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Trudeau’s March Madness

Mar 16, 2012

By Dave Andrusko

Gary Trudeau

Nancy Northup, President & CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, sent  out an email today saying that 60 newspapers  have refused to  run  cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s six-day-long diatribe against Texas’ new ultrasound law. To Northrup this is “censoring pro-choice voices from their pages” rather than, say, an editorial judgment about what is appropriate for their newspaper, and especially whether this series belongs (as one editor put it) between “’Family Circus,’ ‘Dennis the Menace’ and ‘Blondie.’” 

In explaining why the Des Moines Register would not run the series in the comics section (but would run the entire series inside the Sunday Opinion section this weekend), Editor Rick Green succinctly (if understatedly) summarized the plot line as “follow[ing] a woman who goes to a clinic seeking an abortion. She is confronted by several people — a Republican Texas legislator, a physician, a nurse and a medical clerk — who suggest she should be shamed for seeking the procedure.” We’ll return to Green’s explanation in a second.

Now, I understand that it is the interests of the Abortion Establishment and its media sympathizers to portray ultrasound legislation as intended only to “shame” women. But to those who have no stake, either way, in the debate, I would ask them to consider–can that really be the ONLY reason?

Don’t forget: Long before pro-abortionists (in a clever ploy to change the subject) conjured up the mythology of trans-vaginal ultrasounds as “rape,” the fact of the matter was that abortionists used ultrasounds to date the age of the about-to-be-aborted baby. So when a growing number of  state legislatures introduced legislation to require ultrasounds, they were not asking for something novel or out of the ordinary.

What is the intent of the legislation? Well, it starts from the premise that Planned Parenthood is going to go out of its way to make sure there are no informational speed bumps that slow down the trip from panicky reaction to an unplanned pregnancy to ripping the kid apart.

Back to Garry Trudeau. His narrative of busy-body middle-age Republican males at work runs head-on into the author of Rhode Island’s ultrasound law: Democratic State Rep. Karen MacBeth, who experienced an unplanned pregnancy as a single woman. She’s introduced the bill for four consecutive years.

Here’s what Rep. MacBeth told the Brown Daily Herald newspaper:

“MacBeth characterized the bill as ‘pro-information for women.’ She said that she was motivated to introduce the bill by her own experience as a single and pregnant woman seeking advice about her pregnancy, which she had no plans to terminate. She said she went to the Planned Parenthood center for advice at the time.

“’I saw Planned Parenthood, and I thought it helped you plan your parenthood,’  she said. ‘I went in, explained what I was there for, and they looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re in the wrong place, we don’t do that here.’ MacBeth said she realized there were women ‘going to Planned Parenthood or other organizations and not getting the information they should.’”

As we discussed on Monday, this is Trudeau’s second shot across the pro-life bow. 27 years ago he wielded his pen in an attack on Dr. Bernard Nathanson’s hugely influential video, “The Silent Scream.” Dr. Nathanson, who traced his own pro-life conversion back to the impact of ultrasounds, galvanized a national debate when he used an ultrasound to show an actual abortion. Trudeau satirized the unborn baby as “Tiny Timmy.”  There was enough skittishness that Trudeau and his then-syndicate scaled back distribution.

How about now? In one interview Trudeau said, “I spend much less time playing defense, presumably because of the ubiquity of topical satire these days. ‘South Park’ and ‘The Daily Show’ have stretched the envelope so much, most editors no longer see ‘Doonesbury’ as the rolling provocation they once did.”

Give the Des Moines Register credit. Editor Green is a “fan” of Trudeau

“but I elected to not publish the strip in its normal place, wedged between ‘Family Circus,’ ‘Dennis the Menace’ and ‘Blondie.’ My reasoning: In this world filled with a barrage of troubling images depicting crime, sex and violence, the comic pages of Iowa Life should be free of objectionable topics…like abortion.

“Predictably, I’ve heard from many readers. Some applauded the move, saying the last thing they want to do is explain Trudeau’s scenes to unsuspecting pre-teens. Those panels, by the way, feature a woman being called an offensive name, discussion of contraceptives, vaginal sonograms and fetuses and the portrayal of a 10-inch wand as essentially an instrument of rape.”

Instead, according to a post today, along with the cartoons, the reader will also find in Sunday’s Opinion section “a selection of readers’ letters about the strips, along with a commentary by Editor Rick Green about The Des Moines Register’s decision to remove them from daily Register comics pages.”

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