Vermont’s Department of Children and Families violated the rights of a Vermont woman by surveilling her, interfering with her medical care, and taking her newborn from her before the woman was even able to hold her child, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this year. The complaint, filed by the ACLU of Vermont and Pregnancy Justice on behalf of the woman, referred to as A.V., alleges that DCF illegally monitored the woman, breaking Vermont law that requires individuals to consent to assessment and collaboration with service providers, interfering with her parental and medical rights. Family services organization Lund and Lamoille County’s Copley Hospital are also named as defendants, allegedly breaking confidentiality laws by sharing highly sensitive information about A.V. that included ongoing updates throughout her labor and time in the hospital.
The complaint’s description of DCF’s behavior is shocking at every turn. Nevertheless, DCF filed a motion in late March to dismiss the lawsuit, calling the lawsuit “a transparent collateral attack” on the previous decisions made by the Family Division of the Vermont Superior Court, which had issued the emergency order for DCF to take custody of the child. DCF’s motion also states that DCF has broad discretion in determining how to protect children from potential abuse and argues that it is immune from being sued for carrying out its duties, “whether or not the discretion involved is abused.” Perhaps most surprisingly, it argues that “reproductive autonomy” is only protected in situations in which an individual seeks to terminate a pregnancy.
In a filing submitted May 22, the plaintiff pushed back firmly against DCF’s arguments, clarifying that the lawsuit does not challenge any family court decision, but rather seeks to “vindicate the violation of [the plaintiff’s] own fundamental rights.” The Family Division lacks the authority to resolve claims involving the plaintiff’s fundamental rights. The plaintiff also argues that sovereign immunity does not shield DCF from seven of the eleven claims, as they are grounded in the Vermont Constitution. Regarding the agency’s assertion that reproductive autonomy protections apply only to abortion, the plaintiff warns that this “incorrectly—and dangerously—narrows the scope of Vermont’s protected reproductive freedoms beyond recognition.”
Extraordinary Intervention: How DCF Took a Newborn from Mother, Moments After Birth
DCF was initially notified of A.V.’s situation in 2022 when she was temporarily without housing and staying at Charter House, a local shelter in Middlebury. The executive director called DCF, positing that A.V. had untreated mental health conditions and was not aware of her pregnancy. On this unsubstantiated claim, DCF caseworker Jennifer Stone began a unilateral assessment, contacting a counselor at Lund who had advised A.V., a social worker at Copley Hospital, where A.V. planned to deliver, A.V.’s midwife, and even A.V.’s mother. They never reached out to A.V. herself and never received information about A.V. from a mental health professional. Lund and Copley provided confidential information, and the hospital allegedly agreed to update Stone when A.V. was admitted to the hospital during labor. Copley denies wrongdoing and states that they were performing their duties in cooperating with a DCF investigation.
Once Copley alerted DCF that the woman was in labor, DCF began aggressive legal actions to take temporary custody of the child without A.V.’s knowledge. They initially did so via court order by falsely representing that the fetus had already been born, listing the baby’s date of birth as February 11, 2022, while A.V. was, in fact, still in labor. During labor, A.V. repeatedly advocated to follow her birthing plan, which included a natural birth, skin-to-skin time, and breastfeeding.
When she refused to undergo a vacuum-assisted delivery or c-section at the hospital staff’s urging, the complaint claims that Copley Hospital moved to have her evaluated by the Department of Mental Health (DMH). DMH refused to evaluate based on unsubstantiated claims, “concluding there was no basis for even a threshold evaluation of A.V.’s competency.” Extraordinarily, DCF ignored DMH’s input and sought more court intervention to try to force her into an unwanted medical procedure.
Eventually, A.V. consented to a cesarean surgery, and her child was born on February 12, 2022. The baby was immediately removed from A.V.’s custody. The mother was not allowed to hold, touch, or even look at her child.
DCF retained custody of the child for 9 months without ever substantiating claims about A.V.’s mental health.
Having a mental health condition does not preclude one from thriving as a parent. As DCF’s own statutes specify, people with disabilities “can be successful parents.” Even so, the only evidence collected regarding A.V.’s mental health was an evaluation with no significant findings conducted by Lamoille County Mental Health on the day of her child’s birth. That is to say, she was not found to have a mental health condition, and even if she had, it would not have been a basis to remove her child. And yet DCF continued to fight to sever A.V.’s parental rights for 9 months following her child’s birth.
It is especially troubling to consider that Stone, the DCF caseworker, included as evidence of mental impairment the fact that A.V. had been involved with DCF as a teenager as a potential victim of parental abuse. This reveals a paradox in DCF’s operations, where the agency appears to harm the very children and families it is supposed to support.
