The new regulations need to be amended.   At least some of them were politically motivated with no significant concern for the public safety, etc., and no discernable concern for the economic impact on the businesses being regulated.  For example, one regulation concerns having halls and doors of widths comparable to those found in hospitals.  Those writing this regulation must have ignored that emergency responders, who would be called if a woman were in need of care in a hospital, are trained to go into houses, apartments, and other buildings with narrow halls, average-width doorways, narrow (and steep) stairways and to remove the person both safely and quickly.  I'm confident they do this every day somewhere in Virginia.  An interesting, relevant statistic in this matter would be the number of times during the past several years that emergency responders were unable to "rescue" a woman from an abortion clinic because of narrow doorways and/or narrow halls.  My guess, based partly upon my own experience with emergency responders negotiating steep, narrow stairs combined with a right-angle turn out of my bedroom to get me into their ambulance safely and fast is that the abandonment of a person in need has never occurred.  And, certainly, such a regulation is far from "necessary for public health."  Also, mplimenting this regulation would be extremely costly; therefore, the people who created this regulation had not even a minimal concern for its economic impact on the small businesses it affected.

There are other regulations (the one about wash basins, for example) which also fail the test of necessity.  The whole lot of them need to be reviewed, rethought, . . . fixed.  However, this task must not be left up to politicians, nor should those chosen to amend the regulations make up a bipartisan committee.  The committee of "amenders" must consist of nonpartisan members highly qualified to judge in such matters as public safety, welfare, etc., and economic impact on small businesses.  That means a commiittee of professionals in the medical and business fields, especially the former.

However, I am not so big a fool as to think that anything like the above recommendation will be done by some part of Virginia's government today.  Especially in the General Assembly, there seems little sincere interest in the general welfare of people.  Sad, isn't it?