Protecting women's health is not a partisan issue

June 15, 2012

The Roanoke Times reports, "New regulations about to become reality in Virginia would allow government agents to demand a list of every woman visiting an abortion clinic -- even if she changes her mind. The rules... are even more shocking, appalling and intimidating than lawmakers' scuttled plan to require pre-abortion probes of women's vaginas."

Progressive Point: Our bodies are not campaign issues. Virginians depend on women's health clinics for comprehensive reproductive care, including cancer screenings, family planning, and STD tests. Politically motivated regulations pushed by Bob McDonnell and Ken Cuccinelli will shut down clinics and cut off women's access to health care. These regulations are opposed by medical professionals, and we should all be outraged with any politician who would place their politics above our families' health.

Women should be confident that when they visit the doctor that their conversations and health care decisions remain private. But the proposed regulations would open up patient records to government inspectors and allow bureaucrats to compile lists of abortion clinic patients. Bob McDonnell and Ken Cuccinelli's narrow ideological agenda is jeopardizing the health and safety of Virginia women. Their ideology should not supersede the judgment of medical professionals and has no place in women's health care decisions.

Get the Facts: Via the Virginia Coalition to Protect Women's Health:

• "Last spring, state legislators passed a law that allowed for the promulgation of temporary abortion regulations. These regulations single out women's health centers as part of an unprecedented political campaign to undermine women's access to safe, legal reproductive health care services."


• "According to the AP article and evident in the FOIA documents, the recommendations that the medical committee and Department of Health developed together were quite different than what the Department of Health ended up releasing, and it appears that the committee's recommendations would have likely enabled most health centers to remain open."


• "As a result of the politicization of the process, unless amended, women's health care centers would have to come into compliance with the architectural requirements temporarily and then be forced to comply with potentially different architectural requirements shortly thereafter through the permanent regulatory process that will begin next year."


• "Even health centers that only provide oral medication abortion would be forced to overhaul buildings for medically unnecessary reasons."

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