Several years ago, art historian Professor Milena Georgieva described the artist Dora Slavova as a visual artist of “restrained character” and a “delicate sense of humour”, qualities that have always shone through in her work within the field of contemporary art. In this respect, her project, imperatively titled DO NOT TOUCH, might be read as a surprise. Restraint has yielded its place to an insistent slogan, and the delicate sense of humour has stepped aside for one of the most pressing issues of our own time: control over human reproduction and the age-old tension between the sexes. Before us stand 18 anonymous human silhouettes – figures of women seemingly dressed for a wedding. Veiled. Women without faces. 18 human beings with their blackened wombs. We walk between them. We do not know whether they are pregnant or have collectively had an abortion. 18 future single mothers, in whose bodies life is growing – or, on the contrary, has been torn out, put to death. And who, who holds power over that life? – sometimes created unknowingly by another; and over that death? – so often not a desire, not a whim, but a vital necessity, a salvation.
France recently became the first country in the world to make the legal gesture of enshrining abortion as a constitutional right for every woman. At the opening of parliamentary debates, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal declared: ‘We have a moral debt to all women who have suffered in their bodies [from illegal abortions],’ and shortly afterwards the deputies and senators of both chambers of parliament gathered at the Palace of Versailles to vote. The amendment to the constitutional text was adopted by an overwhelming majority—780 votes in favour and 72 against—with President Emmanuel Macron describing the occasion as “French pride” and a “universal message”. ‘Let us together celebrate the arrival of a new freedom, guaranteed by the constitution,’ he wrote in a post on the social network X. In April 2024, a resolution passed with 336 votes in favour, 163 against and 39 abstentions called for the right to abortion to be enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union – a demand that has been put forward on several occasions. MEPs called for Article 3 of the Charter to be amended so that in its new form it would read that ‘everyone has the right to bodily autonomy, and to free, informed, comprehensive and universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, as well as to all related health services without discrimination, including access to safe and legal abortion.’
The impetus for placing the subject of abortion back on the agenda is the continuing worldwide erosion of women’s rights. Examples are not lacking from within EU member states – Poland, for instance, where a 2020 court ruling further restricted access to abortion by ruling that women could no longer terminate a pregnancy on grounds of foetal defects. Since 2006, following pressure from evangelical leaders in the United States, abortion has been entirely illegal in Nicaragua and is punishable by imprisonment for both the woman and the doctors involved. Abortion is no less contentious in Italy, where it is guaranteed by law, yet 7 out of 10 gynaecologists refuse to perform the procedure, deeming it “a sin before God”. The situation in Croatia is similar. And our centuries of historical experience unambiguously show that restricting the right to abortion leads to the deaths of thousands of women every year, as a consequence of being forced to seek alternative methods and individuals to circumvent the ban. The struggle—to the horror of figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, George Sand, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and of course Simone de Beauvoir—however paradoxical it may sound and despite the long road travelled to this day, continues. Bioethics, unforeseen by anyone, places us more than ever before at an unexpected crossroads.
The subject of abortion, at least according to the written sources that have come down to us, has no recorded manifestations in the ancient world – with the exception of the writings of Aristotle, where it is touched upon in the context of children born with malformations. In Aristotle’s words, ‘let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared; but on the ground of number of children, if the regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed, there must be a limit fixed to the procreation of offspring, and if any people have a child as a result of intercourse in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practised on it before it has developed sensation and life’, since according to Aristotelian embryology the foetus is visited by life when the first signs of movement appear in the womb of the pregnant woman. Turning to the Old Testament, the question of abortion is likewise a matter of debate – discussion even extends to what restriction should be imposed upon one who has deliberately or accidentally caused an abortion. According to the ancient rabbinical interpreters of Scripture, the foetus does not possess the status of a living human being until it draws its first breath, which permits—as indicated in one Talmudic text—”an unborn foetus to be killed”. Nevertheless, abortion is rejected unless it is necessary to preserve the life of the mother. In the Christian scriptures, abortion finds no place, but in the early Christian work the Didache it is nonetheless stated: ‘do not kill the human foetus by abortion and do not take the life of children already born’, since this is regarded as the criminal destruction of “God’s work”. In the Age of Enlightenment, although the debate on abortion had never been entirely absent throughout the Middle Ages, it would take new directions, eventually becoming a kind of cornerstone that, in the 19th century, would bring about essential changes in the perception of abortion as a serious ethical problem requiring urgent resolution.
Abortion is incompatible with the ethical views of traditional 19th-century society regarding the family. The Christian truth is one: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; and before you were born I sanctified you’ (Jeremiah 1:5, MEV). In other words, the embryo, from the moment of its formation, is a living creation of God, with an equal right to life as that of the mother. On the other side of the debate stands the person of the woman, in whose womb new life is growing. Does she have the right to choose and determine its future? And what if it is the product of an act of violence? Should a foetus, proven unfit for a full life, nevertheless be allowed to live? And who, who has the right to make “the final decision”? In the words of Professor Paul Ramsey, who devoted his life to Christian ethics, for common sense to prevail in debates about abortion, five fairly specific questions must be clarified: the relationship between religious convictions and public policy; the distinction between sin and crime; the differences in the ethical status of the embryo and the foetus (the latter being the unborn child after the 9th week of fertilisation); the difference between killing a foetus and killing a child; and the consequences that one or another resolution of the question would have on the development of embryology and neonatology (after Albert Jonsen).
The debates of the first half of the 20th century were fierce, and the outcome – long awaited and leading to a radical shift in public thinking. Slowly and gradually, abortion became part of the package of women’s rights. This important political gesture quickly gained traction after the 1950s and became a symbol of the new liberal world. The pressure of bioethics, however, continued, bringing to the fore the major themes of fertility, in vitro fertilisation, and surrogacy. Nor should the conversation about “selective abortion” be overlooked here – a procedure to which dozens of women today resort following the determination of foetal sex. These are questions that increasingly cause us to forget what it means to be an ordinary human being in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which, in 1932, he described a terrifying vision of the future – a future in which ‘we decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future … He was going to say “future World controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries,” instead.’
Considered statistically, the truth about abortion is alarming: according to World Health Organisation data, more than 73,000,000 abortions are performed worldwide every year. When we add to this figure the trade in contraceptives, including the morning-after pill, the number of unconceived and unborn children truly paralyses our capacity for judgement. Yet “optimism” lurks everywhere. Had all those children drawn their first breath, together with the annual natural increase of 130 million live births, we would long since have overpopulated our planet – devastated it with our thirst for life. The truth is often harsh. And it is as though Dora Slavova’s artistic gesture and her appeal: DO NOT TOUCH, gives us cause to reflect on all of this, and on the ever more dissolving (or perhaps simply unimaginably expanding, who can say) boundaries of the moral law within us.
This event is part of the gallery’s cultural calendar marking the 125th anniversary of the founding of the art collection of Art Gallery – Kazanlak.
General media partner: Bulgarian National Radio.
