Marc Murphy: Drawing the road that overturned abortion rights in Kentucky
To most people, the word “cartoon” suggests “funny.” Political cartoons aren’t comics. Well done, they express hard opinions in ways that can be visceral, educational, controversial, and on occasion, funny. There’s nothing funny, though, about abortion, and what the United States Supreme Court did on Friday, June 24, 2022.
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I’ve been drawing political cartoons for The Courier Journal for 15 years. It’s likely I was moved to draw a cartoon about the state of women’s choice that first week in 2007, and it’d be too heartbreaking to count how many I’ve drawn since. I would like to not have drawn any. At a minimum, I would like to have drawn, perhaps, progressively more hopeful pieces as the years passed. I would like to have lived in a country in which that was possible. As it happens, I do not. None of us do.
I could not have imagined that 15 years later I would be drawing about the literal end to this Constitutional right, the end of the - as it happened - quite temporary notion that in the United States women were considered in the law as fully human.
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How does one even express that in a single image, with lines and color? I recall the first time I submitted a cartoon in which I used a coat hanger as a symbol. My editors at the time rejected it, saying that such hyperbole wasn’t necessary or helpful to the conversation.
As time passed, however, and the vocal, bigoted evangelical minority grabbed more (at first) state legislative seats and power, images like a coat hanger and a soiled back alley garbage became tragically less hyperbolic and even understated. Now that the same vocal, bigoted evangelical minority controls even the Supreme Court, they aren’t even symbols, really, but snapshots of life in America.
Marc Murphy is The Courier Journal's contributing cartoonist. Find him on Twitter @MurphyCartoons
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Roe v Wade overturned: Abortion rights depicted in political cartoons
