I would like to commend the Virginia Board of Health for its initial approach to determining their temporary regulations responding to SB924. First it assembled a distinguished group of medical professionals for their guidance and opinions and next invited public comments and one public hearing.
However, it then ignored both. The professionals disagreed with Attorney General Cuccinelli who is now a candidate for Governor, with what was forwarded as the temporary regulations and you are considering as the permanent regulations.
Cuccinelli has joined with State Senator Colgan and Delegate Marshall in their attempts to make abortion unavailable to women in Virginia
The blitzkrieg against women’s reproductive rights, including defining a zygote as a person and denying insurance coverage for poor women with extremely deformed fetuses, will soon extend to contraception as they consider IUDs and birth control as abortifacients. It has only just begun
I dare say that Cuccinelli, Colgan and Marshall have never seen the inside of a exam room where abortioncare is safely provided, yet they intend to trump the medical advice of medical professionals and women.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the Virginia Department of Health will not long remember what we write here today but will not forget what we will do this November and every, every November thereafter.
