Republican Delegate Bob Marshall wants to keep Virginia's regulations
forcing abortion-clinic closures on the books.
The Virginia House of Delegates last week proved once again that it doesn't care one bit about women's well-being. In a budget amendment, the Republican-controlled body blocked any changes in abortion-clinic regulations that the state health commissioner says should be amended "to be aligned more accurately with medical best practices."
Since 2011, when they were first proposed, the regulations have been aligned instead with the political views of extremists determined to shut down as many abortion clinics as they can. And it's working.
So far, five of the 23 clinics that were in operation in Virginia when the regulations went into effect in June 2013 have closed their doors. Thirteen more could be shuttered if the regulations remain as they are. Five clinics say they can comply with the regulations, which require that they meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers.
Physicians and other critics say these standards are not medically necessary for abortion clinics. In Texas in 2013, state Sen. Wendy Davis made that argument during a 13-hour filibuster of a forced-birther bill which included the ambulatory surgical center requirement. That year there were 41 clinics providing abortions in the Lone Star State. Now there are 16. Meanwhile, in Colorado, which in 1967 was one of the first states to loosen abortion laws, legislators are considering similar legislation.
Samantha Lachman reported Friday on the situation in Virginia:
The amendment, introduced by Del. Bob Marshall (R), was aimed at halting Gov. Terry McAuliffe's (D) push to ease existing regulations on abortion clinics. Advocates for abortion rights often refer to those rules as TRAP laws, or targeted regulations of abortion providers.
When Republican Robert McDonnell, McAuliffe's predecessor, was governor, the state board of health passed regulations requiring clinics to meet the same physical building standards as ambulatory surgical centers, incorporating specific ventilation systems, parking lot designs, hallway widths and covered entrances. Virginia's health commissioner at the time resigned in protest over the rules, which critics said were too expensive and unnecessarily restrictive.
It's not just Virginia. When forced-birthers invent some new method of making abortions harder and more expensive to obtain in one state, they quickly work to get it passed elsewhere. Twenty-two states now have passed regulations in the past four years that include some version of the ambulatory surgical center standards, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that supports abortion and closely follows changes in laws affecting women's reproductive rights.
There's more on this below the fold.
Virginia's regulations in this regard are the most outrageous—stricter and dumber than any other state's. The law includes whole chapters from a book of guidelines for construction of new healthcare facilities. Many of the other requirements being imposed are not even medically related, much less medically required. Among them, mandates on the specific kind of fabrics used for window shades and ceiling heights for boiler rooms as well as requiring that abortion providers have four parking spaces for each procedure room.
The new regulations were first pushed by former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who ran against McAuliffe in the governor's race. Typically when new regulations like these are imposed on other facilities, they only apply to new construction and existing buildings are grandfathered in, either permanently, or until their next major renovation. But Cuccinelli would have none of that and issued orders making them apply to clinics already in operation.
Last May, McAuliffe announced during National Women's Health Week that he would be appointing five new members to the state's 15-member board of health, which had voted 13-2 for the regulations in September 2012.
That move was a turnabout. Virginia is only one of the states where right-wing governors aided by tea party-boosted majorities in state legislatures have sought to pack health boards with abortion foes. McAuliffe said at the time:
"I am concerned that the extreme and punitive regulations adopted last year jeopardize the ability of most women's health centers to keep their doors open and place in jeopardy the health and reproductive rights of Virginia women."
Extreme and punitive is exactly right.
But women's health is not what these legislators had in mind when they passed the new regulations. And they certainly weren't concerned about any violations of reproductive rights, something they don't believe women should have any of anyway.