Idaho, thanks to a UCLA pro-life student magazine, The Advocate.

If you’re not a subscriber of WORLD — or if you are one and just can’t wait until it arrives in your mailbox — head on over to WORLDMag.com to check out the March 22/29 issue, hot off the server. Here’s just a mere sampling of what you’ll find in this HUGE 100-page issue:

Cover story: Marvin Olasky asks: What is campaign ’08 revealing about American culture? Plus a sidebar on Barack Obama’s church.

Abortion: WoW’s Alisa Harris on how faith is the motivating factor for pro-life volunteers.

Environment: Mark Bergin discusses the double standard in global-warming alarmism.

Military: Former hostage Kurt Muse shares with Lynn Vincent the story of the faith that lit the fire that freed the nation of Panama.

Thoughts: Insightful columns by Joel Belz, Gene Edward Veith, Janie B. Cheaney, Mindy Belz, Andrée Seu, and Marvin Olasky.

For all you non-subscribers out there, we’d love to have you join our family of readers and not miss out on all this magazine has to offer. Click here for more info. (And subscriptions make great gifts!)

Finally, something pro-life Sen. Sam Brownback and pro-abortion Sen. Ted Kennedy can agree on: a bill that values unborn Down Syndrome children.

According to the New York Times, more parents are getting Down Syndrome diagnoses for their unborn children and 90% choose to abort their Down Syndrome babies. Kennedy and Brownback’s bill just passed its Senate committee and would ensure these families understand the condition and the resources available to them. It would also create a national registry of families seeking to adopt Down Syndrome children.

On MotherJones.com, Debra Dickerson tosses some grudging praise at a bipartisan effort to reduce abortions. Then she slashes all consensus to pieces with a polarizing rant on pro-lifers’ unwillingness to adopt the children they would force others to keep. She makes a cynical prediction:

This national registry will flop. Protesting outside of clinics is quite different from agreeing to raise a fundamentally disabled child, as birth parents are oh-so-blithely instructed to do on pain of hellfire.

Dickerson is wrong about pro-lifers. Most pro-life organizations link to adoption agencies for special needs children, and these pro-life people are a few of many taking special needs children into their homes.

But Dickerson seems to assume that no one else would want to adopt a fundamentally disabled child, either. She seems to think this registry depends on pro-lifers walking the walk. Where’s her confidence that pro-choicers would pick up the slack?

Unlike Brownback, Kennedy, and even the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Dickerson misses the point. People – both pro-life and not – who know Down Syndrome sufferers cherish them. Here’s a PBS essay from a teen about the lessons her disabled brother teaches her, a mother who says her Down Syndrome son changed her perspective on life, another recent article about a couple who would have aborted their daughter if they’d known she was disabled, and a Boston Globe column from a woman who calls her granddaughter an “ambassador against fear.”

When pro-life people and “abortion grays” can reach consensus, why politicize and polarize?