MONTPELIER, Vt.—Marking the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, some 280 Vermonters marched on the Statehouse on Saturday to decry legalized abortion and celebrate the defeat last year of a bill that would have permitted physician-assisted suicide.
"This is not about doing what is easy or accepted; this is about saving lives," said Lizzie Rinaldi, a 17-year-old junior at Twin Valley Union High School in Wilmington. Speaking in the well of the House, she called abortion "an evil that has slipped into our country disguised as a right to choose."
Many of those in the crowd had earlier attended a special Mass celebrated by Roman Catholic Bishop Salvatore Matano at St. Augustine's Church. They then gathered in the parking lot behind City Hall and marched to the Statehouse carrying a wide variety of signs. One said, "You're lucky to be alive. One-third of our generation has died from abortion."
Joanna Turner Biseglio of Waterbury Center, an at-large director with Vermont Right to Life and master of ceremonies for Saturday's event, spoke briefly on the Statehouse steps before the group entered the building. She said that since Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, 85,000 abortions had been performed in Vermont; 48 million in the nation as a whole.
In the House chamber, Matano offered a prayer saying God's "love is present long before our hearts begin to beat at 22 days after conception, and long after our hearts begin to fail."
Mary Beerworth, executive director of the Vermont Right to Life Committee, drew repeated cheers as she recounted last year's defeat of a bill that would have allowed the terminally ill to end their lives with a doctor's help. Beerworth congratulated those present for helping with the lobbying effort that helped narrowly defeat the bill in the House.
The event's special guest speaker was Angela Franks, author of a 2005 book linking Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger to the eugenics movement of the 1920s and '30s, which sought to keep allegedly defective people from reproducing and to encourage those deemed to have better genes have more children.
Beerworth said Vermont Right to Life is backing three pieces of legislation this year, which she gave little chance for passage in a House and Senate dominated by Democrats who support abortion rights.
One would create a new ability to sue under Vermont law when a fetus is killed in an accident resulting from negligence; a second would call for notification of parents of minors seeking an abortion; the third would require abortion clinics to offer patients an opportunity to see an ultrasound of the fetus -- Beerworth said this frequently dissuades women from getting abortions.
