Bills would push abortion back into shadows

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The Falls Church health care facility in a bland brick office complex is similar to most others -- with a waiting room, examining rooms, counseling rooms, a storage room and bathrooms.

An oxygen tank sits in one corner. The dreaded scale stands in another.

Everywhere, there are magazines and pamphlets explaining medical procedures, patient's rights and social-service referrals. Only a tiny straw basket filled with colorfully packaged condoms signals the procedures performed in this office.

This Falls Church medical office could be any woman's ob-gyn office, a place where you make regular visits to get pelvic exams and reproductive prescriptions or go for an emergency checkup or procedure. Except, one day a week, this Planned Parenthood clinic also performs abortions.

However, if several bills working their way through the conservative-controlled Virginia General Assembly are passed during this legislative session, women in the Old Dominion could lose critical access to safe, legal abortions performed at clinics such as the one in Falls Church.

As thousands gathered in the nation's capital yesterday for the 31st anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, lobbyists on both sides of the issue are making their case in Richmond and Annapolis.

The Virginia bills range from what constitutes feticide to prohibiting state colleges and universities from dispensing emergency contraceptives (the morning-after pill).

Jatrice Martel Gaither, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, which covers the entire region, was at the Falls Church clinic Wednesday with Holly Blanchard, the certified nurse midwife and quality-control-assurance coordinator who monitors all regional Planned Parenthood facilities. They were joined by Judy, the staff clinician, and Samantha, the clinic manager.

Ms. Gaither maintains that the proposed Virginia laws set up "a two-tier system," and, "even if Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land, bills like the Virginia laws do essentially what a reversal of Roe would eventually do -- make abortion so restrictive and inaccessible that only women with wealth and the ability to travel can terminate a pregnancy."