These medically useless health center specifications for clinics that perform legal abortions threaten the health and safety of women across the Commonwealth, as well as remove access to preventive reproductive health care, as many clinics will be forced to close.  The regulations are not based on proven, published scientific and medical evidence; rather, they are based on personal opinion and moral beliefs.  They are of no medical benefit to women; in fact, they reduce women's access to safe, affordable, and necessary health care.  Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures, and all your bluster about concern for safety is just smoke and mirrors. Your shocking disregard for the negative effects of these onerous regulations, especially on uninsured, low-income, and minority women, disproves any attempts at justification. 

If you require these unnecessary regulations for clinics where legal abortions are performed, then you must require the same physical specifications for ANY facility that conducts out-patient procedures, including physician's offices and business providing abdominal and pelvic ultrasounds, cystoscopy, colonoscopy, laser skin treatments, bone scans, and liposuction and other elective procedures.  It's all or nothing in this matter.  To have separate and burdensome requirements for clinic buildings is blatant sex discrimination. 

Impeding access to a constitutionally protected procedure is the height of hypocrisy: you cannot pick and choose what parts of the Constitution to ignore; you cannot call for the deregulation of industries that cause great physical harm and death to Virginians while regulating access to one of the safest medical procedures performed; you cannot speak to a concern for women's health while aggressively working to deny those same women access to essential health care.  

The TRAP regulations are yet another step in taking the "common" good out of the Commonwealth and making "wealth" what is important here.  Do the right thing.  Amend the regulations based on scientific and medical evidence, and do not put women's lives at risk by blocking and eliminating access to essential health care.