Doonesbury Creator Trudeau Displeased Comic is Being Moved During Controversial Series

The comic pages (remember those from when you’d beg the section off your teacher during study hall?) have been a source of some controversy this week with an abortion-centric series in the long-running cartoon Doonesbury.

As we reported earlier, Doonesbury is running a six-day story arc centering around women’s reproductive rights, satirizing the Texas law requiring women who seek abortions to submit to an ultrasound- and not surprisingly, some backlash has resulted. It’s difficult to think of a more perennially hot-button issue, as generally people are not moved by data or statistics and moral or religious inclinations often fuel any one individual’s stance on the issue.

The latest installment features a woman entering what is presumably an abortion clinic, with a bored receptionist telling her:

“Please take a seat in the shaming room. A middle-aged, male state legislator will be with you in a moment.”

In the wake of the controversy, many papers have opted not to run the strip, while others have moved it to editorial sections of their editions until the Doonesbury abortion arc ends. In an email exchange with UK paper The Guardian, Trudeau expresses the same slack-jawed shock many progressive Americans feel when it comes to the rollback in women’s access to contraception and reproductive care in the United States. The cartoonist laments:

“Ninety-nine percent of American women have or will use contraception during their lifetimes. To see these healthcare rights systematically undermined in state after state by the party of ‘limited government’ is appalling. “In Texas, the sonograms are the least of it. The legislature has also defunded women’s health clinics all over the state, leaving 300,000 women without the contraceptive services that prevent abortions in the first place. Insanity.”

However, Trudeau isn’t bothered by the move to editorial for the series- he adds:

“I write the strip to be read, not removed. And as a practical matter, many more people will see it in the comics page than on the editorial page.”

Have you been appreciating the Doonesbury abortion arc so far?