For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse

Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement.

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.

Okay. So it's a college newspaper, but a newspaper nonetheless. This is just all kinds of wrong, even if it was legal. This is the extreme what happens when you accept that a ZEF is not human. Yikes.

She did it for nine months. I wonder how many times she could have possibly gotten pregnant. It's very unusual for a women to get pregnant that much. How many miscarriages did she induce? How many confirmed pregnancies did she have?

Just weird. Even in vitro doesn't always work so it's unlikely she really got pregnant a bunch of times by doing this. Perhaps she was just self inseminating and then taking abortion drugs without confirming any pregnancies?

I personally don't think actions qualify as "art" simply because they're shocking and devoid of humanity. But perhaps that's just me.

Ok I read the many articles out there and it doesn't sound like she ever confirmed any pregnancies.

She just repeatedly inseminated herself and then took abortion drugs after which she videotaped the bloody mess. There's no indication that any of the crap she took pictures of was actually "abortions." When you take abortion drugs most of them have you shed your uterine lining whether you were pregnant or not. So bloody mess doesn't = abortion necessarily.

Since she never confirmed any pregnancies and just sort of repeatedly abused her own body I'm a little confused about what her point was. Very odd thing to do and if she really didn't ever confirm any pregnancies then it's very disingenuous to call this an abortion art project.

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself. ...

The display of Schvarts’ project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts’ self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

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Never Yet Melted Her Work of Art is a Real Abortion

Jesus.

What ever happened to referring students for counseling when they're behaving oddly?

talloulou said:

Ok I read the many articles out there and it doesn't sound like she ever confirmed any pregnancies.

She just repeatedly inseminated herself and then took abortion drugs after which she videotaped the bloody mess.

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Still, its pretty gross and ****ed up behavior. Silly "art" students.

Lachean said:

Still, its pretty gross and ****ed up behavior. Silly "art" students.

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Yeah. It was a project that was supposed to be art that represented social commentary.

You almost have to wonder where she's coming from. I'd be inclined to think she was more pro life than pro choice except that doesn't make sense if she really genuinely was aborting pregnancies.

However if she's full of crap and was just taking abortion drugs to acquire enough little bloody messes to set everybody off there's a fairly decent chance she's a prolife nutter. I just can't imagine what a prochoice gal would hope to accomplish with such a stunt. Their big joke is, "Yeah I'm gonna get pregnant just so I can have an abortion." With the satire being that no one would actuall do that so it's relatively absurd to talk as if they would. So why would one of them actually go and do that?

So she almost has to be against abortion to go and do something so disgusting to get a rise out of everyone.

Very odd all around. Either way she's creepy.

She'll probably get an A. Personally, its not even worth a grade simply because women don't go to sperm donors to have abortions. Thats just lazy.

She said she was trying to incite discussion. Mostly I think people are discussing how crazy she is. I feel sorry for that people that actually have to witness it.

Sometimes there is a reason someone has never done something before....

If we want to discuss possible ulterior motives: maybe she was pro-life and never actually was artificially inseminated.

This just may be a big joke:

Yale Student's 'Abortion Art' Claim a Scam | NewsBusters.org

What is really the truth with this so-called "art" project, though, is that Shvarts has pulled the wool over the eyes of the Yale Daily News, the willing dupes who claim to be her professors, and anyone reading this story on Drudge and believing she really induced her own miscarriages. It's all a hoax. Or if not an outright hoax, it’s a misleading tale of a girl who hasn't a clue about how one becomes pregnant, what the fake drugs she took are really capable of doing, and the psychological pain of a real miscarriage

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americanwoman said:

This just may be a big joke:

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Well speaking as someone not too versed on miscarriages and artificial insemination, why should we think this is a scam?

cascadian said:

Well speaking as someone not too versed on miscarriages and artificial insemination, why should we think this is a scam?

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Because getting pregnant isn't all that easy. Getting pregnant with a turkey baster in your college dorm is even harder than normal. Doing it multiple times in 9 months is probably incredibly difficult. There's a reason women pay top dollar to be artificially inseminated by drs. It's not rocket science but it's not incredibly easy and I imagine if you're taking abortion drugs and having abortions it's gonna be even harder next time around especially if you're talking about a relatively short time period. You'd think that the herbal drugs & abortions would probably throw off her ovulation, even if only for a bit.

So under the best circumstances in 9 months, if she ovulates normally, she had 9 chances to get pregnant. Given all the abuse her body was taking it's probable she had far less than 9 shots. Even if monitoring your ovulation its not a sure thing that intercourse will lead to pregnancy. Add in sperm donors in lieu of sex and some sort of turkey baster method and your shots are even lower.

So her story, that she artificially inseminated herself repetitively and then aborted regularly in the 9 month time span is rather wild.

The fact that she never confirmed any of her pregnancies is somewhat telling. You'd think that even a crazy person doing such a project would attempt to lend some sort of credibility to her technique, but she doesn't. She also doesn't say how many times she did this and remains vague which doesn't make sense for someone trying to get attention.

Plus how many men would offer up their sperm to this freak for such a purpose?

The entire things sounds absurd.

cascadian said:

Well speaking as someone not too versed on miscarriages and artificial insemination, why should we think this is a scam?

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I don't think it's a scam per se (in that I think she believes in what she did), but artificial self-insemination is tricky (the insemination has to occur almost immediately) and there is no evidence whatsoever that the woman ever conceived; she never saw a doctor.
It is my suspicion that the sperm she "inseminated" herself was already dead.
The "herbal abortifacients" she claimed to use to induce "miscarriages" are sham drugs. They don't really work. If they did, nobody would be idiotic enough pay $500 dollars for a surgical abortion, or $350 for the prescription abortifacient, Mifepristone.
She herself has no idea whether she was ever pregnant, since there isn't any difference between an early miscarriage and a period. The woman cannot tell the difference. Maybe a doctor could run tests to tell the difference, but she never saw a doctor. If she had taken any home pregnancy tests and they had come up positive, she probably would've included those in the exhibition, to preempt just this sort of speculation.
She's just a college kid. This was a fairly original idea, but she's not a mom, she's never had kids, and she has a child's skewed idea of how easy everything is- conception, abortion. Pregnancy does not magically occur just because you stick a turkey baster full of your friend's probably-unviable sperm up yourself, nor does abortion magically occur simply because you brew up some herbal tea you ordered off a non-FDA approved site on the internet or bought at the local occult shop.

But what the hell; she's an art student, not a med student.
You have to admit, the idea's original.
It would probably be more impressive to me if there was some evidence that any of it ever occurred, other than nine months worth of mouldering pads and tampons, which she could have just as easily accrued without going to such lengths.

You'd think the school would shut the whole thing down just because normally we don't allow medical waste to be put on display. Particularly by young idiots who don't know what they're doing. I mean really! Why not just enter a room whilst on the rag and finger paint with your clots all over the walls? It's disgusting and you'd think in this day and age someone at that prestigious university would step up and talk about how perhaps it's not the best idea to have a dripping cube of menses hanging from the ceiling for everyone to gawk at.

I miss the days when someone wanted to create a work of art and they just peed on a statue of Jesus.

This was stage and not real.

Yale University :: Office of Public Affairs

Gipper said:

I miss the days when someone wanted to create a work of art and they just peed on a statue of Jesus.

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It was social commentary on how Christians have made a mockery(pissed on) of their own religion.

As far as I'm concerned, anything that leaves somebody else feeling like they just took a railroad spike to the anus without causing actual harm to anyone or disturbing the peace while others are trying to rest or sleep is a good thing.