The Yale Daily News reported today that a senior intentionally impregnated herself using donations from unpaid men and took herbal drugs to induce miscarriages for an art project.

“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…

“‘I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity,’ Shvarts said. ’I think that I’m creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.’”

Dictionary.com defines art as “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.”

Shvarts 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,” reported the Yale Daily News.

For once, the National Right to Life Committee and NARAL Pro-Choice America were in agreement: they found the exhibit offensive and sick. And as a pro-choice woman, I agree. Shvart’s art is universally horrific, traumatizing for women who have endured the heartbreak of a miscarriage, mocking of women who have made the difficult choice to have an abortion, and damaging to the pro-choice lobby, which has fought long and hard to dispute charges that women recklessly use abortions as birth control.

What woman would choose to endure a miscarriage? What woman who has had a miscarriage wants to watch video footage of a woman who impregnated herself for the sole purpose of aborting the fetus have a miscarriage in her bath tub? And furthermore, how could a professor sanction such an exercise that could’ve had long term effects on Schvart’s health?

My belief is that it is an elaborate stunt, and that at the end of the day, it will be revealed that the project was done using tomato paste. But stunt or not, it is in appallingly poor taste. My heart breaks for the women who are haunted by the memories of their own tragic miscarriages who will turn on the TV tonight and find this story leading the news.