Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) cited the death of comedian Joan Rivers while defending a controversial anti-abortion law in Texas.
During the Texas Tribune Festival on Sunday Perry defended HB2, a strict anti-abortion law that required facilities in the state to meet ambulatory surgery center level requirements to stay open. The law would have closed over a dozen clinics around Texas, according to the Associated Press. In August a federal judge blocked the law but the state is appealing that move.
Perry suggested that if the hospital-level standards were in place at the clinic where Rivers underwent surgery on her vocal cords, she may not have died.
“Clearly, the will of the Texas Legislature —which I agree with— that it is a state’s right to put particular types of considerations into place, to put rules and regulations into place, to make a clinic be as safe as a hospital,” Perry said Sunday. “It was interesting that, when Joan Rovers, and the procedure that she had done where she died, that was a clinic. It’s a curious thought that if they had had that type of regulations in place, whether or not that individual would still be alive.”
Rivers stopped breathing during the vocal cords procedure at a New York clinic. She died on Sept. 4. New York magazine noted that the clinic where Rivers was treated is an ambulatory surgery center.
If the law had not been blocked just seven of the 41 licensed abortion clinics in the state would have stayed open, according to The Huffington Post.
Watch Perry’s remarks, which start at about 1:00:45 below:
Wrong, unethical, tactless.
I can’t wait for his trial to begin.
99 years oh please oh please 99 years
Typical Perry. Open mouth, insert boot.
Daniel, who is this “Joan Rovers” you have Rick Perry talking about? Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s opening act?
Somebody forgot to clean their “smart glasses” before they left the house…
People never die in hospitals? Oh Rick, we need to talk. Grandma and Grandpa aren’t really living in a farm far out in the country.