Reproductive rights groups have sued the state of Virginia in an effort to undo dozens of abortion restrictions there, less than a week after taking similar actions in Texas.
Some of the restrictions go back decades and include requirements for clinic licensing, requirements for undergoing an ultrasound, and a ban on allowing certain healthcare workers to provide abortions. The lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District Court of Virginia in Richmond.
“There comes a time when enough is enough,” Rosemary Codding, founder and director of the Falls Church Healthcare Center, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a call with reporters Wednesday.
She called the restrictions “draconian” and said abortion providers had been singled out for “regulations not applied to other medical providers for their services.”
Defenders of the restrictions say they are intended to protect women during their pregnancies and ensure safer abortions, but critics charge they do not serve a medical purpose and instead cause clinics to shut down. As a result, women are unable to access abortions services, they say.
“They do not protect women,” Codding said. “They do nothing to improve the safety of women.”
Groups behind the lawsuit say that they have been bolstered by the Supreme Court’s 5-3 decision in 2016 on Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt. That ruling overturned restrictions in Texas that set specific requirements for the way clinics had to be set up and for doctor licensing.
Whole Women’s Health and other clinics sued, saying that the requirements forced them to shut down. The Supreme Court ruled in that case that the requirements posed a “undue burden” on a woman’s right to have an abortion, and that they were not medically necessary.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, the organization that also was involved in the Supreme Court case and a plaintiff in latest the Texas lawsuit, said she hoped other states would replicate the approach that abortion rights groups are taking in Virginia and Texas.
“Some of the laws we challenge today have been on the books for over four decades,” she said. “Some of the laws are obsolete … They have noting to do with patient safety. These restrictions shame patients and treat abortion as a crime. They don’t make abortion safer they only make it harder for patients to access the care we provide.”
“It’s time to call these laws what they are: Outdated and draconian barriers that stand between patients and safe, compassionate abortion care,” she said.
Other plaintiffs in the case include A Capital Women’s Health Clinic and Virginia League for Planned Parenthood. The Center for Reproductive Rights is lead counsel on the case.
