Board of Health,

The primary reason we have laws and regulations is to use the power of our collective state to protect the ones who are the most vulnerable and need it the most. Whether protecting us from despots outside our borders or charlatans within our borders, the exercise of the "police power" is a high and sacred calling and essential to our existence as a nation and a civilization. I can think of no more vulnerable persons than those with no voice and no means of defense - the unborn. But a close second would be the women bearing them, feeling desperate and powerless to follow maternal instincts and feeling like they have run out of choices. What a blind and hideous shame if we do not use the power of protection entrusted to the state to see that these women are treated with dignity, decency, and basic first world medical standards. They do not deserve to be abandoned by the state to profiteering enterprises. If the profiteers practiced their enterprise in keeping with those standards, they would have no reason to object to regulation and accountability. Charles Pittman