This is the first of a series of comic strips cartoonist Garry Trudeau planned for this week which deal with the recent spate of anti-abortion ultrasound bills. (Click to enlarge the strip.)
Several newspapers have made plans to run repeat Doonesbury comic strips in lieu of the strips.
“We thought the strips were over the line for the comics pages and won’t be running them,” said Oregonian features editor JoLene Krawczak “We’ll tell readers where they can read them online.”
(Note to newspaper editors: This is not a time to send your readers to other online sources to get what they want, in case you haven’t noticed.)
The more controversial strips, expected to run Tuesday and Thursday, contain the lines “Do your parents know you’re a slut?” (directed at the strip’s protagonist by a “state legislator” after she tell him she’s been using the health clinic’s contraceptive services) and “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape” (announced by the doctor administering the pre-termination trans-vaginal sonogram).
This will be the first time in Doonesbury‘s 42-year history that Trudeau has used the strip to sound off about the abortion debate.
“I chose the topic of compulsory sonograms because it was in the news and because of its relevance to the broader battle over women’s health currently being waged in several states,” Trudeau told The Washington Post.
He continued:
“For some reason, the GOP has chosen 2012 to re-litigate reproductive freedom, an issue that was resolved decades ago. Why [Rick] Santorum, [Rush] Limbaugh et al. thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate, I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice.”
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