The regulations threaten the continued availability of safe, legal first-trimester abortion and preventive reproductive health care in multiple locations throughout the state. 

 

Extensive, burdensome requirements for clinic buildings that are unrelated to the services health centers provide and have no proven medical benefit will reduce or eliminate patient access to health care.  The regulations will increase the financial hurdles to health care for patients, with no proven medical benefit to patients. Women need more access to affordable, high quality health care, not less.  Medically inappropriate and unnecessarily burdensome regulations would restrict access to essential health care services for the women of Virginia and further marginalize young, low-income, uninsured and minority women by decreasing their health care options.

 

If regulations placed on women's health centers are based upon evidence-based medical practices that advance the public health, then women in the Commonwealth will be able to maintain access to vital health care from trusted medical providers.  The fact that these regulations are unnecessary is evidenced by the fact that the Virginia Board of Medicine initially rejected these proposed regulations before Gov. McDonnell stacked the board to ensure a favorable vote and before Attorney General Cuccinelli threatened to withold state legal protections from the Board members who did not vote in alignment with his political beliefs.

 

Medicine should be an evidence-based profession, and regulations of medical care should respect this premise.  Additional regulations based on sentiment and politics have no place here.  These regulations are a proposed answer looking for a problem, and are driven solely by partisan ideology.  As such, they have no place here and must not be used to impede women's access to necessary and legal medical care.