This letter is by Renee Brodowski, a resident of Addison County.
In his UVMMC video bio, state Rep. George Till, OB/GYN and associate professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UVMMC, timidly gushes, “Oh, I don’t think there’s any question that the most rewarding thing I do is deliver babies, even if it happens in the middle of the night for me … it’s an amazing experience, unlike anything else in medicine.”
Dr. Till, baby-deliverer-by-night and legislator and usurper of parental rights by day, apparently also has the gift of prophecy, knowing how courts would decide if a person sues a hospital ethics board, professional medical organizations, or the Board of Medical Practice for their constitutional right to have an elective abortion in their last trimester pregnancy under the proposed Article 22 reproductive autonomy amendment.
Rep. Till claimed during the Feb. 8 House floor vote: “It [Prop 5/Article22] changes nothing for medical personnel involved, nor the medical personnel who wish not to be involved in terminations. It does not mean as we have heard that pregnancy terminations will happen up until the end of birth. It does not mean that there will be no restrictions on abortions in Vermont.”
Rep. Anne Donahue, J.D., Georgetown Law School, debunked Rep. George Till’s assertions during the House Floor vote:
Adopting Proposal 5 without first adopting conscience protection establishes a legislative intent regarding its priorities. Conscience protection will be argued as an unconstitutionally imposed obstacle for some individuals’ decisions on their reproductive autonomy. Even laws that allow for licensing standards or hospital regulations or ethics standards may very well be found to violate those constitutional rights as an obstacle.
Here are a few family-unfriendly bills Rep. Till has introduced and/or co-sponsored over the past few years:
- H.684 (2020) proposed to allow minors age 12+ to consent to preventative services for STDs, which includes HPV and Hep B immunizations, medications pre- and post- exposure to HIV, and “any other services for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.”
- H.663/Act 157 (18 V.S.A. § 12 passed in 2020) requires public schools, grades 7 – 12 make condoms “readily accessible to students, including [but not limited to] the school nurse’s office.”
- H.57/Act 47 (18 V.S.A. Chapter 223 passed in 2019), an act relating to preserving the right to abortion, in which § 9494 Sec. 2 states, “No State or local law enforcement shall prosecute any individual for inducing, performing, or attempting to induce or perform the individual’s own abortion,” wherein “any individual” is undefined.
- H.515 (2019) proposed to allow minors age 16+ to consent to vaccines.
- H.230/Act 35 (Sec. 1. 18 V.S.A. chapter 196, passed in 2017) allows minors to consent to outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent or notification.
- H.23 (2022) An act relating to administering stem cell products not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Although Till claims delivering babies is the most rewarding part of his medical practice, he seems to be bent on making sure many babies are not delivered, especially with his claims during the House floor vote that, “according to the Center for Disease Control, carrying a pregnancy to term is 33 times more likely to result in a maternal death than would be having an abortion – 33 times – so if you’re telling a woman she cannot have an abortion, you are subjecting her to a major increase in her risks.”
Such strong promotion against bringing pregnancies to term does not seem very profitable for the Obstetrics business.
Rep. Donahue’s statement is stalwart and forthright.
I defend abortion until 20 weeks. VT already guarantees that.
So, Ms. Brodowski is an adoptive parent, foster parent, pro bono guardian ad litem in family court, a volunteer in a public school classroom, a Big Sister giving 600 hours and 8% of her gross annual income in behalf of children whose parents can’t or won’t care for them, or is she just trying to earn her “hero for the unborn innocent” medal?
There is, after all, a life after birth, especially for that 30% of children whose parents were not at all thrilled about a pregnancy.
Every woman has an absolute right to have as many children as she, not Ms. Brodowski, wants.
Cgregory, Please express your thoughts about eliminating children that could have a less than ideal, by your standard, childhood to the children that are alive living in such situations. Does not consistency put you in favor of eliminating those poor children? A less painful process could be used. So are you for killing children that don’t live within some standard of ideal, or not. Your trail has been trod long before you and plenty of arbitrary ideas as to what determines if someone is worthy to live has been applied. And the fact is Prop 5 opens the door for people with the thinking you have just presented to do a lot of harm to others … all in the name of making an ideal society. You should know the trail of such thinking in history and if not, please learn history before you help make its horrific past get repeated.
