Doonesbury Hitting the Issues

Today I became a mature adult. It has been a grat birthday so far!

This past week, Garry Trudeau's cartoon strip Doonesbury, has been tackling the issue of the conservative view on abortion. The newly emerging abortion laws has led to Trudeau's posting a cartoon series on the Texas ultrasound law. Garry Trudeau told Comic Riffs that to ignore the vaginal-ultrasound debate would have been “comedy malpractice.”

The website Addicting Info has carried the Doonesbury abortion comic strip all week long. "Why?"

Because many newspapers have decided that censoring this topic is a good way to keep people ignorant of what Republicans are doing to women’s rights. These so-called “news” organizations have failed to keep their readers informed because they would rather bow down to conservative demands. We here at AI reject such censorship and will continue to bring you the Doonesbury comic strip as long as this abortion segment continues. Republicans have declared war on women and everyone has the right to know exactly how the GOP is waging that war. To that end, Garry Trudeau decided to include the war in Doonesbury.

Republicans don’t want anyone to see this strip because they know it will draw the ire of much of the country. Women represent just over half of the national population, yet they are having virtually no say in what middle aged white male conservatives decide about their sex lives and medical privacy. It’s wrong and shouldn’t be tolerated. The only people who should be able to decide what is best for women’s bodies is women. Republicans have completely obliterated their claim of being the party that stands for small government the stays out of our lives. They’ve decided that small government should violate our privacy, force us to get medical procedures against our will and dictate what we do in our private lives with others. If that is their new definition of small government, I want no part of it. To combat this war on women and Republican censorship, please be sure to spread the word and share this with everyone you know. Women are counting on us to stand with them and their rights.

Monday’s Doonesbury:

Tuesday’s Doonesbury:

Wednesday’s Doonesbury:

Thursday’s Doonesbury:

Friday’s Doonesbury: 

Saturday’s Doonesbury:

According to Garry Trudeau:

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. 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.

Texas's HB-15 isn't hard to explain: The bill says that in order for a woman to obtain a perfectly legal medical procedure, she is first compelled by law to endure a vaginal probe with a hard, plastic 10-inch wand. The World Health Organization defines rape as “physically forced or otherwise coerced penetration — even if slight — of the vulva or anus, using a penis, other body parts or an object.” You tell me the difference.

Mr. Narrow-Minded!

Rick Santorum does not believe in contraception.  Rick Santorum does not believe in abortion.  Rick Santorum does not believe in insurance fully paying for prenatal tests like amniocentesis which can determine fetal problems in the womb.  Rick Santorum does however, believe in medically induced miscarriage.

Do you know what that means?

That means that Rick Santorum doesn't have to take contraception, get an abortion or any prenatal tests.  It means that his wife's medically induced miscarriage in 1996, was supported by Rick Santorum. It also means that a medically induced miscarriage, by any other name, is an abortion.

In the 19th week of her pregnancy, Karen discovered during a routine exam that the fetus she was carrying had a fatal defect and was going to die inside of her. A long-shot surgery was performed that required cutting directly into the womb. It carried a high risk of infection and was performed not to save the fetus, but to reduce Karen’s complications while she attempted to go full term.

Two days later, she became severely feverish. She was rushed to the hospital and placed on intravenous antibiotics, which reduced her fever and bought her some time, but could not eliminate the source of infection: the fetus.

Karen was going to die if her pregnancy was not ended, if the fetus was not removed from her body. So, at 20 weeks, one month before what doctors consider ‘viability’, labor began as a result of the antibiotics and the infected fetus was delivered. It died shortly thereafter. Once the Santorums had agreed to the use of antibiotics, they believed they were committing to delivery of the fetus, which they knew would not survive outside the womb.[...]

The procedure, whereby labor is induced to remove the fetus before it has any chance of surviving on its own, is considered by Mr. Santorum to be a ‘partial-birth abortion’, and he is correct. He also personally authorized one to save his wife, whom he loves.

But Rick Santorum is now a candidate in the Republican Tea Party primary for the presidency.  He is taking a very strong stand against every other woman's rights to contraception, medically induced miscarriages/abortion, partial-birth abortion and prenatal tests. Now, Santorum doesn't  care if the reason for an abortion is incest, rape or to save the life of the mother. His opinions stem from his belief that these rights were not God given and therefore cannot be given at all. That means he wants to take them away. This is what Rick Santorum has to say on these issues:

ABORTION: I have my own views on these things. They are deeply held beliefs. But not everything that I disagree with morally should the government be involved in. Only where there are real consequences to society or to the rights of individuals do I feel a need to speak out and that's why I do on the issue of abortion, because we have another person involved in the decision. But in the issue of contraception that's certainly not the case.

