 Good afternoon. It is Wednesday, March 10th still and we are picking up on JRH2, which is the Apology for the Eugenics Survey. And we have invited Representative Ann Donahue in this afternoon. This will be pretty much the testimony we take on this bill this week, this resolution this week. And then we'll start during next week while we're post crossover, we'll take this up again. To work on the language with some of the suggestions that have been made. And we wanted to bring you in, Representative Donahue, we wanted to bring you in because you have a real historic connection and institutional knowledge, if you will, on what we're trying to do here. And if you could just relate some of the history that you bring to the table, not only with your past, with your past proposal for an apology, but also I think one of the things that concerns me that people should know more about is this notion of language. And you were instrumental probably 10, probably when the apology didn't happen 10 or 12 years ago to start ridding our statutes of the language that was used. And one of the things that we, no matter what, oh, it was the time is a common excuse for a lot of things. But again, it's language, it's words and they were hurtful. So welcome back to House General. Thank you very much, Representative Donahue. And I really am grateful for the work that this committee is doing on this issue. As your chair mentioned, probably 10 years ago, I think or so that I first brought a proposed resolution forward after having learned a little bit, really about the survey, but also the outcomes of the eugenics, the movement, the sterilization program and so forth. And my initial interest and focus was because of the relationship to people in our psychiatric hospital at the time, the Vermont State of Salem for the insane and my own experience with mental illness has led to a significant interest in that whole area. So I did do a fair amount of research at the time and it was really clear that when you look at the eugenics legislation, which has been my real focus, the primary expressed intent was to reduce the growth of the targeted population, that population being mental defectives in order to reduce the growing size and costs of our institutions for mental illness and developmental disability. Old expression, follow the money. And it was the money that was a big driver of the legislation. However, it obviously disproportionately targeted people who were not necessarily insane or developmentally dislaid. It disproportionately targeted people because of what's sometimes called the social construct of a diagnosis of mental illness or mental defectiveness, diagnoses that are based upon systemic racism and biases rather than valid medical science. And I think it's important to note that that social construct continues to influence our mental health system today. Patients locked up in the Vermont psychiatric care hospital are 15% non-white contrasted to being 6% of the Vermont population. So that overlay of the sentiments that were going on in the state at the time around very highly racist attitudes very much influenced who was in those institutions and therefore who was targeted by the legislation and the sterilization movement. These were state actions. That's why I think they require a state apology. And that's both to repudiate the past but also as part of a commitment to continue to try to overcome the implicit biases that remain and continue to work for more equitable health outcomes which of course is the bill that we're working on in the health care committee right now. So this is really a preamble to our work. It dovetails what we're trying to achieve in our health care system today. So I really, I apologize if you've heard some of the things I wanted to just read a few real focus today to read a few of the excerpts that most moved me when I started researching this from some of the documents at the time because I think they say a lot and I sent the fuller quotes today for your committee but just from a couple of them. The first one from a Burlington Free Press article in 1926 which was five years before legislation was actually adopted. So it's part of how you build up the sentiments of the community, right? Farmers today are paying much more attention to good breeding of their cattle. They find they have much better results with cows of good breeding. This same care is not being given to the choosing of human mates. Therefore such institutions as the home for the feeble minded at Brandon are filled with children whose parents are not as carefully selected as are the breed cattle. In a survey, it was found that many of the children in Brandon have some relative in one of the penal institutions or insane asylums of the state. The Vermont institutions are nearly filled. Five years later, the Free Press in an editorial said, something must be done to control the mental defectives in Vermont. Both for the sake of improving the population generally and in order to control the rapidly mounting cost of the Department of Public Welfare. The question arises whether we're going to continue trying to keep up with the increase in mental defectives by adding more buildings and appropriating more money to operate them or adopt the new policy of confining only the most dangerous cases and allowing others their liberty after sterilization to guard against reproduction of their kind. And the third one was from the inaugural address of the governor of the state of Vermont in 1931, Governor Wilson. I call your attention to the fact that the numbers of our insane and feeble minded is constantly increasing with a corresponding increase in burden cast upon the communities and the state. We are doing our duty about the care of these unfortunate but practically nothing to prevent a further increase in their number. Medical science points out one definite course which has been successfully followed in other states. The supervisors of the insane in their biannual report recommend the enactment of a properly safeguarded sterilization law. You will do well to give this