Mr. Shepard, WHY do self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” always focus on death rather than on helping all children achieve a fully-functioning and happy adulthood? You immediately project that I might be in favor of “eliminating” children who are stunted by their environments, whether political, social, educational or parental.
Ted Bundy did not have to grow up to kill three to five dozen young women. There are thousands of children growing up with the same mindset he had, only many of them are being dealt with in a positive way.
Maybe if you reflect on your own history of contribution to helping children not of your social, class or kinship circles, providing them what their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t supply, you’ll see what so-called “pro-lifers” ought to be doing.
cgregory: Killing an unborn child isn’t the only way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. After all, according to your logic, using the ‘less than ideal’ life as a standard, the question becomes, why stop the recourse with the killing of an unborn child?
See my reply to Mr. Shepard.
A remarkably consistent feature of the self-proclaimed ‘pro-life’ movement is its focus on death. It is so powerful as to preclude its adherents from considering caring for human life. I point out that there are children who are almost predestined to fail horrifically as adults, and not one self-proclaimed ‘pro-lifer’ asks, “What can I doing?” Instead, they ask, “Why do you want them killed?”
Maybe there’s an allegory in play here. Abortion represents Death, the fetus represents the self-proclaimed ‘pro-lifer’ and that person gets to act like God. If they can ‘rescue’ the fetus, maybe it proves to them that God will ‘rescue’ them.
Re: “A remarkably consistent feature of the self-proclaimed ‘pro-life’ movement is its focus on death.”
This is projection….
The focus on death is, clearly, more inherent in the pro-choice movement. The so-called ‘pro-life’ folks are simply characterizing abortion as what it is. Pro-choice folks are the ones, then, demanding the right to abort (i.e., ‘kill) an unborn child… at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If anyone is acting ‘like God’, they are.
So, I repeat my question: if some ‘children are almost predestined to fail horrifically as adults’, and abortion is a reasonable alternative, why does your logical progression stop at birth?
My logical progression is that human life is inculcated, not innate.
If someone were to encounter a six-foot-high fetus in a crepuscular alley, they would scream and probably draw their weapon. Anybody who is not aware of the dangers facing any baby which comes out of the Baby Store (a tale I presented here some time ago) has no idea of what they are exposing a fetus to. “A one in four chance her daughter will be sexually abused by age four? I can live with that!”
Children who do not receive humane nurture grow up to be little more than animals. Nobody cared about Ted Bundy.
The only thing that can grant a fetus personhood of any sort is the pregnant woman. If society wants to arrogate that power, all it has to do is provide what the woman freely demands– anything from the $360,000 in cash required to raise a child well to free transplantation of the fetus into the womb of a surrogate and complete immunity from responsibility for the resultant child’s life.
So, can you re-focus from your own preference to talking about death and say a little something about what real children need after they’ve been “rescued”?
Human life is ‘inculcated’ (i.e.,taught?), not innate??
innate – adjective
‘ 1. Existing naturally or by heredity rather than being learned through experience. 2. Of or produced by the mind rather than learned through experience. 3. Possessed as an essential characteristic; inherent.
What are you talking about?
re: “…a six-foot-high fetus”…. really? As false dichotomies go, that’s a whopper.
And what do children need once they’re born?
Someone to provide food, nurturing, and shelter initially. Basically, babies need the same things they’ve needed for thousands of years… and $360K in cash wasn’t a common historical requirements.
And, still, you deflect. No answer to my question – if some ‘children are almost predestined to fail horrifically as adults’ (whatever your definition of failure happens to be), and abortion is a reasonable alternative to giving birth, why does your logical progression stop at the time of birth?
Or does it?
Mr. Eshelman, “Almost predestined” does not mean “predestined.” It means that they can be saved.
Sad to say, but it does indeed cost $360,000 to provide a child with the educational, health, socialization, feeding, clothing, sheltering, etc., services that give it the means to arrive at a happy (in the Socratic definition of “the exercise of vital talents in a setting affording them scope”for) adulthood.
