USA Today reports that in today's issue of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 from Dark Horse Comics, Buffy shares her newly discovered status as a pregnant woman with her family and friends. She presumes that the vampire on-again-off-again lover Spike is the father, although there's some plot-purposeful indecision about that. And hey, it may just turn out that there's some mystical energy inside her or something. I'm sure there's plenty of supernatural oddness to come.

But more controversially, the comic explores her decision to have an abortion.

The preview that USA Today show isn't that reflective of the whole issue however, the article talks about the decision process. In the comic, we see Buffy talking to her friends, and indeed the child of a previous slayer, and the decisions she makes after talking it through with as many as she can.

Of late, mainstream comic books have become a lot more comfortable with topics including race, gender, homosexuality, drug use and all manner of topics that may once have been problematic. Abortion, however, is not a topic that's come up of late, especially not a protagonist deciding to have one. For all their progressive changes of late, I don't expect, even in their future fantasies, to see Betty or Veronica going to the clinic on the cover of Live With Archie. Today's Wolverine and The X-Men also has a pregnant Kitty Pryde, which is handled in a very different fashion.



But it remains a major debating point in America, And in an Election Year in the USA, it's just the time for abortion to become a hot trigger topic again. And for Buffy The Vampire Slayer to try and at least explore some of the complexities that accompany such a decision when it's away from the media spotlight.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #6 is published today. Comics are courtesy of Orbital Comics in London, UK. They are currently exhibiting the original art of Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot's Dotter Of Her Father's Eyes.

By the way, any Buffy The Foetus Slayer jokes in the comments, and you're barred.