I originally wasn’t going to post this but it’s spun so far out of control that I feel like I have to comment on it.

Yale art major Aliza Shvarts just finished her senior thesis on performance art. Her medium? Abortion.

Over the course of nine months, she says she artificially inseminated herself with donated sperm and then induced miscarriages by taking herbal drugs. She videotaped each miscarriage and preserved the blood for display.

However, she says she didn’t believe it would shake anyone up.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock, saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for “shock value.”

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

Yeah effing right. The when this story hit the fan, Yale was compelled to say something about it, calling the project “a creative fiction” and reporting the whole project was a hoax.

Not so, says the art major herself:

Shvarts stood by her project, calling the university’s statement “ultimately inaccurate.”

…

But Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant.

“No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,” Shvarts said, “because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

I honestly don’t know what to think, other than that it’s safe to say that people on both sides of the reproductive-rights debate are definitely scandalized.