• Abortion will cause you eternal damnation, unless you are Catholic and feel really bad, promise your priest not to do it again and say a gazillion Hail Marys.
• Abortion — and particularly multiple abortions, you libidinous, unfeeling slut — will render you infertile. It could be medical, it could be karmic retribution, no one really knows.
• Every woman that has an abortion gets breast cancer. The mere act of sucking a human baby out of your uterus causes cancer cells to start forming in your breasts and there's nothing that can be done.
• If you manage to escape God's retribution for your immoral acts and do get pregnant after an abortion, you'll likely just miscarry or have an ectopic pregnancy. If you actually manage to carry the child to term, having aborted another child, God will visit upon your new baby birth defects or low birth weight, if He doesn't just kill your baby entirely.
• You'll basically want to kill yourself from the guilt after an abortion, and will definitely have a mental breakdown from realizing the consequences of your actions. This will manifest as depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or Leslee Unruh.
• Abortion will cause every woman who has one to end up not pregnant.

It's so hard to separate the myths from reality sometimes, I know.

Photo via Amelee/Deviant Art

Abortion Not Seen Linked With Depression [Reuters]

Related: Abortion Myths [National Abortion Federation]
Top 10 Anti-Abortion Myths [Ask.com]
courtesy of Amelee
Abortion Myths: Fact vs. Fiction [TeenWire]
Post Abortion Syndrome [National Abortion Federation]

Earlier: Abortion In New Zealand
The Many Contradictions Of Leslee Unruh, Anti-Abortion And "Purity" Advocate

"It starts when you feel that first unmistakable twinge that something is totally wrong. It continues through the rough days of sorrow and deep cramps, and then it meanders through every single day of the rest of your whole stupid life. I will probably mourn about this miscarriage in some outwardly unremarkable way until I either have a healthy baby or die," Moss bravely admits.

Mom blogger Dooce linked to another mom blog called Flotsam, where a woman named Alexa talks about the baby she had who died at 22 weeks. "If McCain had his so-called 'culture of life,' and if my condition had progressed just a bit earlier, I would at least have lost my uterus, and I might very well be dead. All this in the interest of a baby who could not possibly have lived, because while an extremely few 23-weekers do survive, a by-then-severely-infected 23-weeker would certainly not. 'Culture of life,' indeed," Alexa rages.

"I can tell you that I want people to know. I don’t want it to be a secret or a shadow or something that is endured only alone," Moss writes, "I want people to know that I have been through something, that I am tired but optimistic, that I’ve been knocked down but don’t help me up because I can get up myself." And these stories are precisely the brutal and vivid things we need to hear so that people like John McCain will never dismiss the idea of women's heath with soulless air quotes ever again.

[Image via Ulla Pugaard, NYT]

A Planet of Pain, Where No Words Are Quite Right [NY Times]
Why Any Woman Who Intends To Vote McCain Should Reconsider [Dooce]
More Wounded Than Eloquent, I'm Afraid [Flotsam]

Earlier: Memo To Senator McCain: My Health Is Not An Extreme Position

The foundation of Aliza's outfit is, naturally, built upon the shopping mecca of aspiring hipster poseurs everywhere: American Apparel. Below, the leggings, scoop-neck leotard and black hoody.

(Unisex flex fleece zip hoody, $40; cotton spandex jersey legging, $26; jersey short sleeve t-shirt leotard, $28.)

And her boots? White fringe stylings are something that could only be found at a place called the Boot Barn.

(Oak Tree Farm "Oasis" fringe boot, $89.99)

And don't forget the hair! This Beverly Johnson wig in Shade 4 ought to do the trick.

(H-214 by Beverly Johnson wig, $45.90)

But to really encapsulate Aliza-style, you've gotta rock the baggy leopard-print short. Where to go? The men's underwear section of WildFree, naturally.

(Wild Free men's lingerie silk leopard-print boxer shorts, $24)

Related: Shvarts Explains Her 'Repeated Self-Induced Miscarriages [Yale Daily News]

Shvarts stood by her project, calling the University's statement "ultimately inaccurate."...But Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly used a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant. "No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen," Shvarts said, "because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties."

University Calls Art Project A Fiction; Shvarts '08 Disputes Yale's Claim [Yale Daily News]

Actually, "gullible weenies" isn't the term that was used, but that's pretty much what it amounted to. Here's the full statement from Klasky:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. 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.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

Yale Press Release [Yale]

Earlier: Yale Senior Undergoes Multiple Self-Induced Miscarriages In The Name Of Art
Just How Do You Give Yourself An Herbal Abortion?

We've all met young men and women like Aliza Shvarts: They come from relatively happy, upper-middle-class families, and are so desperate to be "edgy" and "crazy" that they perform a series of stunts — whether through drug experimentation, sexual exploration, or bad performance art — to differentiate themselves from their hopelessly bourgie peers and parents. The problem with Shvarts' little art project, however, is that her need to rebel has potentially big ramifications outside her ivory tower of academia. (One assumes that Shvarts used, at least in part, the abortifacient RU-486, a prescription-only drug that some politicians want added to the list of Schedule I controlled substances.) Plus, conservative bloggers are already up in arms and using Aliza's capriciousness to support their anti-abortion agendas. (At 9:00am this morning Shvarts' name had 53 hits on Google; as of 11:52am, it had 291.) And though the Buckley School valedictorian claims that she wants her piece to be a medium for "politics and ideologies," it's not like she's shedding light on an obscure subject. People debate the ethics of abortion constantly, and possibly harming your body by forcing it to miscarry repeatedly? Yeah, that's not helping the discourse.

Molly Clark-Barol, a Yale student and commenter on the YDH's website, sums up Shvarts's egocentrism better than I could: "Congratulations, Aliza Shvarts '08: you have single-handedly trivialized not only an entire generation and a half's fight to gain and retain the right to choose, through harassment and against massive odds, but also history of women's struggles, not only politically, but with the emotional, moral, and spiritual impacts of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. You also spit upon every couple who has tried, and failed, sometimes repeatedly, to have children. it is the emotional impact of these struggles, emotional impact that you shamelessly exploit, not explore, in your senior project."

[Image via Soapbox Event]

Related: Absolutely Fascinating [Bitch, PhD]

And you know what happens following all that coffee-related weight-gain? Rates of miscarriage and ovarian cancer fatalities increase! But! Coffee helps prevent gallstones and decrease asthma attacks! But it can also increase fibrocystic changes in the breasts and cause acid reflux! Oh my god we're all going to DIEEEEEEEEEEEE. (Though, have you tried those new $1 cups of Joe at Starbucks. So cute and small!)

Coffee: The Good, The Cheap And The Fattening [Guardian]
Women And Coffee: How Many Cups A Day? [MSNBC]

Earlier: Coffeee Causes Miscarriage, Except When It Doesn't
Coffeee Causes Miscarriage But Prevents Ovarian Cancer
Why Coffee Shops Should Discriminate Against Women

"I am not persuaded [caffeine] poses a health hazard," says epidemiologist David Savitz, who, Newsweek reports, considers caffeine "among the long list of things you should think about." "We don't really know the truth." And Dr. Alan Peaceman, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University cautions against "creating hysteria": "I tell women not to be guilty about a cup of coffee if that's what they really need. There are a lot of people who are hooked on caffeine, including myself. there is so much guilt out there that women have to deal with when they have a bad outcome in pregnancy. The vast majority is not within their control."

Caffeine Doubles Miscarriage Risk, Study Finds [Reuters]
Cup Of Contradictions [Newsweek]
New Kaiser Permanente Study Fortifies Caffeine's Link To Miscarriage [Eureka Alert]

Related: Starbucks Beverages [Starbucks]