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Next week, Vermont voters could write abortion protections into the state constitution. But 50 years ago, Vermont was a state where most people went elsewhere to end a pregnancy.
The Vermont Supreme Court had legalized abortion in 1972, with its decision in Beecham v. Leahy. But while elective abortion was allowed, it remained elusive: The University of Vermont’s hospital, which came from a Catholic tradition, said it wouldn’t offer the procedure. Vermont hospitals did fewer than 20 abortions per year, and more than 1,000 patients traveled out-of-state annually to terminate a pregnancy.
So in just three months, in the short window between the Beecham judgment and the Roe decision, hundreds of people in the Burlington area — activists, faith leaders, hippies, bankers, lawyers — organized and created the Vermont Women’s Health Center. It was the first women-run health center of its kind in the United States.
The Health Center also created a unique apprenticeship program that enabled women to become physician assistants and to provide abortions. It trained UVM medical students and OB-GYN residents at a time when it was rare for medical schools to train students in abortion. It was written about in major medical journals. It survived a ballot referendum, a fire and an onslaught of out-of-state protesters.
The Women’s Health Center operated as a worker’s collective for years, and this episode includes just some of the women who worked and trained there over its nearly-thirty-year run. Rachel Atkins, Sue Burton, Berta Geller, Cate Nicholas and Janet, all physician assistants, discuss their work at the Health Center, and reflect on this post-Roe era. Allie Stickney, former CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, describes the first call she answered on a pre-Roe abortion hotline.
Below is a transcript, edited for length and clarity.
Allie Stickney: One of the things I did was staff a telephone line that provided information about where a woman could get an abortion.
Riley Robinson: This is Allie Stickney. She had a decades-long career with Planned Parenthood, including several years as the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.
But before that, before Roe v. Wade, and before the Vermont Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion here, Stickney was a volunteer working a Planned Parenthood hotline. At the time she was about 25 years old, and a mother of two.
Allie Stickney: And I’ll never forget the very first call that came in on the line. I expected to pick up the phone and hear the voice of a young woman. And I heard the voice of a man, who was self-described as a middle-aged man from New Hampshire. And he had, his wife had, four children. She became pregnant. It was an unintended pregnancy. And they were desperate. They knew that they couldn’t care for any more children than they already had. And he wanted to know where they could get some help.
And I can still, I can still hear the fear in his voice. And he was a scared, scared person. He and his wife needed help, and they didn’t know where they were going to get it. So they were looking to us for some information.
Riley Robinson: In the next few days, Vermont could become the first state in the country to enshrine reproductive rights in its state constitution. Lawmakers have been working for the past four years to put this amendment before voters, and if public polling is any indication, it’s likely to pass by a wide margin.
But Vermont wasn’t always a safe haven for abortion rights. In fact, it used to be a state where most people traveled elsewhere to terminate a pregnancy. Until 1972, under Vermont law, it was illegal for a doctor to provide abortions.
That changed when the Vermont Supreme Court decided a case called Beecham v. Leahy, just a few months before the Roe decision. But even though abortion became legal, it wasn’t freely accessible.
Vermont hospitals back then performed fewer than 20 abortions per year. Around this time, more than a thousand patients traveled out of state each year for the procedure, often to either New York or Canada.
Even the University of Vermont Medical Center, which has now endorsed Prop 5, restricted access to the procedure back then. (This comes from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.) Soon after the Beecham decision, the OBGYN department at the medical school drew up recommendations for providing abortion services, and presented them to the hospital’s board of trustees. But the trustees told them no.
So activists in the local community took matters into their own hands.
Sue Burton: And this is in the summer of ‘72. And then that’s when people sprang into action and started the health center.
Berta Geller: We had a big meeting, probably over 100 people at the Unitarian Church on Church Street.
Riley Robinson: They elected a board and formed committees. Somebody found a space in Colchester, where a physician agreed to rent them part of his building. They got a loan from a local bank, co-signed by people who believed in the cause.
And in less than three months, they created the Vermont Women’s Health Center. It was the first women-run, legally recognized health center to provide abortions, along with a whole range of OB-GYN services.
