Melissa Harris Perry: ‘Rick Perry Wants To Get All Up In Your Uterus And Take A Picture’
That Texas governor Rick Perry is a strongly pro-life candidate for the presidency should come to few as little surprise, though on tonight’s Rachel Maddow Show, host Melissa Harris Perry dove a bit deeper into what kind of legislation results from those beliefs, bills that don’t attack the abortion process itself, but make doctors involve themselves more in the process. Or, as Harris Perry summed up the Texas sonogram bill struck down recently, “Rick Perry wants to get all up in your uterus and take a picture.”
After a primer on Perry’s stance on the government in general– namely, that he want a government “that’s so small you don’t even notice it”– Harris Perry (no relation, as she often emphasizes) noted that the attitude that the government as a social safety net and guide for the impoverished did not extend to individual reproductive rights. According to her, if “you’re a lady… Rick Perry wants to make the government so big that it can control the pregnancy of any woman in Texas.”
The “taking a picture” part of the uterus argument comes in with the Texas sonogram law, which would require women seeking abortions to get a sonogram at least 24 hours before getting the abortion in order to, as one legislator explained it, give the woman time to reflect upon the life she is about to terminate. To Harris Perry, this puts the doctor in a position of “whispering in your ear that you should be ashamed of yourself” as a representative of the government– and according to the courts, as well, which struck the bill down. “The bill treats women as less than fully competent adults,” she concluded.
The segment via MSNBC below:
