To the editor: Only Heather Chase will stand up for IVF and abortion care in race for State House

My name is Krista, I’m a life-long Vermonter who lives in Athens on the same land that my family has for at least six generations, and I write to endorse Heather Chase for our state representative.

This election is deeply personal to me as my ability to have children — and the ability to receive life-saving medical care if God forbid I miscarry — could quite literally depend upon the outcome of this election.

As a first-generation college student growing up in the small town of Athens, I saw education as my way “out.” I did what I was supposed to do: I worked hard and got a scholarship to college, then went to law school, and spent my 20s advancing my career doing some of the most prestigious things a young lawyer can do, including clerking for a federal judge and working as an associate at a top law firm in New York City (commuting in twice a week from Athens). While working in NYC I met the man who is now my fiance, and I recently moved to a job here in Vermont as we plan to settle here and raise our family after we get married.

Unfortunately, what many people don’t talk about, is that while chasing a career in your 20s you’re also bypassing your prime years of fertility. In addition to being in my 30s (the decade in which fertility dramatically declines) I also have a medical condition that makes it very likely that the only way I will be able to conceive biological children is through fertility treatments like IVF.

Thankfully, at my last job in New York, my insurance paid for me to freeze my eggs. Although I was able to freeze 21 eggs, this only gives me a 76% of having one live birth. As we hope to have a larger family, I will likely need to undergo another round of egg freezing and then, of course, a medical procedure to transfer the eventual embryos, called IVF.

The No. 1 predictor of whether egg freezing will be a success is the age at which you freeze your eggs. Knowing this, as soon as I got to Vermont, I looked into doing another round of egg freezing. I was shocked to learn that my new employer didn’t cover this procedure (or IVF), and upon further research learned that Vermont is the only state in New England that doesn’t require medical insurance to cover the procedure. Even more traditionally “conservative” states, such as Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana offer such coverage.

Disturbed by this, I spoke to Heather Chase at one of our town events in Athens. To Heather’s credit, she has been to just about every event in Athens since she was elected, and is therefore very accessible to her constituents. She immediately supported the idea of making IVF more accessible in Vermont, and even contacted other lawmakers to get the ball rolling. In contrast, when I reached out to her opponent, Tom Charlton, about making IVF coverage more accessible in Vermont, while he was open to learning about IVF, he did not express enthusiastic support, nor did he commit to making IVF more accessible.

Although I am a devout Christian, I recognize that the right to safe, legal abortion procedures is necessary to protect all child-bearing women. I have watched in horror as news stories have continued to pile in since Roe was overturned (and the issue of abortion was “returned to the states”) of women dying, nearly dying, or suffering life-altering medical consequences because they were denied medical abortion procedures during miscarriages.

As the result of state abortion bans, women who are actively miscarrying have been sent home to literally bleed out as hospitals refuse to treat them (Google Christina Zielke, the New York Times article on a woman named Amanda from Texas, and similar stories published by the Associated Press). We cannot support candidates that would allow women in Vermont to face similar circumstances.

Heather has been loudly — and unapologetically — pro-choice. This means that while she has protected a woman’s right to choose, and to obtain life-saving medical care, she has also taken seriously my concerns to expand medical care that will make it easier to conceive.

Unfortunately, in his comments to The Chester Telegraph, Mr. Charlton referenced former President Trump, who brags about his own role in overturning Roe. Mr. Charlton has only provided evasive, wishy-washy statements on his stance on reproductive rights, and has chosen to instead — just as he did in my email — reference the need for “conversations” and a willingness to learn.

We are far past the point of conversation. Women are actively bleeding out in parking lots and hospital waiting rooms, and my ability to have children is at risk by lawmakers who refuse to support IVF. His comments that if a federal abortion ban is passed, Vermont should “continue the conversation … within the framework of the law” suggests that he does, in fact, support abortion restrictions, in contrast to Heather who has stated that if a ban was passed, she would “do everything in her power to fight the ban.”

Heather has also advocated to make raising children more affordable in Vermont, including passage of the child tax credit and expanding Vermont’s child care financial assistance programs to be the most generous in the nation.

Vermont women need a representative that will stand up for our right to have children and to access life-saving medical treatment when our pregnancies heartbreakingly don’t go as planned. There is only one candidate in this race that will do that, and that is Heather Chase.

Sincerely,

Krista Gay
Athens