A art student at Yale  recently announced in her student paper that she had been inducing repeated abortions on herself and using the blood for her art:

The story about Aliza Shvarts’ project, published Thursday in the Yale Daily News, swept across blogs and media outlets “” including the Drudge Report, Fox News and The Washington Post “” before Yale issued a statement saying it investigated and found it all to be a hoax that was Shvarts’ idea of elaborate “performance art.”

“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,” said Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky.

Shvarts’ “performance art” included visual representations, a news release and other narrative materials, Klasky said. When confronted by three senior Yale officials, including two deans, Shvarts acknowledged that she did not seek any abortions.

Shvarts told the student paper that she planned to display a work that consisted of a cube lined with plastic sheets with a blood-and-petroleum-jelly mixture in between, onto which she would project video footage of herself “experiencing miscarriages in her bathroom tub.”

The newspaper’s account detailed “a nine-month process during which (Shvarts) artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages.” [AP]

What do you think? Does Shvarts project seem like an honest way to create a dialogue? Perhaps it reeks of sensationalism to you? Maybe it even offends you?

Let us know what you think - we’re always exploring how media can inspire action and this is a great example of how that line can often be blurry!

Also, / to learn about a health center here in NYC that works to help women, men and all gendered people keep their bodies healthy and the way they want them to be.