 So much for joining us today. We're really excited to have this conversation about Article 22, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment. My name is Lucy Larish. I'm the Vice President of Vermont Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood, Northern New England, Planned Parenthood, Vermont Action Fund, and I'm the President of the Vermont for Reproductive Liberty Amendment ballot committee campaign. And I am here because I am really passionate about preserving the right to abortion access as well as other reproductive rights in the Vermont Constitution. And joining me here today is Dr. Harry Chen. Harry, maybe I'll just pass it to you. Okay, thanks, Lucy. And I'm Harry Chen. I'm in emergency position by training. I practiced in Vermont at several emergency departments for over roughly 30 years, and I was the health commissioner 2011 to 2017. And Lucy and I served in that legislature together. And so I've seen many different perspectives on the question of reproductive rights and choice. And to me, I'm dismayed by what I see happening in our country now. And from both a health care perspective, a public health perspective, or even a parent of two young women in Vermont, I think it's, you know, we have to do something. And Indy from the ACLU. Yeah, thank you, Lucy. I'm Indy Shown here at the Advocacy Fellow at the ACLU of Vermont. And what brings me to this work is that I'm passionate about reproductive rights. I'm non-binary, and I believe in making gender-affirming choices for myself. And that means having access to reproductive health care in the ways that I wouldn't even. It's just super important that we preserve the rights that we have now, the protections we have now. And so I'm gonna continue to do all the work that I can to make sure that happens, yeah. Yeah, that's great. And I guess I wanna kick it off of the story about how this whole effort came into being. I feel like there was an alignment of stars and there were a number of people in Vermont who saw the writing on the wall years ago. In 2018, I was sitting in a conference room in Chicago for a Planned Parenthood National Policy Conference. And in that moment, we were all sitting there together in the summer in July. In 2018, we got the news that Justice Kennedy had announced his retirement from the US Supreme Court, which meant that the current administration and Donald Trump's administration would get another Supreme Court nominee pick. Now, working in reproductive health and rights, I knew at that moment that what that means is that we would have someone on the bench, another person on the bench who would vow to overturn Roe v. Wade because that is what Trump appointees, that was the litmus test for being appointed to the courts, Trump vowed to only appoint justices who would agree to overturn Roe v. Wade. So in that moment, I knew that we had to do something to protect this right that we've had in Vermont for 50 years. So I came back to Vermont with a new, with a commitment that I would do everything that I could to protect reproductive rights both in statute as well as in our Constitution. And fortunately for me, I think our legislative leaders were, some of them were having the same thoughts. And we all came together, we created a coalition, the Vermont Medical Society, ACOU of Vermont, the Attorney General's Office and others. And together we worked to create the language of the reproductive liberty amendment. I'm wondering, Indi, if you could talk a little bit about the process of amending the Constitution because in a lot of states, you can just do it like in one year. What's the story in Vermont? Oh, it's a much longer process here in Vermont. Essentially it's taken about four years to get to this point. And what has to happen is initially you start with a proposition to move through your legislature. And in this case, it was proposition five. And in 2019, it made its way through both the Senate and the House, which was super great. But there's a requirement that it has to move through two bienniums. And so it moved through the House this year and passed, thankfully, Prop 5 passed, which has now gotten us to this point where it will be on the ballot in November for Monters to vote on. Yeah, that's great. And it has really been a long haul. And Dr. Chen, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit, given your role as a public health professional, talk a little bit about how this amendment, how do you see it through your eyes as a public health professional? Well, thanks, Lucy. I think at the beginning, I think it'd be important just to really underscore the fact that full access, unfettered access to reproductive health care, including abortions, is really essential for a healthy population. And that's mothers, it's the wellness of their families. And that's been shown time and time again. From a public health perspective, in our country, we have maternal mortality rate, which is the highest of developed countries. And it's a bit dismaying. I was really kind of shocked to see that. And even twice of some of the other countries. And part of that obviously is access to reproductive health care. And one of the things that we really know is that within that number, if you tease down further, as we've done so much with the pandemic, it's women and families who are black and brown and living in poverty that are both at risk. And so anything you do in terms of restricting access will increase that maternal mortality, will lead to untoward effects to families. There are studies that really demonstrate that in terms of wellbeing of mothers and their children, will be negatively impacted by restricting abortions. And then finally, for me, remembering taking care of women who are in the process potentially of having a miscarriage in the emergency department. I mean, it was really an intense private and personal thing, which really belongs between, that discussion belongs between a woman and her healthcare provider. And really the government should have really nothing to do with that as far as I'm concerned. And restricting abortions and health access to reproductive health care really will have a chilling effect to bring us back to what I consider a dark age in terms of reproductive health in this country. And I think I just read today that in Texas where abortions are illegal, a physician could have life in prison for a performing one. And it's just not really a question that