Women are giving Texas Gov. Rick Perry a hard time. The erstwhile candidate for the Republican presidential nomination has decided to refuse more than $30 million in federal funds for women’s health programs because he doesn’t want some of it going to that radical group, Planned Parenthood, prompting women to take to the streets to protest and to his Facebook page to fight back.

To mock his notion that he knows what’s good for women, they are asking his advice about menstrual cramps, products for relief and other matters better not discussed further in a family newspaper.

Perry’s narrow-minded choice put at risk the health of 130,000 low-income women who cannot afford  pap smears and cancer screenings that groups like Planned Parenthood offer. But he is willing to accept the collateral damage to aim his six-shooter at reproductive rights, even though those federal dollars cannot be used for abortions.

The governor is but one leader deserving of criticism as state legislators, members of Congress and the remaining Republicans desperately seeking the White House mount their horses to herd women back to the corral.

Among the most bone-headed is an Idaho senator who has proposed yet another bill to force women to get an ultrasound before an abortion, unfortunately one of many similarly oppressive measures riding through state houses across the country. The bill does not allow exemptions in cases of medical emergencies, incest or rape, but Sen. Chuck Winder, a Boise Republican, suggests that women may not know the difference between rape and “normal relations in a marriage.” Doctors, he says, should question a woman to determine if her pregnancy was “truly caused by rape.”

Further south, a bill in the Arizona Senate would require that women who use contraceptives prove to employers who have “moral objections” to birth control that the pill has been prescribed for other reasons, such as treatment for acne or to lessen menstrual pain.

Further east, a Tennessee state representative has put up a bill to require that the names of doctors who perform abortions be posted online, subjecting them to danger from anti-abortion extremists. The legislation also requires that the race, age, level of education and the number of children of women who have abortions be made public — county by county. This might not be a problem in a metropolis, but in rural areas, the details could be enough to reveal a woman’s identity.

While these measures are limited state by state, taken as a whole they thicken the mass of degrading and humiliating legislation to force women already in difficult and agonizing situations to undergo even more suffering. Such proposals also leach deeper into the women’s health care issues.

Politicians who push against women do so at their peril. Labor statistics show their economic heft as about 4 in 10 working women earning more than their husbands. Women also vote in greater numbers than men, and recent polls and surveys have shown they have had enough of being elbowed in the ribs.

A conservative pundit recently asked: What do women want? They want to be released from being the stuff in the guys’ political football game. They want to be free to make their own decisions with the people who matter to them. They want to be left alone.

———

Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.