Parts for Sale

By Sonja Morin

Honorable Mention, Visual (2D), Create | Encounter 2022

Artist Statement:

Abortion-providing facilities work with research institutes to “harvest” pre-born bodies and generate profit, both from private donors and the federal government. Every single day, bodies are removed and sold, parents’ lives are put at risk, and more funds are fed into the Abortion Industrial Complex.

My work, “Parts for Sale”, explores the dehumanization inherent to these studies. The format was inspired by 1950s-era newspaper ads, as both a commentary on how aborted fetal parts are advertised to buyers, as well as a callback to the first recorded unethical experimentations on fetal bodies undertaken in 1953. The sanguine marker — indicating the real prices that fetal parts have been advertised for — disrupts the monotone composition of the rest of the piece. Much like diagrams pointing out the profitable parts of machinery, the pre-born in the center of the ad is marked for death, dehumanized for profit.