Photo by Adam Ewing
It’s 8:30 p.m. on a Monday during the legislative session when State Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant gives me a call.
“Good evening, Senator,” I say. “Thank you for calling this late — I’m sure that you’re tired.”
“I have another call to make after this,” the 12th District Republican senator from Henrico says briskly — then proceeds to ask how I was doing, how the story was going, and if I was related to the Reardons she knew at St. Bridget Catholic Church. It was the 50th day of the General Assembly legislative session, and Dunnavant, an obstetrician/gynecologist, had a morning at the hospital on the horizon, but her voice betrayed no sign of fatigue.
When I ask the first question that came to mind — some variation of “How do you manage?” — her response was short. “My kids are now grown, in college or older, but I was a full-time working mother for over two decades,” she says. “It’s not new for me to have two full-time jobs.”
A Norfolk native, Dunnavant was interested in healing and helping others long before she became a physician. “I have loved medicine and everything about it since I was a child,” she says. “I was an EMT, I was an emergency room receptionist, and I started off in nursing. I was so hungry to know more and understand more and do more.”
Dunnavant earned her M.D. in 1999 from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk. She had become a mother while in school there. Now, she’s a partner with OB/GYN Associates. Her political switch flipped on after the formerly independent practice was sold in September 2015 to Henrico Doctors’ Hospital. According to Dunnavant, the business was suffering under the Affordable Care Act.
In 2014, the Affordable Care Act introduced health care exchanges, online state-run portals where residents could shop for health care plans. In an attempt to lower costs, the insurance industry responded by offering consumers plans that only covered visits to certain doctors.
“We were a small practice,” Dunnavant says. “Insurance companies wouldn’t negotiate with us, and we had to sell.
“I had always been a physician entrepreneur. Now there were laws that thwarted my ability to do that. At that moment in time, I thought, ‘Maybe having a seat at the table is the best way to solve some of the problems I’ve been trying to deal with.’ ”
Despite hailing from a political family — her brothers Chris and Ken Stolle also served in the Virginia General Assembly — Dunnavant, 55, was not big on politics before she decided to run in 2015. “I was focused on raising my four children,” she says. “Actually, observing my family members in the arena convinced me that I never wanted to run for office.”
She did, though in 2015, and won, and earned a second term in 2019.
Improving health care has been a signature issue, a staple of her campaign commercials and website. A fiscal conservative, the Henrico Republican isn’t going to embrace a Medicare-for-All plan anytime soon, but it isn’t uncommon for her to reach across the aisle when legislating health care.
She sponsored a bill allowing for vaccines, flu shots and birth control pills to be administered by pharmacies, eliminating the need to visit a primary care physician for these services. The bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support, 38-2. Dunnavant says she’s proud of her legislative accomplishments, that more than 50 sponsored bills have been passed by a bipartisan chamber and signed by a Democratic governor.
Dunnavant also calls for more support for independent radiology and surgery centers as a way to bring more players into the market providing these expensive services. She would also like to see an external audit of the way the state government handles health care. “Competition and a little bit of friction are good for the industry,” she says.
She is also a supporter of bipartisan criminal justice reform, and she co-signed the bill that will decriminalize recreational marijuana possession.
Her policy wonk approach to health care legislation has not been without criticism. In 2018, she introduced a bill that would have allowed insurance companies to offer short-term, low-cost plans that did not comply with the ACA. The plans were intended as a 90-day stopgap for people in between insurance plans, and were not required to cover preexisting conditions. A year later, her Democratic challenger, Debra Rodman, called Dunnavant a “quack” for sponsoring the bill, which was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam.
Six months later, her voice rose when I mention the barb. “I’m frankly shocked that such a personal insult was lobbed at me,” she says. “So much of what was said to frame me in the negative was not true.
“This is an unusual time,” she went on. “The climate for politics for the last three years has been extraordinarily different. In 2015, [the race] was really more a conversation about issues.
“I don’t think that now is forever. Now is now. That’s how I legislate — I don’t legislate on now, I legislate on principle. If the pendulum swings around me, so be it.”
Her voice, however, shifted from the polished clip of a politician to warmer notes when she talked about her day job, working as an OB/GYN full-time, even during the General Assembly legislative session.
“Everything I do at the legislature is informed by my job. There’s no medicine out there that doesn’t have side effects, and the same is true for bills in the legislature. Some are acknowledged when the bill is passed, and some are unrecognized, but they’re always there.”
She has 150 patients that she sees every week, whom she calls her favorite focus group. Even though the General Assembly meets for 60 days or less a year, there is something of a full-time feel to representing her constituents, Dunnavant says. The responsibility is hard on her medical practice, but having a full-time job helps keep her grounded. As for the grinding stress, she lists four important ways to survive: friends, humor, exercise and sleep.
“I wouldn’t want to be a full-time legislator. I want to be a doctor,” she says. “There are a lot of people like me that think you can be a real person and have a full-time job and care about the issues without getting caught up in the hyperbole.
“It’s healthy to take it down a few notches. There’s a whole lot more we agree on than we disagree on.”
