Abortion As Art

My bullshit meter is reading pretty high on this one. But here’s the story; it’s all over the Internets and has caused the Yale Daily News website to go down from the traffic spike:

An art student at Yale claims that she did the following. First, she obtained sperm samples from various donors. Then, she used them to inseminate herself, becoming pregnant. Then she took a variety of “legal, herbal” products that functioned as abortifacents, and thus induced miscarriages. She videotaped the miscarriages and kept samples of the blood. She repeated this several times, without consulting a doctor or having concern for her own health. Finally, she built a large cube covered in plastic sheeting, in which the videos and the blood samples will be displayed while the cube is suspended from the ceiling of the on-campus art gallery.

Both anti-abortion and pro-abortion activists have been very quick to condemn this “art project.” The anti-abortion types, obviously, think that the repeated abortions make the art student a “serial murderer” and suggest that she has a “mental problem.” The pro-abortion types believe, rightly, that the project trivializes the experiences of abortion and miscarriage. Women who want to be pregnant are heartbroken when they miscarry. Even women who do not want to be pregnant are usually pretty upset at being in a circumstance which causes them to terminate their pregnancies.

I’m highly suspicious of the authenticity of this story. It’s contrived, it’s so deliberately provocative, it’s the sort of thing that obviously will spread like wildfire across the net. If I’d sat down to write the “feverish right-wing outrage of the week,” this would have been pretty close to what I’d have come up with. I’d have made it Wellesley instead of Yale. So stay tuned, and stay skeptical.

UPDATE: (from the comments) Looks like the B.S. meter is working fine. But a lot of “big bloggers” seemed to have fallen for it.