The XX Factor: What women really think.

Called It!

Just after my post below speculating that the abortion-as-performance-art story was a hoax, a fellow Slatester sent around this press release from the Yale public relations office, stating that Aliza Shvarts never really impregnated herself or induced any home abortions, and that the entire thing was "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body." The only ambiguity it brought up for me was the question of whether Shvarts was a liar or a lunatic. But it's not clear who at the university knew about this "creative fiction," and for how long—from the wording of the release, it appears that just today Shvarts was called upon to confirm to university officials that her project was a stunt. I'm interested to know what other XXers think: Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?

Roe v. ...Yuck!

OK, I’m both resolutely pro-choice and a known oversharer on this topic, but that abortion-as-Yale-art-project item strikes me as genuinely repellent. It also strikes me as a scam. Though auto-insemination doesn’t always have to be high-tech and expensive (just ask any lesbian with a turkey-baster baby), it seems highly unlikely that nine months' worth of the most assiduous basting would result in four separate pregnancies and miscarriages. (Though the artist declines to specify how many times she knocked herself up, the description of the installation implies that that four separate filmed miscarriages will be projected onto that plastic-wrapped bloody cube suspended from the ceiling. Up for a jaunt to New Haven, anyone?)

And as long as we're getting technical, what's this wonderfully effective "herbal" abortifacient, apparently available without a doctor's prescription, with which the budding Duchamp supposedly induced her multiple miscarriages? And since an early-stage induced abortion can be indistinguishable from a menstrual period, who's to say the filmed miscarriages weren’t fake? The whole story rings false, particularly the notion that Aliza Shvarts’ adviser would sign off on a project that could endanger her student’s health and would almost certainly endanger her own job. Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time.