Imagine for a moment that you have just given birth to your first-born child. After a day and a half of labor in the hospital that culminated in an unplanned but routine caesarean section, you are elated to finally hold your newborn baby—until staff won’t let you touch your child and whisk the healthy infant from your hospital room.
Bewildered, you learn that without your knowledge, the state has spent the last several weeks conducting an “assessment” about your ability to be a parent, based solely on unsubstantiated claims about your mental wellbeing. Despite never having a conversation with you or arranging for a formal evaluation of your mental health, the state concluded you are unfit to be a parent. You will not be allowed to bring your baby home with you because while you were in labor, DCF lied to a state court in order to take unlawful temporary custody of your fetus. They had also secretly attempted to force you to have a c-section against your will.
Over the next several months, you fight to regain custody of your child while the state resists your parental rights due to alleged mental health issues, even though the only mental health evaluation you have had shows you are capable of parenting your child. You have infrequent, monitored visits with your newborn baby over the next seven months—including, at DCF’s insistence, at a police station—before the court finally issues a ruling that reunites your family.
This might sound like an extreme hypothetical scenario, or something that would never happen in Vermont. But it is exactly what happened to our client, A.V., at the hands of the Vermont Department for Children and Families and with the assistance of multiple service providers. That is why, along with our co-counsel Pregnancy Justice, Sarah Star, and Kramer Levin, we are suing the agency, Copley Hospital, and Lund—to vindicate our clients’ rights and ensure something like this never happens again.
Unfortunately, our client’s experience with the Department for Children and Families (DCF) is not unique. Too often, DCF zealously seeks termination of parental rights, frequently based on incomplete information and bias and disproportionately targeting low-income families and people of color. The appalling lack of transparency and oversight in Vermont’s child protective system is what makes abuse like this inevitable, and it is at odds with our state’s commitment to reproductive liberty and personal autonomy.
Vermont leads the nation in referrals to a state’s DCF per capita, with a 2.9 times higher rate than the national average. Per every 1000 children, DCF receives 171.2 reports—compared to a national average of 60. This stunning rate of referral is yet another reason that Vermont DCF needs to be transparent in its practices and held accountable with guardrails that protect against unjust intrusions into the lives and personal freedoms of families like A.V.’s. With such a high volume of referrals relative to our state population, it is imperative that decisions about what to do with those referrals are made with clear guidelines and guardrails that balance respect for the rights, dignity, and safety of all people involved—unlike the decision-making employed by DCF when they responded to a baseless referral about A.V.’s mental wellbeing.
What happened to our client is especially concerning in the context of emerging threats to reproductive liberty at the federal level. In working on this lawsuit, we learned of an alleged “high-risk pregnancy calendar” maintained by DCF and used to track those it deems unfit to parent effectively prior to the birth of their baby. The state has no authority, and no business, tracking the pregnancies and reproductive choices of expectant Vermonters—and in reality, the existence of such a registry presents an enormous risk to the privacy and dignity of expectant parents who may unknowingly fall victim to DCF’s surveillance and intrusion based on wholly unsubstantiated claims and baseless assumptions.
Furthermore, the decision by staff at Copley Hospital and Lund to share highly sensitive information about our client and her reproductive decision-making ought to shock the conscience of Vermonters who care about bodily autonomy and reproductive liberty.
DCF has no grounds to investigate a fetus or first-time expectant parent. It also has no legal authority to obtain confidential information without the knowledge or consent of the person it is assessing. Voluntarily turning over private details like staff at the hospital and non-profit did is not only unlawful—it also presents yet another enormous risk to the safety of expectant parents, especially in an era of heightened scrutiny, new restrictions on reproductive freedom, and other attacks on our rights that the architects of Project 2025 have promised to deliver in the coming years.
The surveillance practices and reproductive rights violation exacted by DCF in A.V.’s case are deeply disturbing, but this is far from the only problem enabled by the lack of transparency and oversight of DCF. From its ongoing mismanagement of the state’s emergency housing program to its disastrous administration of the now shuttered Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, the wrongful surveillance of and intrusion upon the rights of expectant parents like A.V. fits into the agency’s unfortunate history of perpetuating significant harm to the very communities it purports to serve.
Furthermore, this case is part of a larger legacy of Vermont government going to extremes to exercise control over the lives and dignity of marginalized Vermonters--a history that goes back to the eugenics movement, which positioned state officials as the arbiters of who was fit to be a parent and who was not, resulting in the denial of reproductive autonomy for over a hundred Vermont residents who were sterilized by the state.
Vermonters want and deserve transparent, accountable government. In the face of impending federal overreach into the lives and fundamental liberties, it is more important than ever that state leaders ensure that our rights and freedoms are protected. By filing this lawsuit, A.V. hopes that no family will be forced to endure this kind of frightening and unjust violation of their basic rights and dignity—and that we as a state will account for and remedy the abuses that occur when our government is not accountable to the people.