needs to be impacted by what a legislator does or what a judge does personally. Wow, that really puts it all in perspective, doesn't it? And I think at this point, maybe it's important to also underscore the fact that, yes, this abortion was the driving force that made us think about passing this constitutional amendment in Vermont. But there are other things that this constitutional amendment will do. It will also protect someone's ability to get pregnant and carry a pregnancy to term. We know that sometimes people are coerced against their will to have abortions and that this amendment would protect against that. It would also protect someone's right to access contraception and it would also protect someone's right to refuse or choose permanent contraception or sterilization. We know that to this day, people are still being forcibly sterilized against their will. In criminal justice systems and in other places, institutions. So we wanted to make sure that we were protecting reproductive rights more globally and not focused just narrowly on abortion because reproduction encompasses a lot of other rights. And to that, I think I should also talk a little bit about the language. A lot of people are like, wow, this is beautiful. It's like one gorgeous, elegant sentence that the right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one's own life course and she'll not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling state interest. So that language was created with many great minds. It was an iterative process. Our Legislative Council in Vermont, the ACLU, national experts, Planned Parenthood policy people, constitutional law experts including Professor Teachout at UVM. Many people looked at the language, fed the language and we determined, we landed on personal reproductive autonomy because that phrase, those words are very, very well defined in Supreme Court law already. So that phrase means the right to get pregnant, carry pregnancy to term, the right to choose or refuse contraception, the right to choose or refuse permanent contraception or sterilization and the right to an abortion. Now this all means that there's no government interference. So we're not compelling any hospital from performing an abortion if they don't want to or if they want to have a policy against performing abortions. Everyone still has a right to do that but what the constitutional amendment does, it's a check on state power. It's saying government, you can't interfere in these decisions and so that's how that language was arrived at. And then there's the second part, the compelling state interest, which is a standard of legal review, judicial review, that is the most protective that exists. There are standards of legal review that judges have to use when reviewing a case and this standard, compelling state interest is the most protective that we have so that we know that if these rights are infringed upon ever in the future, that it would have to be an incredibly compelling state interest and that the remedy would have to be as narrowly tailored as possible to address the compelling state interest of the state without infringing upon the right in any other way beyond that narrow scope. So, Lucie, let me give you a little example of what that means and this, so when this passes and I'm both optimistic and hopeful that Vermont will follow the lead of Kansas and do it in a big way, the world will not collapse, things won't change perceptibly. So, luckily, at this point, based on what the legislature has done time and time again, Vermonters have relatively unfettered access to reproductive health, that won't change. The sky won't fall, but you and I know that whatever is in statute now can be undone by the next legislature. So what we're really trying to do is protect what we have now for generations to come, and as you said, this whole concept of compelling public interest, let me give you an example, and I won't even use reproductive health care. I'll give you an example of the opioid crisis and the opioid epidemic. Normally, a doctor just prescribes what they want in terms of what they think the patient needs, but what we found were Vermonters were dying of opioid overdoses. And so, now you get down to, well, maybe there's a compelling state interest to some regulation of how physicians prescribe opioids. And so, they pass that law. And so, that's an example of maybe there is a time where you might want to have a change, but again, it needs to be narrowly tailored and really focused on what the state's interest is in terms of the public good. Yeah, thanks so much for giving that concrete example. I think that makes it so much clearer. It really helps to understand that this isn't a monolith because we also understand that society changes, science changes, there are new discoveries and that we need some flexibility in all of our laws. And that this will allow future generations to respond to really unique circumstances that we can't foresee right now. I'm wondering, Indy, if you have, not to put you on the spot, but if you have any friends or if you know of any compelling reproductive health and rights stories, because I really think it's important to put a human base on this. This is not just about a sterile procedure. This is about human beings and their lives and their futures and what it means to be able to have not just bodily autonomy, but the ability to determine the course of your life, which this absolutely will do. Yeah, I have a story, several, unfortunately, but someone very close to me, several years back, experienced an ectopic pregnancy and it was brutal, it was awful. I felt really just powerless and not knowing what access to reproductive care this person would get because in Utah, where I'm from, it is incredibly restricted. But thankfully, due to Planned Parenthood and the resources there, my friend was able to get the care they needed, the reproductive health care they needed in a very, very scary situation. And I'm just thinking, if that had happened today, that could have ended possibly differently in a not good way. And that's the case for a lot of people, unfortunately, and will be given the landscape across this nation, so. Yeah, that's a chilling example, an ectopic pregnancy. I mean, Dr. Tenkin talked about this with much more authority than me, but I also had an ectopic pregnancy, but it's when the fertilized egg and it gets lodged into your fallopian tube. And there's