matter serious consideration. And the legislature then did pass that law. The last piece that I wanna note is the concept, Vermont was actually criticized because we were not aggressive enough because our statute said that sterilizations had to be voluntary rather than other states that allowed them to be involuntary. What that meant though is really well captured in a letter that was written to the attorney general from the director of the Brandon training school making an inquiry as to what was adequate for voluntary consent. And I read from the letter, we have a boy age 23 who has now completed his training at the Brandon state school. He is definitely feeble minded with the intelligence on the level of an imbecile. He thoroughly understands the purposes and nature of the operation and that it will prevent him from having children. He has requested that such operation be performed. Side by side description as being intelligence on the level of an imbecile, but he fully can give voluntary consent and understands what he's consenting to. The letter was raising a concern because his father had objected in writing to the surgery. But his father was an ignorant, feeble minded person as well. So they wanted to not give regard to the written request of the father and the attorney general said, no, you don't have to pay any attention to the father because since he's over 21, that's not an impediment as long as he meets the voluntariness standard. So that's a flavor of some of the extremely unfortunate things that were occurring and that I think we do need to say, this was wrong, we recognize it, we apologize for it. And now we're gonna try to move forward and work on getting beyond the implicit biases that affect so much of what we do, whether it's based on race or ethnicity or disability and an awful lot of medical bias that goes on simply because a person may have a diagnosis of mental illness, so we don't have to disregard what they're saying about their symptoms, for instance. And there's a lot of study and knowledge about that now. So we have a lot of work to do, but I think it's an important step to recognize some of the underpinnings that existed in our state, not all that long ago. Representative Zanyi, did your research cover when you were deep into your research? One of the things that stood out to me in the last couple of years of focusing on this, and I know we've had this conversation over time, but not as deeply as we have over the last year in change. Just the process of legislating, you're a stickler for details and for the process. And what strikes me is in 1925, we almost passed the bill and it was vetoed because of the constitutionality issue. And then in 1927, there was a court case that said nationally, it's okay to sterilize someone involuntarily, basically. And if you want to direct quote on why it's okay, it is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or letting them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. That's the US Supreme Court decision. In 1927. And then 1928, we had the commission on country life. And I keep seeing these building blocks that every issue seems to have building blocks, right? You have to provide a case. And this was a case that was built both in and out of the legislature. And I'm just curious, did you go into, I mean, did you study the commission on country life which led up to the 1931 vote? Yes, yes, and read of course, Breeding Better Vermonters, which goes into that a great deal. So yes, clearly this was, there's a lot of even just what I sent and didn't read from talks about the fears about the good Vermont stock being diluted away by these influences. That's what they were looking at in this study. And one can argue that at least some of those people may have had good intentions if we reach out and help people who are caught in cycles of poverty that we can change this as opposed to identifying them in order to take their children away or label them in certain ways. But clearly it was a building block and we all know where it ended too because Nazi Germany was only building that block of purifying the good blood and getting rid of the rest. One of the lines that I have here in my notes from the commission was that the doctrine quote, that the doctrine be spread, that it is the patriotic duty of every normal couple to have children in sufficient number to keep up to par the good old Vermont stock. Well, that's exactly right. And I guess exactly. Vermont's constantly skimming off the cream of our younger population. And it's absolutely. So it's first we have, there's two ways to improve the population. First, to encourage larger families amongst the physically and mentally fit. Those who are able to make their way in the world. And second, to bring about by one means or another a less rapid increase in the unfit part of the population. And this was, because this was eugenics, this was hiding behind the notion of genetics as opposed to social conditions. Right, that's right. It was a new emerging field and they believe that you could follow these as genetic traits and therefore you could, through genetics, you could weed out and get rid of the unfit. What, when we talk about the continuing effects in the psychiatric that we've heard from indigenous witnesses and some from the disabled rights groups now the independent living. And we actually did hear some from a witness from the French Canadian descent. What do you see in the area that you studied as, I mean, you mentioned it a little bit at the beginning of your testimony, but just as the ongoing effects that exist still for what we can be responsible for, which is our statutes and our programming. So I have a sister-in-law who died and she's not unique. She died from internal bleeding. She had been to the emergency room. She had a long history of mental illness and she was not in so many words, but in effect told, this is all in your head, the pain you're experiencing and was sent home. And that is, there is something that the diagnostic term, not diagnostic term, the term of art is called diagnostic