A Women's Health Agenda Virginia Hasn't Tried Yet

"You can't outrun your fork," I was once told. There are a hundred such poetic and pithy proverbs regarding our wellness. "To take care of others, you must first take care of yourself," is a common truth, just as Jim Rohn famously advised to "Listen to your body; it's the only place you have to live." Furthermore, the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates—to whom we attribute the famous Hippocratic Oath—declared, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." All of these wise sayings belong to both men and women, and yet because men and women are both physically and metaphysically different, complementary even, we must deeply apply this inherited wisdom to the unique landscape of women's wellness. This fall, that landscape includes Question 1, the Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment, which Virginians will decide at the ballot box in November—and we want to explain how voting NO is a vote that favors women's health.

Whatever side of that debate you land on, the honest starting point is the same: a woman's body is a remarkable, interrelated system, and protecting it means confronting every force that undermines it, whether that force arrives through what she eats or through what happens to her body. Consider the food supply first. A 2024 umbrella review in The BMJ, drawing on nearly ten million participants across dozens of pooled studies, found that heavy consumption of ultra-processed foods is consistently linked to higher rates of cardiovascular death, type 2 diabetes, anxiety, and depression. Much of that damage traces back to ingredients most women never think to question. The landmark Southampton study, published in The Lancet, found that common petroleum-based food dyes measurably worsened hyperactivity in children—a finding serious enough that the FDA moved in January 2025 to ban Red Dye No. 3 outright, with California going further and pulling multiple synthetic dyes from public-school food. Even the soil beneath our crops has been compromised: a widely cited analysis in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition tracked USDA data across forty-three garden crops from 1950 to 1999 and found real, measurable declines in protein, calcium, iron, and vitamin C. And the chemicals surrounding modern life reach further still—researchers at the University of New Mexico recently found microplastics in every single human testicular sample they examined, at three times the concentration found in dogs, while a 2025 meta-analysis in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth linked maternal exposure to PFAS "forever chemicals" with a meaningfully elevated risk of preeclampsia. None of this is fringe alarmism. It is peer-reviewed science describing a food and chemical environment that is actively working against women's bodies, often without their knowledge or consent.

That same principle—that a woman's body deserves protection from forces that damage it, especially when she has no meaningful say in the matter—extends to physical interventions that disrupt a pregnancy already well underway. A CDC-authored study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology found that the risk of death from an induced abortion climbs roughly 38 percent for every additional week of gestation, with the relative risk at 21 weeks or later measured at more than seventy times that of an early first-trimester procedure. That is not a matter of political framing; it is a matter of physiology, and the risk to a woman's body rises sharply the later such a procedure occurs. The psychological toll deserves equal honesty. A thirty-year longitudinal study out of New Zealand, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, followed a cohort of women from birth and found that those who had undergone an abortion experienced measurably higher rates of anxiety, depression, and related mental health difficulties than their peers who had not—a finding the researcher himself, no ally of the pro-life movement, described as inconvenient but undeniable. Both the physical trauma tied to later procedures and the psychological weight so many women carry afterward are part of the same picture: this is a women's health question first, and everything else follows from that.

A genuine commitment to women's health also means investing in the community-level care and maternal healthcare infrastructure Virginia's women actually need. Reliable public health data underscores the stakes: the U.S. maternal mortality rate climbed as high as 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021, and even after that crisis point eased, more than a third of American counties—35 percent, according to the most recent March of Dimes report—remain maternity care deserts, with no hospital, no birth center, and no obstetric clinician available to the women who live there. Meeting that need directly means expanding prenatal clinics in Virginia's underserved rural counties, ensuring low-income and high-risk mothers receive real screenings, nutritional guidance, and postpartum support, and building out the community health centers and pregnancy resource networks that offer women actual alternatives—not a false choice dressed up as one.

A serious commitment to women's health also means confronting the root causes of chronic illness rather than simply managing its symptoms. That means taking seriously the science on ultra-processed foods, petroleum-based dyes, and the everyday chemical exposures—PFAS, microplastics, agricultural runoff—now turning up in the food women eat and the bodies of the children they carry. It means reforming a food-safety system that took decades to act on dyes the research had already flagged, and demanding the same rigor and honesty applied to reproductive healthcare policy that we are finally starting to apply to the plate. A platform genuinely built around women's health does not treat late-pregnancy procedures as untouchable while scrutinizing everything else that touches a woman's body—it holds every one of these questions to the same evidentiary standard.

Women are the ultimate foundation of new life, the first home of every human being, and the gateway to a thriving society. Protecting their bodily and mental health, at every stage and from every direction that threatens it, is the single most important duty of the electorate this cycle. For all of these reasons—the physical risk that climbs with every week of gestation, the psychological toll so many women carry afterward, the maternal health infrastructure Virginia still lacks, and the chemical and dietary threats we have only begun to take seriously—the women's health choice this November on Question 1 is a "NO." Not because the debate ends there, but because the science, honestly read, points nowhere else.