Rachel Atkins: It did feel significant. There were other feminist health centers around the country. But I think the Vermont Women’s Health Center was one of the first.
Riley Robinson: This is Rachel Atkins. She later became executive director at the Women’s Health Center.
Sue Burton: In September 1972, the health center was ready to open.
Riley Robinson: This is Sue Burton, one of the founding staff members.
Sue Burton: And I’m a little hazy on how this law works. But if a clinic has already opened, you couldn’t shut it down. But you could possibly delay an opening of a clinic.
Riley Robinson: The founders tried not to publicize the health center until it was up and running. But word got out.
Sue Burton: And so instead of announcing that the Women’s Health Center is open, so many, a couple people from the board came in and had their blood drawn, you know, as a screening test, so that we could say we’d had we were open. So there was, you know, there was a lot of maneuvering and care, careful thought put into every step of the way. We knew it wasn’t a smooth sailing.
Riley Robinson: That fall, there was some local pushback within Colchester to the Health Center providing abortions.
Sue Burton: There was a referendum put on the ballot in Colchester, because the first clinic was in Colchester. And it said, Would you like to have an unlicensed clinic in your community?
So there was a horrible hearing in Colchester, where there was a mob scene of people. So people, you know, spoke pro and con, but at any rate, it was just a hearing. And then the vote came up and they allowed for the health center to maintain its existence there.
Riley Robinson: They hired a couple doctors, and a small staff who did everything from answering the phone to running labs. Berta Geller was one of those first hires. She was an elementary art school teacher, and didn’t have a medical background, but she had gotten involved with a feminist reading group in the early ‘70s.
Berta Geller: I just arrived in Vermont in the summer of ‘71. And I was a new mother. I had a newborn, who was born in March of 71. So I came and I wasn’t working. And I was introduced to Our Bodies, Our Selves.
I had only one experience, well, maybe two experiences, but one personal experience around abortion before 1972. When I was in college, I had a friend who became pregnant and had an illegal abortion. And I took her to New York City, and dropped her off at a hotel. [They] then took her in a van, blindfolded her. She was gone all day, and this is prior to cell phones. And I was just waiting for her to come back. And I mean, her experience was okay, you know, it wasn’t bad. But then they said, Oh, well you really should have antibiotics, and that will be another $100, which she didn’t have.
Riley Robinson: Sue was also a teacher. Around this time she’d started working at a free birth control clinic in Franklin County.
Sue Burton: The group in Burlington just had started to form the Women’s Health Center clinic. So I applied for a staff position there, and I was hired as part of the first staff at the Women’s Health Center.
Riley Robinson: Was there a particular galvanizing moment for you when you became passionate about women’s health, or abortion access?
Sue Burton: Well, I think, actually, as I think of it, one of my neighbors in Franklin County told me that she had taken Ergotrate for the cows in the barn to bring on an abortion. And that just shocked me that people were so desperate and it wasn’t available.
It’s an estrogen hormone. It would bring on I think it brings on contractions or you give it during childbirth, usually if there’s a problem.
Sue Burton: When I was in Baltimore, I had an abortion. And I had the option of meeting someone on a street corner and taking me to someplace in Pennsylvania for an abortion. I mean, this is by word of mouth that I got that. And then the other option was, because I was a grad student at Johns Hopkins and I had a friend who had had had an abortion there, I went to Johns Hopkins Hospital. You know, at the time, I didn’t really think about it. But as I looked back, was it because I was a Hopkins grad? I mean, it was just one of those perks?
Then I had to see a psychiatrist. You had to say, you know, sort of like, the reason you could have a hospital abortion as if your life was in danger. So the code was you’d kill yourself, if you didn’t have one.
Riley Robinson: So you had to say, if I don’t have an abortion..?
I don’t know if I said it directly, or the implication. But that was part of the code. So that’s what people had to go through. And very few people probably had access to the hospital abortions.
Janet: I began working at the Vermont Women’s Health Center in the spring of 1973, about six months after they opened, and it was really a heady time because we were riding the crest of the wave of that women’s health movement.
