As we reported on Monday, this week's strip of Doonesbury comics takes aim at the absurdity of Texas's mandatory sonogram law, which requires a transvaginal ultrasound of women seeking abortions in Texas. Tuesday and Wednesday's cartoons will be appreciated by Burnt Orange Report readers, as they stick it to the three middle-aged male Republicans responsible for this bill: Governor Rick Perry, State Senator Dan Patrick, and State Representative Sid Miller. The cartoons also bring in the ongoing Republican war on birth control, as the GOP wants to come between women and their monthly blister packs of pregnancy-prevention.
Here are Tuesday and Wednesday's strips:
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
Tuesday's panel, in which “Sid Patrick” (hmm, sounds like a mash-up of Sid Miller and Dan Patrick to me…) asks the young lady if her parents know she's “a slut,” resonates strongly with the remarks made by Radio Blowhard Rush Limbaugh, in which he called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for not only using birth control pills, but also having the audacity to speak up as a woman in favor of access to women's healthcare. More than 30% of American women who use contraception use The Pill. Looks like Rush just insulted one third of the country's ladies. Good work.
Additionally, 14% of pill-takers use them for non-contraceptive purposes including premenstrual dysphoric disorder, endometriosis, and controlling acne. Women also take the pill when they're prescribed other medications that have the risk of birth defects, to make sure they don't get pregnant. Thanks to the ongoing war by Texas Republicans on women's health and family planning programs, there are legions of women lining up to tell their stories about taking the pill for a variety of non-sexy reasons. In short, women take the pill for a whole lot of reasons, and it's none of our legislators' damn business why, nor is it their job to forbid us from receiving them.
Wednesday's panel takes direct aim at Rick Perry, who made sonogram legislation an “emergency item” to speed up the process by which it worked its way through the Republican legislature and into the vaginas of Texas. In his press release, Perry stated that the goal of the legislation was to make sure the “patient understands what's truly at stake” — because, you know, most women seeking abortions have no idea that they're terminating a pregnancy.
Perry added that he hopes the sonograms compel women to make what he terms “the right choice” — i.e. not to have the abortion. Of course, sonogram laws don't actually deter many women from having an abortion at all. The real key here is the 24-hour waiting period and procedural delays it causes women. Women need to take an extra day off from work, travel twice, pay for gas twice, pay for other childcare twice, all to exercise their legal right to an abortion. (Meanwhile, all of Perry's efforts to end women's health and family planning in Texas will only increase abortions, as a result of increasing unwanted pregnancies. Bitter irony!)
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story about the hardships of Texas women who now seek abortions under the sonogram law, and quoted two providers who described their patients' experiences with the law. (Ironically, the Post-Dispatch is one of the papers that refused to run the Doonesbury cartoon, since it wasn't “family friendly” enough.) From their article on the sonogram law, emphasis mine:
“What we have noticed primarily is absolute outrage that they have to come twice,” [Amy Hagstrom Miller, CEO of Whole Women's Health] said. “Many of our clients are already mothers; they know what is on a sonogram. They don't see it and say 'Oh, my gosh, I'm pregnant' and change their minds.”
“It treats women as if they are stupid and don't know what is in their uterus,” [Jenni Beaver, assistant director at Southwestern Women's Surgery Center in Dallas] said. “The law just creates hoops and barriers and drives up the cost for the women. And we have not had anyone decide not to have an abortion because of a sonogram.”
Beaver's comments above are accurate with other research on sonogram laws: they don't cause women to change their minds. However, the increased procedural hurdles — waiting periods, added costs — do deter some women from accessing abortion, and as always it's the low-income and rural women who will suffer the most.
Wednesday's comic ends as the resigned doctor reads the ideological claptrap required by the state. As far as the Legislature is concerned, doctors “cannot be trusted” to provide their patients with the necessary information about abortion and have to say what the government thinks is correct. It's a move that irked the American Medical Association, and it's a move that should send a clear message to Texas doctors and patients alike: when it comes to women's healthcare, the Republican legislature thinks only they know best.
