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Apr. 17th, 2008 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaSo, according to the Yale Daily News, a Yale senior conceived (sorry) of the following plan:
Not designed for shock value. Uh huh. You will be pleased to know that, although she's smearing a blood-and-vaseline mixture all over a bunch of plastic wrap in a gallery and showing videos purportedly depicting her miscarrying in a bathtub, Ms. Shvarts describes her experience as "private and personal."
As I said at Making Light: I don't believe a word of it.
College students (and their student newspapers) are probably a pretty credulous audience when it comes to claims about pregnancy and miscarriage. It's an area about which the vast majority of them will have very little experience, plus a great deal of fear.
But from the standpoint of experience, I question the plausibility of what she claims to have accomplished. How many times is it possible to conceive, miscarry, and conceive again in a nine-month period?
The article says she "inseminated herself as often as possible." How nice. But regardless of how often she inseminated herself, there was only a 24-48 hour window per month that she was actually fertile. A healthy couple has about a 20% chance per cycle of conceiving during that window. Let's be generous and give Shvarts another 5% chance because, as a college student, she's pretty much at the peak of her fertility. We're still talking about only a 58% chance of conceiving at all within a given three-month period.
And then "miscarrying," which seems to be the word she's using for induced abortion. After a miscarriage, it takes time for the pregnancy hormones to subside to zero, and then for the reproductive system to reboot itself and for ovulation to resume. Yet we're to believe that she went through this conception-miscarriage-conception process repeatedly.
But even putting all that aside, and crediting Shvarts with some kind of super-fertility, it comes down to this: If it were easy to produce a "natural," "herbal" miscarriage using legally obtainable over-the-counter products, there wouldn't be an abortion issue for shocking college students to make art about. It isn't. (Yes, I know that there are herbal products pregnant women can't use because they are classified as abortifacients. That doesn't make them reliable abortifacients.) Procuring a home-brewed abortion is difficult, unreliable, and dangerous. If it weren't, there would be no need for abortion clinics.
If it's not a total hoax from beginning to end, then I suspect that what happened is that Shvarts "artificially inseminated" herself periodically without particular attention to fertility (or the viability of the donor sperm - which also takes some finicky care). Then, at about the time her period was expected, she took herbs that are known to sometimes be abortifacients and collected her menstrual blood in a jar. "Edgy" and "daring," without, you know, necessarily involving any inconveniences of reproductive biology.
So, yeah: I don't believe a word of it. But let me also add: she's a fucking dramatastic attention whore. "She has become increasingly comfortable discussing her miscarriage experiences with her peers," the Yale Daily News informs us. I'll just bet she has. It really makes me sick to think of her appropriating the shock, pain, fear, blood, and agony of the grief that is miscarriage in order to have a titillating story to tell at college parties.
Edited to add: Yale officials confirm that indeed she was faking from beginning to end. How very artistic.
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.
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 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."
The "fabricators," or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.
Not designed for shock value. Uh huh. You will be pleased to know that, although she's smearing a blood-and-vaseline mixture all over a bunch of plastic wrap in a gallery and showing videos purportedly depicting her miscarrying in a bathtub, Ms. Shvarts describes her experience as "private and personal."
As I said at Making Light: I don't believe a word of it.
College students (and their student newspapers) are probably a pretty credulous audience when it comes to claims about pregnancy and miscarriage. It's an area about which the vast majority of them will have very little experience, plus a great deal of fear.
But from the standpoint of experience, I question the plausibility of what she claims to have accomplished. How many times is it possible to conceive, miscarry, and conceive again in a nine-month period?
The article says she "inseminated herself as often as possible." How nice. But regardless of how often she inseminated herself, there was only a 24-48 hour window per month that she was actually fertile. A healthy couple has about a 20% chance per cycle of conceiving during that window. Let's be generous and give Shvarts another 5% chance because, as a college student, she's pretty much at the peak of her fertility. We're still talking about only a 58% chance of conceiving at all within a given three-month period.
And then "miscarrying," which seems to be the word she's using for induced abortion. After a miscarriage, it takes time for the pregnancy hormones to subside to zero, and then for the reproductive system to reboot itself and for ovulation to resume. Yet we're to believe that she went through this conception-miscarriage-conception process repeatedly.
But even putting all that aside, and crediting Shvarts with some kind of super-fertility, it comes down to this: If it were easy to produce a "natural," "herbal" miscarriage using legally obtainable over-the-counter products, there wouldn't be an abortion issue for shocking college students to make art about. It isn't. (Yes, I know that there are herbal products pregnant women can't use because they are classified as abortifacients. That doesn't make them reliable abortifacients.) Procuring a home-brewed abortion is difficult, unreliable, and dangerous. If it weren't, there would be no need for abortion clinics.
If it's not a total hoax from beginning to end, then I suspect that what happened is that Shvarts "artificially inseminated" herself periodically without particular attention to fertility (or the viability of the donor sperm - which also takes some finicky care). Then, at about the time her period was expected, she took herbs that are known to sometimes be abortifacients and collected her menstrual blood in a jar. "Edgy" and "daring," without, you know, necessarily involving any inconveniences of reproductive biology.
So, yeah: I don't believe a word of it. But let me also add: she's a fucking dramatastic attention whore. "She has become increasingly comfortable discussing her miscarriage experiences with her peers," the Yale Daily News informs us. I'll just bet she has. It really makes me sick to think of her appropriating the shock, pain, fear, blood, and agony of the grief that is miscarriage in order to have a titillating story to tell at college parties.
Edited to add: Yale officials confirm that indeed she was faking from beginning to end. How very artistic.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-18 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-18 02:40 pm (UTC)I'll be curious to see if she unscreens my comment. I wish I'd saved a copy before posting.
That post makes me furious (and the following one, in which she insists that people who are upset or pissed off are anti-choice and/or haven't really given their opinions the kind of thought that she's given her opinion).
She is blurring the distinction between fertilization and pregnancy in a way that is hugely harmful to women's reproductive freedom. Fertilization is something that happens to gametes. Pregnancy is something that happens to a woman. If a fertilized egg never implants in your uterus, triggering the massive hormonal changes of pregnancy, then you were never pregnant. You can't have a miscarriage or an abortion if you aren't pregnant. Her little "thought experiment" about all those miscarriages/abortions she had due to her IUD is just so much mental masturbation.
...Or would be, if it weren't exactly the kind of argument that the Religious Right is trying to use to deny women access to safe and legal contraception. They claim that birth control pills and the morning after pill are abortifacients, and argue that pharmacists shouldn't have to sell them and hospitals shouldn't have to make them available to rape victims. Your friend is supporting their medically inaccurate anti-choice rhetoric, even if she comes to a different conclusion.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-18 03:21 pm (UTC)Er. Her story isn't mine to tell. I'll just say that I am aware of your history with this, and I would never have wanted to be cruel about it, and I wouldn't have pointed you at her post if I didn't know her to be someone with more than an abstract and impersonal view on the topic. I should not have brought it up, and I'm sorry.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-18 04:40 pm (UTC)