Rick Perry Blames Joan Rivers’ Death on NY’s Lax Abortion Laws

AUSTIN, Texas – Texas Governor Rick Perry this week said that Joan Rivers’ life would have been saved if the state of New York had similarly-stringent anti-abortion laws as the ones passed by his administration in Texas, specifically laws banning abortions for women over the age of 65.

“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,” said Perry. “And one of those regulations is to outlaw abortion when a woman is of a certain age, an age which Mrs. Rivers’ is long past.”

He said that had New York followed the lead of Texas and passed laws imposing stricter regulations on health clinics, the comedian’s life would have been spared. “It was interesting that, when Joan Rivers, 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 be still alive,” he said. “She would have been carried to term the baby and we would have two lives instead of one death.”

Not everyone, however, feels that Perry’s laws are actually about saving lives. Recently, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel ruled against a portion of the Texas law requiring health clinics to make costly renovations that have no medical purpose, saying the law appeared to be aimed at restricting a woman’s right to an abortion rather than the safety of the patients.

Governor Perry rejected this assertion, and he called on Governors across the country to enact what he called life-saving laws that would “put a stop to these tragedies of aborting older women whose bodies can not handle the emotional agony of the invasive, abortive procedure.”

“Let Joan Rivers’ death stand for life,” he declared. “It is what she would have wanted had she not been dead.”