The Texas Tribune reported yesterday:

"Nearly 180,000 Texas women and men are likely to lose access to birth control and preventative examinations next month because the [state] Legislature recently slashed financing for family planning services by two-thirds."

Here's a new primetime debate question: someone should ask Texas Governor Rick Perry why he thinks it's acceptable that his state is undermining women's basic health care. Perry, who announced on Saturday that he is running for President in order to "set [the U.S.] free from the shackles of an overbearing federal government," has no problem that the Texas state government has been overbearing and downright militant of late in gutting access to contraception, access to abortion care, and other foundational pillars of reproductive health. Indeed, over his 10-year tenure, Governor Perry has been relentless in using his executive bully pulpit to advocate for a slash-and-burn approach in the Texas Legislature — all at the expense of young women, children, and the poor in particular.

Take Perry's seemingly innocuous support for creating specialty "Choose Life" license plates, for instance. (Perry's campaign handlers had proudly posted a 2008 news article about this on Perry's campaign website, but they took it down recently [here's a screenshot of Google's cached page], ostensibly in preparation for a presidential run and the accompanying media scrutiny.)

Supporting a right-wing vanity license plate might not appear to be a big deal, but in the case of Texas, car-butt vanity has been made into a kind of sinister revenue generator: a law that Perry helped enact stipulates that profits from these license plates are to go towards funding Crisis Pregancy Centers (CPCs) throughout Texas.

The CPC is one of the worst ideological weapons in the right-wing's anti-women toolbox; these are places that pretend to be legitimate medical or community health clinics, but instead peddle misinformation and egregious, dangerous lies. As we mentioned in an earlier Amplify post (by way of Ms. Magazine):

Most CPCs are staffed primarily by volunteers with no medical training, and these staff members routinely provide deceptive anti-abortion messages to women,

"including that abortion is painful and life-threatening, has long-lasting physical and mental health consequences, increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer, and can lead to sterility or death."

...Another was warned that "If a woman with breast cancer in her family has an abortion, then she will definitely get breast cancer, which will kill her."

So, when I wrote earlier here that Governor Perry is responsible for undermining women's health care, I mean it in the unfortunately worst sense: here's a politician who is just fine with funding institutions that have hurt women mentally and physically. It's not surprising, then, that Governor Perry once publicly stated that he "firmly believe[s] there's no such thing as an unwanted child" (in reference to unintended pregnancies).

He just entered the presidential race, but the media should immediately take Candidate Perry to task for complaining that the United States is being forced into "the grips of central planners that would control our healthcare" — because, isn't that what Rick Perry is doing to the women and families of Texas already?