Dear VDH Board Members:

As a Family Practice Physician I am concerned that women continue to have access to safe legal abortions.

While in college I worked in an emergency room where women were coming in deathly ill and dying after unsafe illegal abortions. Many of these women were married with children at home. This was before New York liberalized abortion laws providing safe legal abortions. Prior to that, women with “means” could fly to the Caribbean and pay $1500 for a legal first trimester abortion (plus airfare).

When Roe v Wade was decided by the Supreme Court, I thought sanity had arrived, that women wouldn’t have to go out of state to obtain a safe, legal abortion.

Over the past 39 years, access to safe and legal abortion has been chipped away at, and we now have VDH weighing in to require facilities that provide abortions to have requirements that have nothing to do with medical safety.

First trimester abortion is a safe doctor’s office procedure*, which it has been for years in Virginia. There has been NO problem prompting this change but an “end run” to achieve what the  opponents of abortion have been unable to achieve legislatively and I’m sure you all know that.

If safety were a serious concern you would also be putting these requirements on oral surgeons and plastic surgeons who do far riskier procedures in their offices.

Are you considering that 10-15% of abortions are medical abortions –where the patient takes the pills at home where the abortion occurs? Absolutely no need for an“ambulatory surgical” center requirement here.

Please reconsider this obtuse reasoning and do what is medically right – refuse to require abortion clinics to operate as hospitals or ambulatory surgery centers.

You won’t stop abortions. When it was illegal, women risked their lives to terminate unwanted pregnancies. You can make it harder, more expensive, and try to change women’s mind by the delays. This will only drive women to go out of state or take riskier choices.

The answer is better education and access to methods of prevention, e.g. contraception. This is the best way to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

Sincerely, 

Dr. Angela Herring

11 Digges Drive

Newport News, VA 23602

757-872-0928

aherringmd@verizon.net

Jan 16, 2012

*Another study just released reiterates what has been know previously. Women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion (in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology)