Virginian women deserve a comprehensive approach to reproductive care. Here’s what that might look like.

Governor Youngkin’s abortion plan consists only of restricting women’s access to abortion services.  This purely punitive approach to women’s reproductive health needs is flat-out wrong.  The decision to have a child is an extremely complicated one, involving questions of health, affordability and very personal needs.  Women should not have politicians telling them what they can and cannot do.  They need our support.

 Therefore, Virginians should insist that our elected representatives come up with benefits that average women really need, including: 

 --first, since many families often face the cruel economic choice that they cannot afford to adequately care for another child, why not adopt new state measures to expand child care and income support for families who need it?  

 --second, offer reproductive health services accessible in every county of the state, with no restrictions on insurance or Medicaid coverage for any kind of reproductive care. Reproductive care shouldn’t be only for those who can afford it. Every Virginia woman who needs should get the timely and professional medical care she needs to make the right (for her) decision.

 --third, any later-term abortion ban should include exceptions based on the health (not the life) of the mother and the fetus – with that decision to be solely that of the mother in consultation with her medical provider.  Such intensely personal choices have no business being taken over by politicians.

 --finally, why not require paternity testing and a requirement that the father help with child support? Because, if there is one goal that should win bipartisan consensus, it should be to providg a decent standard of living for our children, and that is as much the responsibility of the father as the mother.

 In the next state legislative session, therefore, our legislators will have a clear choice:  should Virginia’s approach to reproductive care be simplistic and punitive, which is where the Governor’s proposal appears to be headed?  Or will it be comprehensive and compassionate, as we are proposing here?

 Two things are certain:  the Governor and most Republican legislators will be pushing very hard for the punitive approach, and the deep divisions in the legislature mean that any vote on reproductive rights will be very close.

 This is now a political game, therefore, and the Governor and his allies will play it with passion and persistence.  That same passion and persistence will be required of those Virginians who believe in a reasonable and compassionate approach.