Dear Commissioner Levine and Members of the Board of Health:

On behalf of the NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia Board of Directors, staff and our more than 20,000 members, I ask, due to the highly politicized circumstances and legal misrepresentation of the regulations for licensure of abortion facilities enacted last year, that [12 VAC 5 - 412] be repealed and rewritten.

Thousands of Virginians including hundreds of medical professionals have taken advantage of the Virginia Department of Health’s public comment period. They take issue with these burdensome regulations that singled out abortion providers over other doctors’ offices for no other reason than the service they provide. Requiring cost prohibitive, hospital-like construction requirements on existing abortion providers and even on new facilities (should one open in the future) are neither reasonable nor applicable to the reality of safe first trimester abortion.  In fact, this provision has nothing to do with patient safety. This provision alone was devised to shut off access to abortion by making it too costly for providers to continue offering the service. Onerous and unnecessary architectural mandates limit access to affordable, timely, and locally available health care for women in Virginia and actually put women’s health and lives at risk.

Despite the rhetoric of abortion opponents, during the initial regulatory period and since, every abortion facility in the state met their application deadlines, underwent announced and unannounced inspections, and passed those inspections. The only remaining hurdle is the hospital-like architectural mandates. Some of these doctors’ offices have been safely operating for nearly four decades and are in buildings that are even older. Many of these medical offices are also in rented spaces. Never has the Commonwealth required existing facilities to retroactively meet new regulatory construction guidelines.  With cost estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, this provision alone threatens to close the majority of the remaining 18 women’s health centers in the next year if the current regulations are not rescinded or amended.

This debate should not be about whether abortion is right or wrong. This debate is about whether first trimester abortion providers should be singled out for regulations – of which the most onerous and threatening have nothing to do with patient health and safety nor are medically or scientifically applicable. The architectural standards and even provisions around patient privacy and medical staff safety must be addressed and must be based solely on sound science and medicine. Anything less threatens women’s health and safety.

As a women’s health and rights advocacy organization, NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia stands firmly opposed to the way these regulations were manipulated and enacted. We ask you to please stand up for the hundreds of thousands of Virginia women who use these medical providers for their basic and reproductive healthcare, and ensure these regulations are based on sound science and medicine, not politics. We ask that these regulations be rescinded and rewritten.