Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) said Tuesday that his wife, Anita Perry, misspoke when she said abortion "could be" a woman's right.
“From time to time we’ll stick the wrong word in the wrong place, and you pounce upon it,” Perry said to reporters while appearing at a campaign event for Republican New Jersey Senate candidate Steve Lonegan in Smithville, N.J., according to Bloomberg.
Anita Perry's remarks came during a Saturday appearance at the 2013 Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, where she was asked about abortion by the Tribune's Evan Smith.
"That's really difficult for me, Evan, because I see it as a women's right," she said. "If they want to do that, that is their decision; they have to live with that decision."
When pressed on her stance, Perry said she believed the decision to have an abortion "could be" the right of a woman.
"Just like it's a man's right if he wants to have some kind of procedure," she said. "But I don't agree with it, and that's not my view."
Rick Perry, who unsuccessfully ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, is no stranger to verbal slip-ups. During a debate in 2011, he famously forgot one of the agencies of government he wanted to eliminate.
"The third agency of government I would do away with – the Education, the Commerce. And let's see. I can't. The third one, I can't," Perry said. "Oops."