As fans of the comic strip Doonesbury know, we elected to withhold publication of this week’s strip from the daily newspaper. We deemed the content — graphic descriptions of proposed pre-abortion screening requirements — as far too graphic for a family newspaper, especially as the story line progresses later in the week.In response, we’ve heard from a handful of readers who didn’t like our decision. Now, for them and any others who want to see this week’s Doonesbury strips, we're publishing them at news-record.com. Each day’s new strip will appear in the morning.
Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” has waded into the ultrasound-before-abortion debate that has emerged from Texas and Virginia and grabbed national media attention.
The decision to enter the fray has some newspapers concerned about the graphic nature of the strips and resulted in editorial decisions not to run them, says Starting Monday, “Doonesbury” will skewer the politicians who have pushed for vaginal ultrasounds — a weeklong satiric approach that has prompted at least one newspaper not to run the abortion strips. At the Oregonian in Portland, Features Editor JoLene Krawczak tells Comic Riffs that her paper “has decided to pull the week’s strips and will direct readers online if they want to read them.”
“Doonesbury’s” abortion-law series features a woman receiving a compulsory ultrasound and refers to a “shaming room” and a ”10-inch shaming wand” — and seems to equate the procedure to rape. The Oregonian, in a note to readers Friday, says that Trudeau ”went over the line of good taste and humor in penning a series on abortion using graphic language and images inappropriate for a comics page.”
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