Riley Robinson: This is Janet. She asked that we not use her last name because of the threats and violence against abortion providers — something she’s seen throughout her career.
Janet: I was hired as a healthcare assistant. My role was to educate women about contraceptive issues, sexual health, abortion, choices, risks, complications. It was a time where the hierarchy, the structure, was very flat. And so people assumed many different tasks. Some days I would work in the lab washing instruments, doing pregnancy tests, some days I would do patient education. Some days I would be the support person for someone as they went through an abortion.
Berta Geller: We went in with women held their hands while they had their abortion. And then they went into recovery. And we also, you know, were assigned to recovery rooms to just make sure they were okay. We had to draw blood before their abortion, and do blood typing. Volunteers did everything. I mean, you know, I mean, there were lab people who did that, doctors looked at it. I mean, we all sort of helped out. But we all learned how to do those things.
Riley Robinson: By early 1973, each month the health center was seeing about 300 patients and performing about 100 abortions. A few years in, the board voted to dissolve itself and the health center became a workers collective.
Sue Burton: There aren’t as many collectives still standing as there used to be. It was part of that burst of energy and kind of positive, everybody is equal.The two doctors, Judy Tyson and Emma Wennberg Ottolenghi, took on the less glamorous tasks of maintaining the health center, alongside the rest of the staff.
We were in our first clinic, in Colchester. And one time a drug salesman came to call to us, and he wanted to speak to the doctor. And because Emma Wennberg Ottolenghi really believed in that rotation, I said, well, she’s over there scrubbing the bathroom. And I think the drug salesman went … woah.
Riley Robinson: Eventually, the Health Center started training women to become physician assistants, through a unique apprenticeship program.
Rachel Atkins: It’s kind of interesting, because what happened in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, is paramedics came back from the Vietnam War, and they were trained healthcare professionals, but they didn’t really fit into healthcare. There was no place to put them in the healthcare field.
Sue Burton: They weren’t nurses. They weren’t really med techs. They had some pretty, some of them some very extensive skills. And so there was a movement to start a bunch of physician assistant training programs at universities. And there was also a movement somehow in Vermont, of allowing these people with training to become registered in the state as a PA.
Berta Geller: Eventually, I wrote a grant to the United Methodist Church to fund a program to train women to become PAs, physician’s assistants. I was one of the women who was trained. There were many, many women trained to do that. So eventually, I did routine health, contraceptive care and early abortions.
Cate Nicholas: In the beginning, it was really an apprenticeship training program, meaning that you worked alongside an experienced clinician, and, you know, any kind of apprenticeship training is that, you know, you you watch, you do a little with supervision, you do a more with supervision, you know, you keep growing until that person decides that you’re able to be entrusted.
Riley Robinson: This is Cate Nicholas. She also became a PA through the health center’s apprenticeship program. She actually wrote the curriculum, and got it approved by the state medical board, and then went through the program that she designed.
Rachel Atkins: In Vermont, you can train to be a lawyer in an apprenticeship program and then by challenging the bar. So it was similar to that.
Janet: In 1973, I started training, and was certified in 1975. And over the course of the health center’s existence, we trained over 15 mid-levels to provide gynecological care. And many of those providers also became abortion providers.
Riley Robinson: This was a really unusual program. From the 70s, through the 90s, Vermont and Montana were the only states where PAs were allowed to provide abortions. The Vermont Women’s Health Center was written about in major medical journals.
Rachel Atkins: We were definitely pioneers in a lot of different ways — in terms of access, in terms of training, in terms of the use of advanced practice clinicians.
Riley Robinson: The Vermont Department of Health collected detailed data on patient outcomes at the Women’s Health Center. And in 1989, the American Journal of Public Health published a study that found no difference in the complication rate between abortions done by doctors and abortions done by physician assistants. Another study in 1996 and 1997 found the same thing: Abortions by PAs, in this outpatient setting, were just as safe.
But still, years after these studies, people pushing for greater restrictions on abortion providers have often argued that the restrictions are for patient safety.
