Virginia Capitol. Charlotte Rene Woods/ Virginia Mercury
Del. Kim Taylor is “disappointed” that her abortion bill wasn’t docketed in Virginia’s 2025 legislative session, and therefore defeated without a chance for debate.
As she seeks reelection in the competitive 82nd District — which she won by 53 votes last time — it’s a chance for Taylor, a Republican, to be on the record protecting some abortion access while much of her party has supported restricting or banning it.
But the bill may not be needed, advocates and lawmakers said, since current law already protects doctors’ judgements on a wide range of needs for the procedure.
House Bill 2562 would have outlined protections for abortions as treatment to nonviable pregnancies. With no national definition of viability, the matter is typically handled on a case-by-case basis by physicians.
Defined in Taylor’s bill, a “nonviable pregnancy” is one that “cannot result in a live-born infant, including an ectopic pregnancy or failed intrauterine pregnancy.”
Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia director Jamie Lockhart said that she would have opposed the bill if it had come up for debate.
“(It) does nothing to improve access to care,” she said. “Virginia law already covers life-threatening cases, this is just a political stunt.”
Taylor, however, stressed that her bill would add clarity to shore up protections for certain abortions. It’s a personal matter as Taylor shared that she has experienced a miscarriage.
“We hear so often from the other side that this is a health care crisis, and that women are dying because there is an unclear standard of care,” Taylor said. “Miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies are nonviable pregnancies, and therefore cannot be confused with elective abortion procedures. This would have put any doubt about the law to rest.”
Current Virginia law already has a broad outline for permitting most abortions. The procedure is allowed for any reason up to about the end of the second trimester, while three physicians must approve later abortions should continuing a pregnancy threaten the life of the pregnant person or “irremediably impair” their mental or physical health.
The argument she referenced of people dying has emerged in debate as Democrats are advancing a constitutional amendment to enshrine protections in the state’s constitution. That argument is largely due to laws in other states as patients come to Virginia for care.
Putting Virginia’s protections into its constitution could strengthen them and make them less subject to partisan turnover in elections, its advocates say. Building on existing law, the amendment would reduce the three-physician threshold for abortions later in pregnancy to one physician. The proposal cleared both chambers with every Republican voting against it, including Taylor.
When the House of Delegates debated the effort last month, Majority Leader Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, suggested Republicans in opposition were “(failing) to see and recognize that in states that have adopted restrictions on abortion like Texas and Georgia — women are dying.”
Texas and Georgia have some of the more restrictive abortion laws in the nation where lawsuits have emerged and deaths have been reported of people dying or facing permanent physical damage to their reproductive organs. Debate over Georgia’s law was renewed last year after a ProPublica story about the deaths of two women shortly after it took effect in 2022, the Georgia Recorder reported.
“Medicine is very individualized, personalized, and should be between a patient and their doctor and not left up to a lawmaker,” said Dr. Jayme Trevino, who is currently a fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
The experience of having worked in states with abortion restrictions and states without them, she said, is why she has her eye on constitutional amendments like Virginia’s.
Trevino said that states with restrictions that outline exceptions are where things get complicated. For instance, Texas’ near-total abortion ban has strict and limited guidelines for when an abortion can occur.
“Although a list may seem like it’s improving clarity, it can actually be very dangerous and very harmful, because not all of medical practice can be kind of condensed down into one list,” she said. “Like, how bad does the infection have to be? How low does their blood pressure have to get? How much blood do they have to lose in order for us to be able to intervene?”
By calling attention to ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages in her bill, Taylor acknowledged how those situations can prove fatal for the pregnant person.
When asked why Taylor’s bill wasn’t docketed in the Courts of Justice Committee it had been assigned to — and therefore defeated by never having been up for a vote — vice chair Del. Marcus Simon said: “(There’s a) long history of this sort of thing.”
In a text message, he also shared a link to a 2017 Washington Post article about how a then-Republican-controlled legislature simply didn’t docket bills committee chairs deemed would be unlikely to advance.
Simon may as well have said what former Courts of Justice chair Del. David Albo, R-Fairfax said: “should I be spending time on bills that will never become law?”
Taylor said she plans to try again on her bill next year. To do that, she will need to win re-election this year though.
Democrats will also try to pass their constitutional amendment a second time — a requirement for it to appear on statewide ballots for Virginians to ultimately decide next year.
As opponents argue her bill isn’t needed this year, if voters approve enshrining abortion protections into the constitution, the measure would be rendered moot.
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