DCF Systemic Violations of Family Rights: A Pattern, Not an Exception
While this case may seem egregious, the complaint holds that there has been a longstanding “practice of DCF surveilling and punishing pregnant Vermonters based on unsubstantiated claims that extend beyond its jurisdiction,” interfering with pregnant Vermonters in concert with medical centers and other providers. Sometimes, as was the case with A.V., DCF receives reports from service providers or medical institutions. Even though information about one’s reproductive decisions and mental health is protected and confidential, “DCF cultivates and relies on a network of informers, including medical and social work professionals like the staff at Copley Hospital and Lund, to unlawfully collect sensitive information about pregnant Vermonters,” the complaint states.
DCF uses this information to maintain a “high-risk pregnancy docket” or “calendar,” which the complaint says violates due process by having no formal criteria for inclusion or formal procedures to contest or be removed from the lists. DCF allegedly places people on this list “based on vague and subjective concerns about parental suitability.” As exemplified by A.V.’s case, DCF then uses these unsubstantiated claims to “zealously [seek] termination of parental rights.”
In a meeting with the Vermont Women’s Caucus on March 27, DCF confirmed the existence of such a calendar, describing it as a Microsoft Outlook calendar that the Department uses to track dates and follow up with concerns. “We don’t broadly track pregnancies,” DCF Family Services Division Deputy Commissioner Aryka Radke told the caucus. Radke said that “a couple of people have access to the calendar,” which includes a person’s initials, an intake number associated with reports, and an expected due date. While the calendar has been widely publicized with this lawsuit, it has long been a poorly kept secret, described publicly for the first time by a retired Superior Court judge in a 2016 Vermont Bar Journal article.
Unfortunately, A.V.’s case is not unique. Vermont’s high rates of parental rights terminations suggest a broader pattern of systemic issues within the state’s family policing agencies. Vermont has long been among the top five states in prevalence of termination of both parents’ rights. Between 2000 and 2016, 1.9% of Vermont parents had their rights terminated, more than double the national average of 0.9%. Parents of infants and toddlers involved with family policing agencies are most likely to lose parental rights, likely in part due to practices exemplified by the A.V. case.
Research consistently shows that Black and Indigenous families and other people of color are more likely to be surveilled, investigated, and separated. Family policing is deeply rooted in systems that historically sought to control Black reproduction and the Indigenous family unit. The ongoing inequalities in “child welfare” practices are chilling echoes of this past, and press us to question whose pregnancies are criminalized and who is deemed unfit for parenthood.
Secrecy and Surveillance in Family Policing
One of the challenges in seeking justice for parents whose rights DCF may have violated is the lack of access to information regarding its operations. “Because of confidentiality rules around the family court proceedings,” ACLU of Vermont Senior Staff Attorney Harrison Stark said, “what DCF does on a kind of day-to-day basis is really a black box.” Stark explained that the ACLU has received a number of “really troubling complaints about DCF, but it’s often hard to investigate or corroborate these allegations because of the really robust secrecy rules in proceedings.”
This “black box” reflects broader national practices in family policing agencies that operate in secrecy and do not face the same level of scrutiny or constitutional limits as traditional municipal and state police do.
In an essay examining similar “Civil Suits of Parents against Family Policing Agencies,” lawyer Alexa Richardson describes how agencies like DCF “routinely operate outside the law: lying to parents about their ability to decline to speak with the agency, requiring them to sign often blank releases of information that are voluntary, coercing them into signing ‘safety plans’ that remove their children without a court hearing and conducting searches without a warrant.”
Zenovia Earle of Pregnancy Justice describes the secrecy of family policing agencies, saying they operate “under the guise of, ‘we’re protecting the children we’re harming. So it’s all secret because it’s a child welfare case and nobody can check us.’” Earle said it is this “really bad feedback loop” that makes cases like A.V.’s happen repeatedly.
These practices persist despite the significant awards won by parents in similar cases in the rest of the country. In 2023, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services reached a $75,000 settlement with Chanetto Rivers, whose newborn was taken from her immediately following birth. Following four months of separation, she was reunited with her child, only to be harassed for months by the ACS. In a 2024 case highly publicized in Netflix’s “Take Care of Maya” documentary, the family of Maya Kowalski was awarded $208 million after Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital was found to have falsely imprisoned and battered the then 10-year-old girl while investigating unfounded accusations of child abuse and contributing to her mother’s suicide in 2017.
Punishing Pregnancy: Family Policing and Negative Health Outcomes
While A.V.’s case does not demonstrate a significant departure from DCF practices, it highlights some egregious alleged behavior on the part of the Department, such as misrepresenting details of the case when they sought an ex parte emergency care order to take custody of A.V.’s unborn child. The complaint claims the DCF exceeded its jurisdiction, which they say only applies to born children, and alleges that this is the reason for the false statement of the child’s birth date. Furthermore, while many people with histories of substance abuse or involvement with the carceral system are unjustly separated from their children, A.V. had no history of either.