This was at the heart of a case out of Texas, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016. Texas had passed a law requiring all abortion providers work in specially outfitted buildings, that fit the requirements of a surgical center. It also required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. These requirements, which were billed as patient safety measures, forced about half the abortion clinics in the state to close.
The court ultimately ruled against the Texas restrictions. But still, 12 states have passed limiting where abortions can take place, down to the hallway width and size of the procedure room.
Cate Nicholas, who practiced at the Health Center for decades, said she sees these as, really, bad faith arguments.
Cate Nicholas: It’s all a ruse, all of that stuff. You need to wait 24 hours, you need to have this, you need to have that. It’s a ruse to to limit abortion services. It always has been.
People used similar rhetoric to challenge the Health Center in the 70s. And over and over again, their data showed patient safety was not an issue.
This is not about women’s safety at all. Because if you want to talk about safety, then you want to talk about what happens during pregnancy and birth. Compare that to abortion statistics. So anyway, it’s not about women at all. It’s about power and it’s about curtailing women’s rights.
And here’s the bad thing. You know, women who have access to resources have always, and will always be able to find somewhere that they can terminate a pregnancy. Always. It’s the young women, it’s the women without resources, it’s the underserved people who suffer the most by this curtailing of services.
That’s why this this comparison of complication rates and first trimester abortions performed by PAs and physicians was done. To say, is it or is it not safe?
Riley Robinson: So Cate, Berta, Janet, Rachel — they all went through the PA’s hands-on apprenticeship program. Sue went to a training program in California, and returned to practice at the Health Center.
And eventually, they also started training UVM medical students and OB-GYN residents on how to do abortions. They said it wasn’t a standard part of medical training at the time, at UVM or elsewhere.
Cate Nicholas: It came from a Catholic tradition, like many hospitals did, came from a Catholic tradition. And so with that influence, they declined to take on providing abortion services. And that’s why it started. That’s why the health center started.
I really commend the founders for creating a place where it was providing services that were embedded, right? There were abortion services, contraceptive services, clinical surgical services, you know, it was all embedded. I thought it was really an important model, because a lot of places, you know, there were a lot of places that just provided abortion services, and maybe some contraception. And this was not what this was about.
This was really about, and not to sound corny, but it was really about empowering women, empowering women with knowledge, empowering them with the voice that they should have to be able to say yes or no. And it was about showing that there was a different way. You could have a different relationship with your healthcare provider, that was more — that was equal.
Janet: I loved my work. It felt like a privilege to be able to provide non-judgmental, respectful care to women at a critical juncture in their lives. The decision to terminate a pregnancy is a momentous decision. It’s in the sense that you are choosing the path that your life is going to take at that time.
Riley Robinson: Some of the providers have stories of patients that stuck with them.
Rachel Atkins: There was a very, very young woman that came to us with her mother. And her mother was supportive. And she was, you know, clear in her decision, she was 13. And he was, it was beyond sort of her full comprehension in a lot of ways. But, you know, I was happy that she had the support of her mother. And I later found out that she had been sexually abused by her mother’s partner. And the mother was aware of that. And none of that was disclosed or discovered at the time that we saw her so that stuck with me.
And there was a woman who was impregnated by her priest. So it’s just — there is no sort of classic woman that has an abortion. Every story is unique.
Riley Robinson: The health center moved to Burlington, then burned in an accidental fire in 1977. They ended up at a new location on North Ave., also in Burlington.
But generally, things were pretty calm until anti-abortion protests ramped up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Cate Nicholas: One day we got word that Operation Rescue was targeting us.
Riley Robinson: Operation Rescue was a nationwide anti-abortion group that bused protestors to demonstrations. The organization drew nationwide attention for staging a sit-in at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.
Cate Nicholas: Operation Rescue came from out of state. Back then there was a very active Right to Life movement in Vermont. The very first time that they picketed, or they did a demonstration outside the health center, I was in the hospital recovering from my C section, with the twins. So I had my C section on Saturday. And I was getting discharged on that Friday.
