Women's Health Care and the Law
http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2011-03-16/womens-health-care-and-law
A new measure in Virginia would treat medical clinics that provide first-trimester abortions the same as hospitals with regard to most state licensing and health regulations. Kojo hears from a women's healthcare provider in the Commonwealth about the likely impact of the new law, and meets legislators from Maryland who proposed a similar law there.
Guests
Rosemary Codding
Director of Patient Services, Falls Church Healthcare Center
Adelaide Eckardt
Member, Maryland House of Delegates (R-Caroline, Dorchester, Talbot, and Wicomico Counties)
Pamela Beidle
Member, Maryland House of Delegates (D-Anne Arundel County)
Comments
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I'd like to voice my support of Ms. Codding's work in caring for women and protecting a woman's access to abortion in Virginia. Thank you to all providers who stand up for a woman's sovereignty over her own body. I am very disturbed by the covert nature of the Virginia law. I find it to be disingenuous at best to suggest that additional regulation of abortion clinics is an effort to protect women's safety when other surgical services available to all Virginians are not regulated in the same manner.
I worked for a dozen years in an abortion clinic in Ohio. We were inspected at least every three months by a variety of certifying agencies. As Rose Codding explained, not all regulation comes from the state.
If the Delegates want to demonstrate that their bill is not targeting women's access to reproductive rights, they will withdraw it and re-write it to cover all outpatient surgical centers. Until they do so, their claims that this bill is not targeting abortion will continue to ring false.
Bills like this one (and the ways their sponsors talk about them) serve a psychological function in our society (a function Delegate Eckardt should recognize, as a psych nurse): they serve to mislead people about the safety of abortion. We see this in Mary's call--she heard about this proposed law and said, "I assumed that there were laws and regulations that would have protected me at the time (of her abortion)."
Although the clinic Mary went to was most likely inspected/regulated by professional organizations and agencies, she is now in fear because she's been told that the *state* did not regulate it.
Although the impulse behind this law might really be to improve patient safety, the law itself will increase patient fear of good providers and decrease patient access to affordable abortion care.