I urge you to uphold the current laws that regulate abortion centers.

For four years, I managed a restaurant in Old Town, Alexandria. Every year, a person from the Health Department came to inspect our facilities. Using a checklist as a baseline, she would walk through the establishment, asking me and my employees questions about our procedures and standards, accessing all the refrigerators, food prep, and storage areas. She would do things like take the temperature of chicken salad in the refrigerator, note how many times our employees washed their hands while the inspection was underway, and verify that dishware was cleaned using the right concentration of  sanitizing agent, among other food safety and sanitation practices. These measures were in place as a way of protecting public health.

Our restaurant passed every inspection. Had we failed, however, our restaurant would have been shut down for fear that the public was at risk.

If standards such as the above are in place and enforced yearly (if not more frequently) at places where people are simply fed a meal, then how much more important it is to maintain standards at abortion facilities and scrutinize facilities that fail to meet those standards. If public feeding places must be inspected and kept to a high standard, lest people get ill or die, then even greater concern must be shown for a facility that does such procedures as insert a curette into a woman’s vagina to scrape her uterus. If a coffee shop’s milk steamer should be checked for milk residue and bacteria, then an abortion center’s suction machine—which is more powerful than a vacuum cleaner—should be inspected with even greater scrutiny.

Abortion is extremely risky and dangerous. Regulating abortion centers by making them follow standards and punishing those who fail keeps women safe.

Please uphold the current standards.

Sincerely,

Cristina Ramos