So my husband picked me up. I have two babies in buckets — buckets, they used to call them — and we put them in the car. We were going home, except (my husband) doesn’t take me home, he takes me to the health center, because he knew that’s where I really wanted to be. OK, I’m like six days postpartum, and I show up with these two babies. And as we’re driving into the parking lot, people are yelling at me, ‘Don’t kill your baby!” And then they look in the back of the car, see two little babies and they’re like — they shut up.
Rachel Atkins: The most notable was they came in the back of a moving truck.
Riley Robinson: The protestors?
Rachel Atkins: Yes. There were two young people that pretended to come in for a pregnancy test. And they sat down and the doorway as they were leaving, and they blocked the door open. And then they opened the back of the pickup truck. And like 50 people came storming down and into the facility.
Riley Robinson: Inside, so like a Trojan Horse situation?
Rachel Atkins: In the middle of the day.
They locked themselves together down the hallway. They did go into one exam room. A woman was waiting to have a colposcopy because she had several abnormal pap smears in there, we were ruling out cervical cancer. And she was a low-income single mom from Washington County. And it had taken her quite a while to arrange childcare and a ride and the money and everything to come to this service. And then, you know, come get these services that are critically important.
And you know, they came into her exam room and said, We’re here to rescue you. So, you know, they didn’t recognize that people came to the health center for a lot of different services, including OB care.
Riley Robinson: One of the Operation Rescue tactics was to clog up the court system. When protestors were arrested en masse, they’d refuse to give their names — just aliases, like “Baby John Doe Number 10.” Courts couldn’t release them on bail, because they didn’t have any identifying information. At one point in 1990, according to news reports at the time, nearly a hundred protesters were detained at an old psychiatric facility in Waterbury.
Rachel Atkins: I believe that the thinking was that we were a small state, and that they could come in and cripple us.
They weren’t successful because what happened is Vermont was very, very aligned. So when I say that, you know, basically the belief was abortion care is a legal service. And so from the Burlington police chief, the police, department of corrections, you know, the Legislature, the governor, — anybody that interfaced with the protesters and the, you know, Operation Rescue folks in the picketing, held the line and basically said, We’re going to uphold the law. This is a legal procedure that individuals can choose.
Cate Nicholas: So here in Vermont, It’s kind of like this: I may not agree with you. But okay, you do you I’ll do me, right. You come in from the outside, and try to mess with Vermont, you do not get a good, warm reception. And so because these people were from out of state, they did not get a very warm reception. And so many of them were kept overnight in the jail. I think they got more than they bargained for.
Rachel Atkins: We would have counter protesters who would circle the clinic. And when I say counter protesters, I’m talking about state senators, leaders in the faith community, you know, a lot of them well known folks in the community, connected with the Episcopal Church and the Unitarian Church and the synagogue. So there was a lot of opposition.
Riley Robinson: Around the same time, beginning in the 90s, there was a string of murders, where shooters targeted abortion providers. Rachel and others at the Health Center knew some of the providers who were targeted. And they remember it as a really scary time.
Janet: We had to put bars on the windows to our chart room. We had to put locks on the doors to the upstairs so they couldn’t reach treatment rooms.
Rachel Atkins: A doctor colleague of mine was shot at his kitchen table. Another doctor, colleague of mine, was shot in on his way to church. I mean, it was getting really scary.
Riley Robinson: What was the mood like, during this time for the people who worked in the center?
Rachel Atkins: Well, you are under siege. You know, and so it was, it was pretty scary. And, you know, they would follow me around the, you know, I go to the Champlain Valley Fair, and they would follow me around and say stuff to me. And, you know, one time a photographer for one of the news stations called me late at night, and I had been in court, you know, when there were court cases for some of the picketers. And this guy called me and said, “You know, I’ve never done this before, but the way that they were looking at you in court, I couldn’t go to sleep without telling you that I’m concerned for your safety.”
Cate Nicholas: We had bulletproof vests, but I didn’t wear them. I didn’t wear them. I don’t know if it was my optimism. So it’s not correct thinking, but you’re like, but it’s like you put that bulletproof vest on and you think someone’s gonna shoot you and kill you. If I don’t have it on, nobody’s going to kill me. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but I never wore it.
