Guest opinion: Regulating rights out of existence

It’s been almost a year since state-mandated, medically unnecessary regulations that unfairly target abortion providers in Virginia went in to effect. These regulations are a tactic pushed around the country by those seeking to restrict access to reproductive health services. They are a cynical effort to regulate rights out of existence by making it impossible for doctors and clinics to provide abortion services because of the cost of implementing government rules. As a direct result of these regulations, women’s health care centers that choose to offer abortion services along with other preventive care and family planning services, must comply with medically unnecessary building standards that are unrelated to the services they provide. If the women’s health care providers can’t comply with these rules, the facilities will close.

These regulations that target only abortion providers, and not doctors and clinics providing other similar surgical and non-surgical health services, have nothing to do with the safety of patients and everything to do with politicians’ efforts to restrict a woman’s access to reproductive healthcare. Not content with having politicians in Richmond interfere in women’s private medical decisions, some politicians in Manassas recently attempted to double down and enact local rules designed to block new or relocating legal health care businesses from the city and require women to travel outside their community to seek legal and safe abortion services.

Some politicians on the Manassas City Council considered a proposal that would have fast-tracked a controversial zoning measure that would have circumvented a comprehensive rewrite of local zoning recommended by their professional staff and imposed additional restrictions on doctors and clinics providing abortion services within the city. The proposed zoning change unfairly targeted women’s health care centers with medically unnecessary restrictions by requiring these medical facilities to have a "special use permit” before they can locate in the city.

Early abortion is safely provided by health care professionals in office-based practices throughout the country. Doctors offices and women’s health centers that provide abortion care, a service that’s extremely safe, minimally invasive, and similar to many other procedures carried out every day in physician’s offices in Manassas and around the country, should be treated the same as any other physician’s office, which are not required to file for a special use permit. A special use permit requires a burdensome process - application fees, legal fees related to filing, a public hearing and staff review and approval by city council. In short, the proposal would have made it disproportionately difficult for any new or relocating doctor or women’s health center providing abortion services to operate within Manassas city limits.

The good news is that public outcry about these unfair restrictions on certain health care providers resulted in the council voting down this discriminatory proposal. Council chose, instead to initiate phase one of a comprehensive update to the city’s zoning law that will include consideration of what rules should apply to medical facilities, including abortion providers. This decision does not mean that the final zoning rules will be fair. It’s crucial that the public support adoption only of a new comprehensive zoning law that does not discriminate against doctors and women’s health care centers that provide abortion services by imposing rules on their location and operation that are medically unnecessary, do not enhance patient safety, and are intended only to make provision of such services so costly that providers new or relocating providers won’t be able to provide services in the city.

Zoning decisions should be based on specific, precise, non-discriminatory criteria applicable equally to all similar businesses and property owners, and not on the desire of politicians to insert themselves into women’s private health care decisions and place themselves between a woman and her doctor.

Katherine Greenier is director of the Reproductive Freedom Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.