no place for a baby to grow in there and it will lead to certain death if it's not treated and dealt with. So this is a very, very serious condition and you may have heard in Texas, there was the Biden administration was trying to enforce federal guidance that healthcare providers must protect the health and life of a pregnant person if something goes wrong in a pregnancy, which would mean some kind of abortion. And the courts in Texas challenged that and did not uphold that. And so even, I mean, it's just unimaginably cruel to me that the courts and that the state feel so strongly about controlling people that they want to actually say, yeah, too bad if you die, you can't terminate a pregnancy even if it's going to kill the patient. So I think that is the state of affairs right now. It's a pretty extreme situation that we're in. People, let's be clear, 36 million people are going to be without access to safe legal abortion. Most of them as Dr. Chen just described are people in marginalized populations, people in rural areas, people with low incomes who won't be able to access healthcare and people will die. So ultimately the most important thing that we can do in Vermont is to protect this right from a future legislature who might want to regulate the right through laws like Texas or some of these other states in Utah where people are prevented from getting basic healthcare, life-saving healthcare. Yeah, the point you made about ectopic, so I'll call them simple, it's like a tubal pregnancy because that's usually where they are, they're in the tubes. And a standard treatment for a tubal pregnancy or an ectopic pregnancy are the same drugs that you might get from early first trimester abortion in terms of the pills. So now I just imagine that providers in those states are just, they're wondering what can I do? What can I not do? And I really imagine that the conversations are really unnecessarily complex and potentially damaging in terms of the patient care. And what do you think this is going to do to the practice of medicine when you think about all of these states and all of these people? I think that it will create, as I said, this really distressing complexity that physicians will have to have to talk to lawyers when maybe they should be taking care of patients. And so that really is just, and then additionally, I mean, in terms of the places like Texas, you and I know that people who have privilege will be able to get on that airplane and go to a state where they can get a procedure done or get the healthcare that they need. But the people who are more disadvantaged won't be able to do that. So again, this just really kind of exacerbates the disparities inequities I've already had. What is it that, this is a question for both of you. What is your role in the campaign and what is it that you're doing personally to get involved and talk a little bit about your involvement and how it makes you feel and what is, yeah, what that means to you? Oh my goodness, my role to be supportive. I'm one of the savers of the most. And just like to hold space. But really, just educating people, I feel like is where the ACLU of Vermont is at and ensuring that people know that nothing is going to change in practice once this amendment passes. And so yeah, just heavily educating people, doing as much as we can to get out into our communities to just like engage and bring people in to support this campaign. And also as an advocacy fellow, I've done a lot of like speaking engagements around the reproductive liberty amendment which has been incredible and energizing and has made me feel really hopeful about this amendment. Yeah. Awesome, that's great. It's just so wonderful having you in the campaign and doing this work, doing this work all together. And what about you, Dr. Chen? Talk a little bit about your role here. So my official role is I'm the treasurer of the ballot committee. So helping to raise the funds that we need to really get the word out and educate providers because I think just because the process to amend the constitution is so complex, people don't understand it. And so I think it's really important that everybody when they go to that ballot in November understands what article 22 means and that what's underlying it, whether to vote yes or whether to vote no, we're not a ballot measure state so people aren't used to that. So it's gonna take a lot of things like this, media to really to have people understand it and have it down so they know what to do come November. Yes, absolutely. And there are just so many ways to get involved and there's just so many ways to have an impact here, talking to people so powerful, raising money. Yeah, incredibly powerful. We need those funds so that we can get the word out and make sure that people understand that our opposition talking points are actually either false or incredibly misleading. Make sure that we're getting the facts to people so they can make really good informed decisions at the ballot box as good and as informed as they would want those decisions to be with their health care, with their primary health care provider or other health care provider. So for me, I am working in all kinds of facets of this campaign for folks watching this if you really like to get involved, please contact us. We've got lunch lines, we've got buttons, we've got events and rallies and fundraisers and canvases and phone banks and so many ways for people to get involved and it's exciting and actually it's really fun and empowering. We just had a wonderful fundraiser at the comedy club, a bunch of performers created unique material just for this amendment and for reproductive rights and it was hilarious. It was super fun and three needs. I also did a fundraiser for us, that brewery, three needs and wonderful, we love them and there's a mountain biking event in Paulette on September 10th and where the registration fees are going to support the reproductive liberty amendment. So if you're a mountain biker or a runner, sign up for that event and help support the amendment and be with others but there's just lots to do and you can also sign up at our website to get emails from us and learn about where the opportunities are for you to plug into the campaign. No job is too big or too small for us, we welcome everyone who shares this value or wanting to protect reproductive rights for all of our mentors and our website is reprolibertybt.org. So thanks so much.