overshadowing. And what it means is if a person comes in and they have that label on them, that they have a history of mental illness. It's one of those implicit biases. This is not a conscious decision or assessment by the physician, but that diagnosis overshadows the other symptoms and that person's symptoms are judged differently. And as a result, there's significant health outcomes because of lack of appropriate treatment. And that's a well-studied phenomenon. And it's similar to the impact of other implicit biases that influences. I don't know if you've heard the very recent sort of staggering study that was done on why people of color were being hit much less significantly than other populations by the opiate epidemic. There were fewer opiate overdoses among people of color, particularly among blacks than there were among whites. Why? What was the protective factor? Well, the protective factor was two-fold. It all had to do with being prescribed fewer opiates and therefore less at risk of addiction. They were prescribed fewer because of perceptions that they were at higher risk of abuse and that we all know that blacks have higher pain tolerance so they don't need as many opiates for their pain. And those were the operative factors that resulted in lower appropriate prescriptions of opiates. But as a secondary effect, less opiate addiction, the fallout that happened for so many others. And is this diagnostic overshadowing? This is a recent case to me, to my knowledge was Serena Williams. Here was one of the most powerful athletes didn't need to have insurance. They could pay out of pocket for the best healthcare in the world and she almost died because the doctors didn't catch. They didn't see what is a common, postpartum factor in her health. My first year in the legislature, I had a medical symptom that was actually having, suddenly my legs were going weak under me, I was falling and I went to the emergency room. And my chair that afternoon told my committee members, Anne isn't here, she had something come up, she had to go to the hospital. And the first reaction from somebody else in the committee was, oh, what kind of a hospital? Why would you? Representative Callacchi. Thank you, Representative Donahue. I have two questions for you if I may. First is when you talked to us last year about this resolution, you shared a story about the unmarked grades that I just, and I just wonder if you'd be willing to share that again for the new members of the committee, because that is also an impact that this whole thing we're talking about. Sure, and the kind of deep personalizing in many ways as well. I had always been aware that there was a graveyard somewhere on the grounds of the Vermont State Hospital. I had never gone to look at it, but after the flood, I became concerned that when we closed down the hospital and moved it elsewhere that it would get forgotten. So actually with a great deal of effort, I found it in the woods abandoned, overgrown and also discovered the fact that none of these graves had been marked. They'd apparently been marked at one time with little wooden crosses, no names on them. There was a granite marker that had been put up many years later that reflected the fact that there were 19 or so, not even a unknown number, people who had died at the state hospital and been buried there anonymously. And actually with the help of this legislature, I mean, it is now in very well-tended condition, I'm happy to say, that there was a response to the concerns. We also passed this little tiny piece of legislation, little special annexemption for access to medical records of people long since deceased, which are otherwise still protected for the explicit purpose of trying to track down and identify who the people were in these graves. And I actually spent a good deal of time doing that. And it's clear that I'm not gonna be able to come up with a final definitive list, although I have a pretty good list and I'm actually planning to have a plaque made to place at the new Vermont psychiatric care hospital to remember those people by their names, not just as anonymous and anonymous gravesite, but. And this is the gravesite that's up off of the other side of the highway now or the other side of where it tracks up, actually not too far down from the bike trail, that's there. And it's, yeah, because of the bike trail now, it's easily accessible, it used to be difficult to find, now it's easily accessible and it's also well-tended. So it makes it much easier. From the bike trail, you can now see the granite marker. Right, and did we share the thing that the, when that cemetery was used at the turn of the century, the trees had actually been cut down so that they could see, those buried there could see the hospital. That was the high spot that overlooked, you know, that area. A pinnacle, but they also, in order to beautify it, had planted pine trees around it. And that is why that area now has this batch of huge old pine trees. They were planted by the patients at the time around the cemetery. And this operated as kind of a potter's field because in the corner of Hope Cemetery, at the very back of Hope Cemetery, there are a number of more contemporary graves for people who died at the hospital, you know, up through, well, up through 2011. Well, the laws changed to require communities to take care of their own deceased if they could send them back to their communities. So this cemetery was only used for a relatively short period of time, this unmarked one, because after that, they changed the law to require home communities to take them. So I'm assuming those at Hope Cemetery probably are the people that they could not identify a hometown to send them back to. But there are also two individuals who were buried somewhere on the grounds of the state hospital because for varied reasons, they weren't able to move them to the center. And I mean, that was the worry when all the construction happened down there was that they would be discovered at something, you know, just disinterred by accident. Right. Representative Murphy. Sorry. So, John, go