The regulations otherwise known as "TRAP" should be repealed. The specific building code regulations included in the TRAP laws are not necessary for the protection of public health, and are instead designed to shut down the clinics entirely.  The same regulations were used to shut down all but one clinic in Mississippi for a governor who declared to make Mississippi an "abortion free state." I challenge the Board of Health to reexamine the nature of these regulations, and consider why at one BoH meeting the board voted to grandfather-in the clinics so as to not have to submit to cost prohibitive new building codes, and then switched their vote a few months later. How are women in Virginia any better off, how are their bodies more healthy and more safe with LESS access to healthcare?  This is precisely why all existing hospitals have always been grandfathered-in when new building code regulations are signed into law - because wise people recognized that it does the public no good to shutter hospitals completely.
Shutting down businesses will not only have a negative economic impact on the clinics themselves, but will have a multiplying effect on the economy of the Commonwealth as a whole, as the state systematically forces women and families to endure worse economic hardship by removing the right to access to abortions, healthcare, and family planning that they need in order to build healthy, sustainable lives for themselves and their families.??The law might have been clearly written, but the regulations were consistently re-interpreted by the then Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, as was the extent of the Board's legal authority, and words re-defined to meet whatever definition suited the objective of making abortion inaccessible to women in Virginia.??Please reconsider the wholly inappropriate tactics of former AG Cuccinelli and his staff, reexamine the true nature of these regulations, what they have done to states when implemented elsewhere in the country, and repeal these regulations. Or if you will not repeal the regulations, then consider placing every other clinic that is not currently regulated as such (clinics that perform colonoscopies, vision correction surgery, cosmetic surgery and dental surgery) under these same strict measures. I would be curious to see what happens to the "health and safety" and "economic" arguments then.
Women need abortions. You will never have an abortion-free state. Make it safe and accessible.