Up until now, I don't believe there has been any reason to suspect that abortions performed by a competent, trained physician in a clinical environment threatened the health of the mother.   Virginia's decision to make that clinical environment more restrictive and more expensive effectively cuts off the availability of safe abortions, particularly to women who can least afford to raise children. The idea that women face increased risk in clinics is not born out by evidence and is, in my opinion, a cynical manipulation of fact to please a religious minority. 

As such, it indirectly violates Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, as well as the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution. More importantly, this proposed regulation intrudes on the free exercise of individual conscience and on the sanctity of a person's moral relationship with God. In Thomas Jefferson's words, these regulations "will be an infringement of natural right." (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786)

I am old enough to remember families and loved ones grieve when a woman died after a "coat hanger" abortion.  After Roe vs. Wade, I thought our society had decided to let families make their own decisions about conception, birth and the commitment to rear children. A woman would no longer have to worry about risking her life when she decided to end an unintended pregnancy. I thought that we had agreed as a society that, difficult as a decision to end a pregnancy is, it is a personal one, a family one, and not the province of the state, the legislature, the police or the courts.

If passed and enforced, these regulations will move us back into the dark world of criminalized abortions practiced in back rooms, on kitchen tables, by amateurs wielding coat hangers and worse.  The effect of these regulations will endanger, not improve the health of women in the Commonwealth.