A Yale University student’s bizarre claim to have repeatedly impregnated herself and induced abortions that she videotaped for use in a senior art project is a work of “creative fiction,” the university said yesterday.

Aliza Shvarts’s senior project, set to go on display next week, included video of her bleeding in her bathtub, as well as plastic sheeting layered with a mixture of Vaseline and post-abortion blood, the Yale Daily News reported yesterday.

“Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. 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,” a Yale spokeswoman, Helaine Klasky, said in a statement sent by e-mail to reporters. “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.”

Ms. Klasky suggested that Yale would not have permitted a project of the sort described in the student newspaper. “Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns,” she said.

The newspaper story, which made no suggestion that the artwork might be fiction, spread like wildfire on the Internet yesterday. Traffic was so heavy that, for a time, the newspaper’s Web site was knocked offline. The paper’s editor, Andrew Mangino, did not return calls seeking comment last night. Ms. Shvarts’s project was so provocative that it repulsed even jaded art majors at a Yale forum where she discussed her work last week, according to the Yale paper. Neither the artist nor the Yale lecturer advising her on the project, Pia Lindman, responded to e-mail messages seeking comment for this article.

Before Yale’s announcement yesterday, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton, Lee Silver, told The New York Sun that he was dubious about Ms. Shvarts’s claims. “I wonder if the so-called blood may just be menstruation,” he said. He noted that the article did not indicate if she had ever taken a pregnancy test and said she performed an unspecified number of abortions over nine months using herbal compounds. “It’s hard to believe she depended on herbal medicine,” the professor said. “She’s being a little wishy-washy about the details.” A science student of Mr. Silver’s once proposed impregnating herself with chimpanzee sperm. Mr. Silver convinced her it was a “horrible thing for her to do,” but his fictionalized account of the event became a book and a play.

Mr. Silver said a science project of the sort Ms. Shvarts described would require approval from an ethics panel, which would never permit it. The Yale spokeswoman, Ms. Klasky, said she did not know whether the planned exhibit contained real blood or whether sperm had actually been solicited from donors, as the artist claimed. An environmental health official at Yale, Peter Reinhardt, sounded alarmed when told of Ms. Shvarts’s plan to put a mix of her own blood and Vaseline on display in a public building. “I will look into this immediately,” he said. “Normally, that would be out of the bounds of what we would allow a student to do.”

Ms. Shvarts has long displayed a keen interest in issues relating to human reproduction. Her account of her first menstruation, “The Ming Period,” appears on a Web site devoted to such stories, My1stPeriod.com. In 2006, a Yale journal published a photograph of one of her creations, “Disarticulation.” The sculpture, said to be made from plaster, Vaseline, towels, rubber bands, and latex gloves, resembles male and female reproductive organs.

Ms. Shvarts outlined some of her personal philosophy as she took part in a performance art event Ms. Lindman organized earlier this month at Federal Hall in Manhattan, where members of the public were invited to stand on a soapbox and speak their piece.

“We have this huge f—ing institution telling us: ‘That’s what power looks like. That’s what empowerment looks like.’ It’s these patriarchal, heteronormative trappings of a voice, of a right to speak, but really I think we should think more about it,” the Yale student said, according to a video posted on YouTube but removed last night. “We need to stop being sheep.”

Ms. Shvarts also railed against those who take a narrow view of what constitutes art. “People have to stop being so dismissive about what art is. It has to stop hanging on the wall. It has to be something lived, breathed every day,” she said. The Federal Hall event was sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with the “generous support of the September 11 Fund,” according to the video.