Aliza Shvarts confessed on Thursday she lied when she said she self-induce a series of abortions as part of her “right to express herself through performance art.”  The films of her cramping and bleeding in a bathtub were staged.

“She did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages,” Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said.  “The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body.”

Earlier Shvarts said over the past year she’d been artificially inseminated herself using a syringe “as often as possible,” then taking legal, herbal abortifacient drugs to terminate the pregnancies. 

“I think that I’m creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be,” Shvarts told the Yale Daily News.   She hoped to “inspire some sort of discourse” and “provoke inquiry.”

The senior’s “expression art included gruesome videos of Shvarts withering in pain and bleeding from the miscarriages.  She also designed a large cube to suspend from a ceiling, supposedly containing the body fluids from the abortions mixed with Vaseline.

While university officials argued her rights as “an artist to express herself through performance art,” Shvarts declined to comment.