Doonesbury's 'graphic' abortion comic strips: 'Tasteless'?

Newspapers are split over whether to run controversial cartoons likening Texas' mandated pre-abortion ultrasounds to rape

Several newspapers, including the Des Moines Register, the Oregonian, and the Indianapolis Star, won't run this Doonesbury cartoon, which makes light of a Texas law requiring women to get ult
(Image credit: Doonesbury)

Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau is no stranger to controversy, but he's stirring up one of the most tense debates of his long career this week with a series of strips on Texas' new law requiring women to get ultrasounds before having an abortion. In one of the strips (see it below), which some newspapers are refusing to run, a clinic employee tells a woman to "please take a seat in the shaming room." In another, a doctor about to conduct a vaginal ultrasound with a "10-inch shaming wand" tells a patient, "By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape." A spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who signed the law, called the strips "tasteless." Trudeau told The Washington Post that he had expected controversy, but that ignoring the issue "would have been comedy malpractice." Is it appropriate to mine such a sensitive issue for laughs?

Abortion is no laughing matter: Trudeau's riff on abortion laws "oversteps the boundaries of good taste," says Rick Green at the Des Moines Register. His language is "graphic" and "offensive" — and that's coming from a longtime Doonesbury fan. And no matter what you think of this abortion controversy, we should all be able to agree that it's utterly inappropriate to accuse Texas Republicans of a vast rape conspiracy in a comic "wedged beneath 'Family Circus' and 'Dennis the Menace.'"

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