ahead, I'm sorry. And I know that you and I shared kind of language as we were reintroducing this resolution and it has evolved. And it's, I think that the chair is gonna, you know, we're gonna look at it again and evolve it. But I would really appreciate it if you look carefully at the resolution as it now stands. And if you have any input, because I think naming the affected communities is really important for all of us on this committee. And you've done so much work on this. So anything you can send to the chair or to the committee would be deeply appreciated. Thank you. I will do that. All right. Thank you. Representative Murphy. Thank you, Chair Stevens. Representative Donahue, I know you've done just an incredible amount of study, research, and trying to pull up documents on this over the past. And I wondered if you have any information on the actual vote on the act of 1931, number 174 when it actually passed. Was it just a voice vote where you don't have a recording? You know, I don't remember, I would have that. I actually have the, I mean, our state has more than a lot of states in terms of a record. And there actually UVM has a very extensive collection of documents, which is where most of my research ended up coming from. And I mean, I can send you that link, but I also could probably find in my notes whether there was a vote or not. I just don't remember. I haven't re-looked at that research recently. Yeah, I would really appreciate that. I have a personal connection for the 1931 vote. Would love to know if it's where I can discover an answer to my question, or if it just needs to be let lie. And Representative Murphy, I might send a, you might be able to send an email to Michael Chernick, who might have access to that. He's kind of the keeper of those kinds of archives. Right. And so you might want to see, send him an inquiry. Yeah, I thought that if Ann had already done that, I would not request it again. I think it would be a pretty deep dive. So if it's already been done and Ann had it, I just thought I'd find out before I made a formal request. Thank you. Sure. Representative Blumlee. Okay, Representative Blumlee. Yes, I'm so sorry, because I know that you need to get to your committee, but I have a friend who is on your committee let us know that Judy Dowd was testified here to us, had just testified in your committee. And I was wondering if there was anything that she said that, you know, that would be important for us to keep in mind. Well, I mean, her testimony was very valuable as, I mean, we've had a number of witnesses on the impacts today. I mean, she was testifying about the health equity bill and, you know, the effects and a lot of them, particularly in Vermont for, you know, the native Abnakis and other native groups is that they feel the need to hide their identity and are more suspicious of the medical and service professions and all of that because they live with this generationally, they're very aware from, you know, generations before them of what it meant when, you know, the state came to help and the things that happened. So it very much affects today in terms of accessing medical care. Thank you. Any further questions for Representative Donahue at this time? Being respectful of all of our non-existent free time, I would thank you for taking this half hour and as Representative Kalaki mentioned, if you can take a look at the or maybe wait a few days and see what, we'll let you know that there's a new draft available because Nancy Gallagher made some suggestions that were fairly spot on, not too many, but we're really... We would know. What's that? She would know. I mean, she's the preeminent. Yeah. And, you know, again, we did a lot of the work on the writing last year. And so, but no, I thank you for this testimony and for, you know, sharing some of your stories. It is the privilege of hearing the stories even under this circumstance of Zoom is really deep for me. And I appreciate the time you're taking to share with us and helping us move this forward. I really appreciate that you're taking it and with such a gravitas and moving it because I think it is incredibly important. If people don't understand the past and know what happened in the past, it's a lot harder to understand why it would still influence things today and why there are in fact still issues today that people don't really understand the source or why there would even be concerns or issues. So. Right. All right. And I think we will, I will be in touch with you before we go on the floor whenever that may be. Thank you. There is, because I have a question about language. And I won't, we won't talk about it now, but I mean that's to go from disabled to, from what used to be used is, it's hard. It's a hard, so we'll talk on that language sensitivity a little bit closer to us finishing work on the bill. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you, Representative. All right. You can, yeah. So committee, we're going to revisit this next week. I'm going to ask Ron to post, before I ask Michael Chernek to do any rewriting. Nancy Gallagher had provided some language. I believe it's under, it's on our webpage. And John also did some, some a little bit of rewriting work on the resolution as well. And I'll, I think we can talk about that next week, but take a look at the, take a look at Nancy Gallagher's comments. And John, if we can post yours as well. And then it's, because I think it's time to start working on the language, I've asked Ron to check in with the folks who have testified with us to invite them back to be in the room when we take this up again. And to see if there's anybody else who may want to testify. I know there were some, at least a couple of people who testified last year who did not this year. And we can double check with them to see if they wanted to testify. But it was some of the most moving testimony last year. And I don't think it would be easy for them to come back in unless they chose to. Thoughts on this before we end the day. So let's just sit with that. And we'll see you tomorrow at nine.