Every night, before the injection, the artist prayed.

She held the syringe in her hands the way she had been taught as a child to hold her rosary beads: carefully, with intention, with the full weight of her faith pressed into the object between her fingers. She asked God to make the medicine work. She asked for the child. She asked with the devotion of someone who had been asking her whole life and still believed, despite everything, that asking was enough.

She is not alone in this room.

Every woman who has ever held a syringe before an IVF injection has stood in this same stillness. Every woman who has ever prayed over her own medicine, who has pressed hope into a clinical object and asked it to carry more than it was designed to carry, who has wanted a child so completely that the boundary between faith and science dissolved entirely, is here. The artist's hands are her hands. The artist's prayer is her prayer.

The Rosary is constructed from the actual syringes used during the artist's in vitro fertilization treatments, and from the treatments of every woman who has ever stood in that same dark room, alone with her hope, asking.

Each syringe held the medicine she injected into her own body. Each one was held first in her hands like a sacred object, blessed by private prayer, before it entered her skin.

They are strung together now as rosary beads.

The instrument of medical intervention becomes the instrument of prayer. The syringe, which in any other context speaks only of clinical procedure, of hormones and protocols and the cold arithmetic of reproductive medicine, is here restored to its original meaning in the artist's hands: something held with reverence, something asked of, something that carried the full force of her hope and her devotion.

The Catholic rosary is a repetitive prayer. The same words, again and again. The same asking, bead by bead, until the full cycle is complete. IVF is also a repetitive prayer. The same injections, again and again. The same hope, cycle by cycle, until the body finally cannot continue.

Both require absolute faith in something that may not answer.

Both ask you to keep going anyway.

Beneath the rosary of syringes, printed large enough for every person in the room to read, is the artist's hysterectomy report.

Every clinical detail. Every medical term. The full, cold, institutional accounting of the surgery that ended the last possibility of biological motherhood, rendered in the language of a system that does not grieve, does not pause, and does not consider what it means to the woman whose body it is describing.

It is printed large because shame thrives in smallness. Because infertility has always been whispered, hidden, managed in private, absorbed alone. Because the medical system produces these documents and files them away, and no one is asked to reckon with what they contain.

The report is the substrate. Everything else is built on top of it.

She has been told, by people who consider themselves kind, that she will never be a real woman.

She has been told, in the language of faith she grew up inside, that God did not choose her. That her empty womb is evidence of divine disapproval. That her body's failure is a spiritual verdict.

These are not ancient cruelties. They were said to her, by friends, by family, by the culture that surrounds her, in this century, in this country, where she is considered lucky.

In the Western world, infertile women are shamed. In much of the rest of the world, they are destroyed.

In India, in Ghana, in Liberia, and across vast regions of Africa and Asia, a woman who cannot bear children is not simply pitied. She is discarded. Girls as young as nine and ten, placed into arranged or forced marriages before their bodies are physically capable of sustaining a pregnancy, are designated infertile after months of marriage. The failure is never attributed to the husband. It is never attributed to age, or to biology, or to the violence of a system that married a child before she was a woman. It is attributed to her.

She is divorced. She is cursed. She is cast out by her family and her community simultaneously, rendered without protection, without income, without belonging. She is told she has no value. That the only places left for a woman like her are the convent, where she may serve God since she cannot serve a husband, or the street, where her body may be used for what her womb cannot provide.

Across these regions, infertile women and girls are among the most vulnerable populations for sex trafficking. Rejected by family, unmarriageable by social designation, without financial resources or community support, they are absorbed into systems of exploitation that were waiting for exactly this kind of desperation. United Nations gender officers have documented this pipeline directly. It is not exceptional. It is routine.

The artist who made this piece lives in New York City. She has a career, a home, a voice, and the resources to transform her grief into art. She knows she is among the fortunate. She knows that the shame directed at her, devastating as it was, is a fraction of what infertility costs a woman born elsewhere.

The Rosary holds all of it. The private prayer in a Santa Fe room at night, syringe in hand. The hysterectomy report printed large and public. The friends who said she was not a real woman. The girls in Ghana told the same thing before they were old enough to understand what it meant. The ones who were cast out. The ones who disappeared into trafficking. The ones whose names were never recorded anywhere, whose grief was never witnessed, whose loss was never given a room, a set of chairs, a string of beads, a piece of art, a single sentence that said: you were here, and you mattered, and what happened to you was wrong.

The Rosary does not distinguish between the sacred and the medical, between the personal and the political, between the woman who could afford IVF and the child-bride who never had a choice.

It asks you to hold all of them in your hands at once.

Like a prayer. Like a syringe. Like something you are not sure will work, but cannot bring yourself to put down.