Janet: It was a time where you had to ask yourself, did you have the courage of your convictions? I had two young children at the time, and a husband. Was it okay for me to potentially put myself at risk given what effect it would have on my family? Many of us soul searched and that is what is happening for people now still, in these times.
Rachel Atkins: I think the sort of whole movement of Operation Rescue sort of started losing some steam. They passed access laws, passed barriers in a lot of states — it was called clinic access, where picketers can’t come closer than X amount of feet.
I don’t know, it faded out. I don’t really know why. I think Operation Rescue faded out. There were less and less providers, so access got affected.
Riley Robinson: Into the ‘80s, the barriers to abortion were less about what was legal, but about material access. There were fewer people providing abortions.
Rachel Atkins: Physicians that did their residencies when abortion was illegal watched young healthy women dying from illegal abortion. So there was a whole core cohort of providers that were in that age group, that provided abortion services and reproductive health care for women for, you know, the first like 15 years after Roe.
Riley Robinson: Because of what they’d seen.
Rachel Atkins: Because of what they’d seen, and how impactful it was. And what happened is as those providers started retiring and getting older, there weren’t young providers coming in to replace them, for several different reasons.
One is that it wasn’t taught in medical school, in most residency programs, and it wasn’t a requirement to finish your OB-GYN residency to learn how to manage abortion complications or how to provide abortion care. So there was no sort of natural way for people to gain those skills.
Riley Robinson: By 1992, only 12% of OBGYN residency programs offered routine training in first-trimester abortion.
Rachel Atkins: It became sort of separate from the rest of healthcare. Because there were a few providers, then you had certain providers that provided the services. And so it wasn’t like, you could go to your family practice physician, or you could go to your regular OB-GYN, and it was just in the list of services they provided. Because of the politics and everything, it was always sort of seen as other in terms of health care.
Riley Robinson: Rachel spoke at professional conferences around the country about how PAs, nurse practitioners and nurse midwives could provide safe abortions.
In the 90s, professional medical organizations, like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Public Health Association formally endorsed non-pysicians doing first-trimester abortions. Rachel’s advocacy seems to have played a big role in that shift.
And the ripple effects continued years later: In 2013, the Governor of California signed a bill to allow nurse practitioners and other non-physicians to provide first-trimester abortions.
Abortion methods also evolved. In 2000, the FDA approved, a pill to terminate a pregnancy. The medication can be used at home, and it’s now the method for 75% of abortions in Vermont.
The Vermont Women’s Health Center merged with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England in 2000. But it left behind a lineage of healthcare providers who had been trained in this model.
Cate Nicholas: The business model was not being successful towards the end, right. And we were trying to figure out why, why why isn’t this working like it used to? And one of the reasons that I thought was we did such a good job. And I’m not kidding — training people how to do women-centered care. So women could go to a more traditional setting, and get the same kind of care, because we had been involved in their training. And so I’m like, we put ourselves out of business. And I thought, It’s OK. It’s okay to put ourselves out of business. If this way of caring for women was becoming more mainstream, then we were very successful.
Riley Robinson: Many of the women who founded the Women’s Health Center, or worked there in those early days, are now in their 70s, or older. And they expressed a rage, and frustration, that’s been echoed on protest signs in the past few years. They are angry that younger generations are fighting this same political battle, again.
Cate Nicholas: I have to tell you, when Roe fell, I changed my — anytime I introduce myself to people, I’m like, Hi, I’m Cate Nicholas. I’m the director of simulation education operations and a former abortion provider. Beccause I couldn’t stand it, because no one wants to use the word abortion. It’s not a dirty word. It is not. It’s not a dirty word.
Janet: I think we lost ground in the abortion debate in this country when we often seemed apologetic about abortion. Abortion is nothing to be apologetic about. It is a moral and ethical decision.
I want to say that for many women, the decision to have an abortion was made more difficult because they felt negatively judged by a minority of society. And that is still happening today. It was true in the ‘70s. And it continues unabated today.
