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thepoliticalnotebook:

Part of a Doonesbury comic strip about a piece of Texas abortion legislation signed into law by Rick Perry in May of 2010. Several US newspapers, like the Kansas City Star, are refusing to run the comic at all, while others are putting it in the editorial page instead of the comics page. This portion does not show all of the cartoon, which includes the woman being asked: “Do your parents know you’re a slut?” The cartoon ends with a nurse preparing the transvaginal ultrasound, saying “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”

In an email with the Guardian, cartoonist Garry Trudeau wrote in regards to the last piece of the cartoon: “That falls within the legal definition of rape. Coercion need not be physically violent to meet the threshold. Many people here are now referring to trans-vaginal sonograms as ‘state rape’. That seems about right to me”

Read the rest of Trudeau’s correspondence with the Guardian in this article.

(via thepoliticalnotebook)