CONTRACEPTION: The whole conception of sexual liberation, sexual freedom had had its downside — and certainly birth control is part of that — with dramatic increase in sexually transmitted diseases, dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births and dramatic increase in the number of abortions."

PRENATAL TESTS: One of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing in every insurance policy in America. Why? Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society."

Rick Santorum is a political operative who sees the issues from his own religious world view. His message is now being championed by his followers and broadcast by the media without in depth scrutiny.  However, when scrutiny is applied, what is left is misinformation, falsehoods and arrogance. The TRUTH:

ABORTION:  This is a difficult decision that is made by a woman who is pregnant. She does have the right to consult others but the decision to abort or have a "medically induce abortion" is hers and hers alone.   When Santorum says there is "another person involved" he is referring to what he believes is a living being inside the mother.  That is his belief and therefore, he should not have an abortion and he alone can decide not to have an abortion, if he ever finds himself pregnant!


CONTRACEPTION: Santorum has a right to his belief system. But Rick Santorum also needs to understand the facts about contraception.  It does not dramatically increase "sexually transmitted diseases." It does not dramatically increase "out-of-wedlock births". It does not dramatically increase the number of "abortions." If properly used, contraception does just the opposite. Maybe Mr. Santorum needs some instruction on the use of contraception!

PRENATAL TESTS:  Prenatal testing does NOT end up "in more abortions."  Santorum's statement implies that the prenatal testing is the 'cause' for the abortion.  In reality it is just the opposite. Prenatal testing is done for a variety of reasons regarding the health and safety of both mother and child.  But many women who have prenatal tests, have already made the decision that they would terminate the pregnancy if the test determined that the fetus had a genetic fetal problem. Many women who would not have an abortion, no matter what the test result showed, might therefore decide not to even have prenatal testing. The test does not determine the decision.  The choice is the mothers!  

Mr. Santorum's conclusions belittle the difficult and painful decision of the mother.  He should know.  His  wife, Karen, was in that situation.  She made the decision by consulting with her husband, as she had a right to do. It was their decision.  No one second guessed them.  No one tried to take away that right. Rick Santorum is now working very hard to take away every woman's right to these individual medical choices.  

So who would vote for him?

The Radical Violent Right Joins Pro-Life

Have you ever wondered how radical hates groups joined forces with anti-abortion groups? An in-depth discussion of this phenomenon can be found in a Mother Jones article by James Ridgeway titled, A Brief History of the Radical Right.

Explaining Scott Roeder’s journey from anti-government extremist to anti-abortion fanatic.

The revelation that Scott Roeder, the alleged murderer of Dr. George Tiller, belonged to an anti-government, white separatist group called the Montana Freemen might seem like an unlikely twist. After all, such groups are generally thought of as either indifferent to the issue of abortion or actively enthusiastic about its potential for reducing the nonwhite population. As it turns out, however, the journey from radical racialist to anti-abortionist isn't as unusual as you might think.

The Freeman's Goals

The Freemen aimed to rid the nation of "14th Amendment citizens" -- anyone who wasn't a white Anglo Saxon directly descended from God. Nonwhites, or "mud people," weren't really people at all, but God's failed attempts to create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. A bad Xerox copy, they used to say. These beliefs derived from a school of thought known as Christian Identity, which holds that Jews, blacks, and other minorities aren't actually people and therefore don't deserve constitutional rights. Instead, those rights are reserved for so-called "white Sovereigns," who aim to take over government and run it through grand juries of the people, with laws enforced by old-time posses.

The Link

One might think that the divisions between pro-life Christians and far-right racists would preclude any sort of working alliance. Evangelical Christians thought that the creation of Israel was a sign of the Second Coming of Christ and became keen supporters of that country. The racialists, meanwhile, hated Israel and detested Jerry Falwell for supporting it. The Klan historically loathed Catholics, and modern far-right leaders like Tom Metzger in California thought abortion was a great way to stem the tide of brown and black babies who were burdening the welfare system and who as adults would threaten white political power.[...]

By the 1990s, the far right had started to attack abortion clinics.

The Bridge Between the Two

What was the bridge between the posse movement and anti-abortionist fanaticism? The Sovereign crowd viewed women as chattel, and the prospect of an independent woman deciding to seek an abortion didn't sit well with them. I gained some insight into this line of thinking in another piece I once wrote about a young woman in Oklahoma who aspired to join the Christian Identity group, hoping that its followers would teach her to shoot and become a guerrilla. Instead, the men asked her for sex. When the woman replied that she wanted a relationship first, one of them replied, "Women are for breeding." According to one faction of the group, women who have abortions are race traitors and should be stoned to death. With that in mind, the fact that some members of the far-right became violent anti-abortionists perhaps shouldn't come as such a surprise.