“Abortion is normal,” proclaims a new art exhibit in New York City. The artists and curators hope you agree.
“We wanted to look at abortion from a health-care procedure — any health-care procedure you do that is your choice to do should be considered normalized and not stigmatized,” co-curator Jasmine Wahi told the Daily Beast, explaining why the word “normal” seemed appropriate.
Marilyn Minter, whose artwork with an unpublishable name hangs in the exhibit, told Bloomberg News, “Some people think the title is provocative, but honestly, women have been getting abortions for millennia, and it’s only in the last hundred years or so that it’s been hijacked by the right wing.”
The exhibit is intended to galvanize abortion defenders before the 2020 election. Proceeds go to the abortion giant Planned Parenthood and to Downtown for Democracy, a PAC that uses the arts to raise awareness and funds for progressive causes. Its full title is Abortion is Normal: An Emergency Art Show.
The show looks like what you would expect if tweets containing the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag melted into photographs and paintings. Minter’s C—rol shows a woman using her tongue to spell out the work’s title on steamed-up glass. “If they’re going to call us c—s, I’m going to push it down their throats,” Minter said.
Another photograph, Laurie Simmons’s Mother-Nursery, stares down at a 1950s-style doll, implying that reduced abortion access would force all women right back into the kitchen. The exhibit’s in-your-face viewpoint also includes the messages, “THANK GOD FOR ABORTION,” and, “Dear Judge Kavanaugh, If you don’t like abortions don’t get one — XXOO, US.”
Wahi said the goal of the exhibit, besides advancing the pro-abortion cause, is to “make a statement that reproductive rights are not just a women’s or cis women’s [that is, biological women’s] issue, but an issue that affects everyone.”
Abortion advocates maintain that if they could just make men care about abortion, and if they could just make the younger generation of women worried that they’ll lose the abortion access they’ve grown up with, then they’ll win. What they don’t realize, or choose to ignore, is that not everyone agrees with them. Abortion opinions are split evenly along gender lines.
In fact, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last year, men are slightly more likely than women to support legal abortion in all or most cases.
The abortion debate is more about differing definitions of morality and the value of life than indifferent men and privileged young people. But admitting that would invite an entirely new conversation, one that Abortion is Normal is not ready to have.