Nationally, the stakes are high for parental and fetal health when it comes to family policing involvement. Pregnancy Justice staff attorney Caitlyn Garcia said there is “an overall trend of states getting involved in parents’ decision making.”
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the country saw a surge of cases in which pregnant people were charged with crimes related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth. According to a September 2024 report, there were 210 prosecutions for pregnancy-related conduct in the first year alone. Over half of these pregnancy-related prosecutions involved collaboration with medical providers and family policing agencies to “surveil and punish pregnancy-related conduct,” and nearly 80% of those prosecuted had low-income status.
In Vermont, DCF commissioner Chris Winters justified DCF’s intervention in cases involving fetuses, saying in a March 27 meeting with members of the state legislature that the Department risked criticism “if [they] had information about a very dangerous situation, potentially dangerous situation, that a child was about to be born into, and [they] said [they] should do nothing until that child is born.”
While someone might be added to the calendar based on a previous record of parental rights being terminated or vague concerns regarding “parental fitness,” most of the arguments supporting DCF involvement with pregnant people relate to prenatal substance use. In the March meeting with legislators, Department officials described a process in which they prioritized support and harm prevention.
ACLU VT’s Stark is skeptical of this argument. “If our primary concern is connecting folks with care services and making sure that individuals get the kind of treatment they need to treat the really serious issues associated with opioid use disorder, non-consensual testing and reporting to child protection agencies is it a terrible way to do that, because it erodes trust between patients and their medical providers and essentially disincentivizes folks from seeking care.” Furthermore, he reiterated that in this case, “there is not a single allegation at any point in our case that our client ever abused drugs or alcohol in any way, and she was still surveilled, and all her medical information was shared.”
Earle said that research shows how policing pregnant people who struggle with substance use is ineffective and dangerous, pointing to Tennessee’s failed legislation that criminalized substance use in pregnancy. She described how Tennessee passed a “fetal assault law” even though “every leading medical organization says this is not the way to get people help, nor do fetal outcomes or infant outcomes improve with incarceration or with family separation.” The law was a failure. It was allowed to sunset after just two years because of the dire health outcomes. A 2021 Georgetown Law Journal article found that “in 2015 alone, this law resulted in twenty more fetal deaths and sixty more infant deaths.”
Family Policing Without Accountability: “Where do we draw the line?”
A.V.’s case calls into question DCF’s commitment to its own mission and internal policies, which aim to “foster the healthy development, safety, well-being, and self-sufficiency of Vermonters.” Court filings suggest the level of interference and trauma inflicted on mother and child in this case is in flagrant disregard for the most basic needs and rights of both. While traditional policing agencies have some established routes for members of the public to file complaints, appeals, and lawsuits against officers, there are no clear or meaningful paths to remedy harm caused by family policing agencies.
The case also highlights the difference between a DCF assessment and an investigation. While an assessment is meant to be a supportive and voluntary process, an investigation typically involves more intrusive measures and is often triggered by allegations of harm. While the motion to dismiss doesn’t directly address this distinction, it asserts that the significance of DCF’s mandate makes it immune to procedural criticisms and that, in the Department’s words, “[t]he system adequately protects parents’ rights.”
Pregnancy Justice staff attorney Caitlyn Garcia disagrees. “Where do we draw the line?” she said. “At what point will the things that a person eats during pregnancy, where they go, who they work with, who they associate with? At what point will those all be used against pregnant women?” Pregnancy Justice has been contacted by people throughout the country facing similar circumstances, Garcia said, “and so I think that’s really powerful to know that she’s not alone.” She hopes that this case sets a precedent nationally, sending a clear message that family policing agencies have limits on their ability to intrude in families’ lives and that “they must comply with the laws.”
If we are really looking to support pregnant people, children, and healthy families, we need to start by “separating care from punishment,” Garcia said. She pointed to comprehensive services such as mental health treatment or material support and environments free from fear of being targeted by family policing agencies. “When individuals have this kind of treatment in an environment that allows them to be open and honest and upfront and direct, they will use the services. They’ll take advantage of that prenatal care,” she said.
These proactive supports and safe services are the key to better outcomes for parents, babies, and families. But when A.V.’s case is one of many throughout the country in which pregnant people and children are being harmed by family policing, Garcia said, “we just really have to remain on top of this.”
Vermont is not immune to national trends of state violence that harm our families and undermine our bodily autonomy. And as elsewhere, we can only gain protection through collective resistance and sustained organizing.
