A Yale art major got slathered with bucketfuls of scorn yesterday after The Yale Daily News reported that the subject of her senior project was “miscarriages”—self-induced and videotaped, as they occurred. In her bathtub. Then exhibited in an installation piece, scheduled to debut next Tuesday, where a cube would be wrapped in plastic sheets lined with blood from the miscarriages, which she induced by “legal and herbal” abortifacients after artificially inseminating herself. Onto the cube, footage of the miscarriages would be looped.

Aliza Shvarts coyly summed up her project’s purpose for the News as “a private and personal endeavor, but also a transparent one for the most part.” Smelling a publicity stunt, no one really bought that line, though, including pro-choicers, one of whom even called Shvarts a “self-aggrandizing fool” bent on “throw[ing] the pro-choice movement under the bus.” Shvarts assured the paper she wasn’t going for “shock value.”

As it turns out, that’s all she was going for: Outraged callers, playing their part, hounded the university all day about Shvarts’s project. Many dubious reporters, meanwhile, questioned its veracity, and the News’s reporting of it—namely, the ability to induce as many miscarriages as possible over a nine-month period (chosen for its symbolism) and know they were, for a fact, miscarriages while not suffering other medical maladies or feeling the need to consult a doctor. Yale’s Office of Public Affairs eventually released a statement by day’s end explaining that Shvarts worked in the medium of “performance art,” acknowledging that “[h]ad these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”

Before this gotcha, debate ensued everywhere on the Right about whether pro-lifers should deny her “the satisfaction of the publicity she craves,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat. His reckoning was no, defending it, and its prominent treatment on blogs and even The Drudge Report, as “too helpful to the pro-life cause to be ignored.” Others argued it didn’t matter: Real or hoax, either belied serious problems of its own. Many argued the faculty members responsible for approving the project should be sent packing. Some used the issue to probe pro-choicers who said they were disturbed at what they characterized as a wanton plea for publicity to explain why, if they do believe fetuses aren’t humans, there should be any outrage at all. Criticism was heaped on the campus pro-life group for not taking an official position.

Yale, for its part, called the projective “a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.”

UPDATE: The Yale Daily News has reported that Shvarts is still standing by her original story. She called the university’s statement “ultimately inaccurate” and went on to tell the paper she did “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 screened portions of the miscarriage videos for News reporters and concluded by saying: “No one can say with 100 percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Except one thing is certain: At this point, her words, which seem most at ease, whatever their claim, so long as they’re stirring publicity, aren’t likely to carry much credibility.