We men have always settled for giving our wives a card and a dinner out on Mother’s Day rather than paying them market rates for their services as nurse, nanny, chauffeur, EMT, appointments secretary, housecleaner, counselor, recreation director, teacher, education administrator, security staff, entertainer– did I forget anything?– which would earn them a minimum of $70,000 a year in the marketplace. Yet, so-called “pro-lifers” insist that EVERY woman is capable of doing these things, including the women they would not trust to take care of their dog.
As the few studies of the “wild child” all indicate, children who are deprived of human interaction grow up lacking very basic skills– hygiene, language and intellectual curiosity prominent among them. They also die much earlier, even after being brought into human society.
And humanity is indeed inculcated. Children learn very early that their environment is “normal.” It was common for JFK and his siblings to run, not to their mother, but to their much-beloved nanny when they had a boo-boo. It is common for children in households with an alcoholic parent to assume that every household has one and to grow up to expect to either be one or marry one. Family values lead children to lie or be honest, to cheat for to work cooperatively, to flee or be brave, to study or to burn books. Many’s the time when a visitor to a household will exclaim, “We never did that!”
With the 30% of children whose parents never really wanted them to be additions to the family, you have thirty percent of children who are not guided to a happy adulthood, but who are largely left to their own devices to figure out what “normal” is. Ted Bundy, killer of three to five dozen young women, figured out what was “normal” for him. You could read the account by his public defender, Polly Bergen, “Defending the Devil,” to get a sense of what self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” are willing to let children be subjected to.
Again, cgregory, if the Bundy’s of this world are ‘predestined’, or even ‘almost predestined’, through whatever circumstances you choose to use as a benchmark, and abortion is the solution, why stop at birth? Why not eliminate the threat one hour, or one day, or one week, or one month, or one year after birth?
Mr. Eshelman, I think that by now you would see that I am not into homicide, but personal responsibility for the welfare of born children. If you think they should be killed, that’s your mission.
My take is that every child I insist be born becomes my personal responsibility. I have yet to meet the self-proclaimed “pro-lifer” who holds and follows through on that belief. It seems you stand with the herd.
Thank you Renee for all this insight as so many are talking out of both sides of their heads…
I want to flash an alert to all registered voters about the referendum on the Nov. ballot. Proposal 5 is not easy to find as it is tucked away on the bottom left-hand corner of the ballot we just received in the mail. All persons should make sure they vote NO on this and make sure they also alert their friends as to where this important vote is on their ballot!! I remember that in the past these were put on the back of the ballot so voters could easily see these issues and not miss them.
Delivering babies is rewarding…..
……. aborting babies is profitable.
The good doctor has a conflict of interest as an elected official when sponsoring or voting on any reproductive issues.
The average abortion cost is around $750. The average birthing cost is around $16,000. I’m very surprised that Dr. Tiller would vote against his own self-interest.
That’s the point. Dr. Tiller has a ‘self-interest’ in either case. As a doctor, that’s reasonable. But as a legislator… affecting what others can or cannot do, that’s a conflict of interest … the Judgment of Solomon.
BTW: your financial comparison is yet another false dichotomy. It typically takes less than an hour to have an abortion. It takes months of specialized care to have a baby. I think you will find, using your numbers, the hourly cost of having an abortion is higher than the hourly cost of a typical nine-month pregnancy… not to mention the higher risks inherent with the later.
Well, if for every delivery he makes, Dr. Till is performing 21 abortions, then he’s pretty well balancing his net revenues. So, we should be able to come up with evidence that he performed some 168,000 abortions in Vermont last year to show how unbalanced his views on natality are.
Deflections, absurdities, and non sequiturs. Who said anything about ‘balance’. How many births did Dr. Till deliver? According to your numbers, we should be able to come up with evidence that Dr. Till delivered nearly 10,000 children in one year to offset 168,000 abortions. That would be 26 a day… every day. And I’m sure they were all six feet tall at birth. ‘Nuff said.
You are making a “strawman argument”. You claim that no one would support a law not in their own financial interest. There are other flaws in your argument.
It seems that you are trolling.