[1] During the 9 month performance Shvarts inseminated herself, and on the twenty-eighth day of her menstrual cycle, she took herbal medications meant to induce menses or miscarriage (although she never knew if she was pregnant).
Feminist political commentator Amanda Marcotte praised Shvarts because she "managed to demonstrate the logic that drives things like blood libels and witch-hunts, where a group believes the impossible because it confirms their irrational hatred for a person they've turned into the Other.
"[14] Brown University bioethicist Jacob M. Appel wrote in The Washington Post that "the history of great art is one of controversy and outrage" and that Shvarts was "an imaginative and worthy heir to" Manet and Marcel Duchamp.
Art historian Jennifer Doyle notes that the “project explores the discursive field through which the female body is produced and read as a reproductive body.”[18] Art historian Carrie Lambert Beatty writes that the project's “central point [is] that what we take as biological facts are constructed in language and ideology,” noting the different implications of calling Shvarts's bleeding a “period,” a “miscarriage,” or an “abortion.”[2] The performance has also been written about as an example of the ways in which issues of truth, reality, and fiction are called into question in contemporary mass media.
[19][20] Doyle proposes that “the content of the performance has expanded to include nearly all reaction to it.” Art historian Nikki Cesare Schotzko writes that the “immaterial documentation that accumulated in virtual space” is an essential part of the work.
[12] Curators Diana Georgiou and Giulia Casalini note that the work is very much in line with "a queerfeminist praxis because it challenges normativity by disavowing the female body of its maternal potential.