Based in Arlington, Virginia, the Feminist Majority Foundation, a national non-profit organization dedicated to women’s equality and reproductive health, applauds the Virginia Board of Health’s decision to amend 12 VAC 5-412, medically-unnecessary restrictions on women’s health centers.

These restrictions were not designed to protect women’s health. In the United States, legal abortion is extremely safe. Most abortions in the U.S. occur in the first-trimester when the risk of complication is less than 0.05 percent. However, restricted access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare services, which includes abortion, cancer screenings, and other preventive care, endangers women’s health, safety, and lives.

The purpose of the restrictions that the Board of Health voted to amend was simply to close safe, trusted women’s health care centers in Virginia, deny women access to abortion, and prevent women from accessing affordable, safe, comprehensive health care. At least three of 21 women’s health centers in Virginia have been forced to close or stop providing abortion services, in part because of these medically-unnecessary restrictions. Low-income women are particularly affected by the closure of women’s healthcare centers and restricted access to care because they are more likely to rely on these facilities for health services.

The Department of Health and the Board of Health now have the opportunity to construct carefully-considered amendments that are medically appropriate and will continue to allow Virginia women to access abortion services.

In particular, the Feminist Majority Foundation supports the recommendation of the Virginia Coalition to Protect Women’s Health (“the Coalition”) that the Department and the Board should remove the medically unnecessary requirement that clinics obtain a written transfer agreement with a general hospital. These types of arrangements are subject to business interests and political influence; a hospital could deny a transfer agreement for variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the safety of abortion or the quality of care provided at a women’s health center. In addition, in the rare case of an emergency, federal law already requires that any patient have access to hospital care.

In amending these regulations, the Department and the Board should also be mindful that abortion providers are often the targets of violence by anti-abortion extremists, who seek out information about health center ownership and policies in order to harass and intimidate abortion providers and patients. In our 2014 National Clinic Violence Survey, the Feminist Majority Foundation found that the percentage of clinics impacted by targeted threats and intimidation increased from 26.6 percent of all clinics surveyed in 2010 to more than half of all clinics, 51.9 percent, in 2014, and almost 20 percent of clinics surveyed experience severe violence. The Feminist Majority Foundation therefore supports the recommendation by the Virginia Coalition that stringent confidentiality protections should be a part of the regulations, to ensure that sensitive information about the health care facility or its patients does not get into the wrong hands.

The Feminist Majority Foundation also supports the Coalition’s comments concerning the inapplicability of design and construction guidelines to existing clinic facilities. Not only were these standards intended to apply only to new construction or major renovations, all other regulated health care facilities, including inpatient hospitals, have grandfathering provisions that protect patient safety while allowing health facilities to operate without having to renovate or rebuild every time new regulations are adopted.

We thank the Board for its decision to amend these regulations, and urge that the amended regulations privilege women’s need for comprehensive health care above the desire of politicians to interfere in women’s personal, private healthcare decisions.

Gaylynn Burroughs, Director of Policy & Research

Feminist Majority Foundation