Hello and welcome to our ongoing general election coverage by town meeting television. So what we're doing here tonight is one of a series of forums that town meeting TV is bringing you in advance of the general election coming up in November. Town meeting TV election forums cover all of the candidates as well as the ballot items that you'll see on your ballot in November and that's what we'll be covering tonight as one of the most contentious ballot items that you'll be seeing. So my name is Helen Morgan-Permitt. I'm associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Vermont and the director of the Lawrence Debate Union and I'm gonna moderate our forum for tonight which will focus on proposal five for article 22. So I just want to read the language that you'll be seeing on the ballot and sort of get through what what is proposal five how is it related to article two. So what you'll actually see on the ballot is proposal five to adopt whether or not we should adopt article 22 as part of the amendment to the state constitution. So proposal five reads to see if voters will amend the Vermont Constitution by adding article 22 to read article 22 personal reproductive liberty that an individual's right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one's own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means. So again you'll have heard of this issue probably referred to as prop five proposal five article 22 so it's after a four-year process through both the House and the Senate and after being signed by Governor Scott that proposal five is now presented to you the voters on the November 8th ballot and if it's approved then it will become article 22 of the Vermont State Constitution. So I am joined here tonight by advocates on both sides of proposal five and so we're just gonna start up and have each of the folks here tonight introduce themselves and I would like you to also sort of outline your general view of act 22 article 22 proposal five and how you feel you're personally and politically affected by this issue. So let's start over here. Sure well thanks for having us and doing this forum. My name is Lucy Larish I'm the vice president of Vermont Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood Northern New England and Planned Parenthood Vermont Action Fund. I grew up in Wolcott but have French Canadian family a big French Canadian family Catholic family and this is really proposal five is really important to me because I feel like the provision of health care is something that we should not be leaving to politicians. At a time when politicians in half of the country are moving to ban or severely restrict abortion access we support Planned Parenthood Vermont Action Fund and Planned Parenthood Northern New England supports proposal five the reproductive liberty amendment because it will protect the full spectrum of reproductive health care including abortion and contraception and will ensure that important personal health care decisions remain between patients and doctors not politicians. Vermonters have had this freedom for the last 50 years and passing proposal five will ensure that the rights we have today won't be gone tomorrow and the reason this is so important to me is because I had a firsthand experience in needing reproductive health care I had an ectopic pregnancy a number of years ago and it occurs to me now of course that if I were in one of these states where abortion was banned I could I may not have survived that what was really a very simple procedure because in states where abortion is banned physicians or where there are gestational limits or viability limits physicians gets spooked very understandably. Great thanks so much for that introduction now let's hear from you. Oh okay hi I'm Anne Pugh and I am chair of the House Human Services Committee a 30-year legislator representing South Burlington. I'm sitting here not because I work at Planned Parenthood or am a spokesperson for them not because I'm an advocate I'm here because I'm a legislator and I brought proposal five to the House floor and it was in the House Human Services Committee where over four years we took testimony had two public hearings and debated the issue. This is something that is larger than me so when you say what is your personal attachment to this issue that my personal attachment is the importance of maintaining the freedom that Vermonters have had since the early 1970s to make their own reproductive health decisions along with their medical provider. What is of utmost importance to me is that each of us you and I and everyone at this table should be able to make our own reproductive decisions vital decisions that affect our lives our bodies and our futures without interference by politicians without my interference. All right let's go to the other side of the table we'll start over here. My name is Norman Smith and thank you for inviting me here tonight. I was born and raised in St. John'sbury when I saw the proposed amendment I was really concerned about the the vagueness of it and the unintended consequences the term personal reproductive autonomy has never been defined in fact when I asked my legislators if they could define and tell me what the the amendment meant they really couldn't do that I did that in my town meeting. So there are problems inherent in this proposal and I feel it should be defeated. There are a lot of regulations that we have in the medical field and this is an area where there can be some possibilities but with this amendment there's there's not going to be any possibilities to pass any laws or do any kind of regulations that may be reasonable that Vermonters may find reasonable. I know Anne has some information about what Vermonters and people really think about abortion. This would have authorized abortion through nine months of pregnancy and I don't think Vermonters really support that. So there are problems inherent in this proposal and I really feel that this amendment should be defeated. Thank you. All right. Thank you. And finally hi I'm the representative Anne Donahue from Northfield. I'm on the health care committee and I got involved as a volunteer spokesperson for Vermonters for good government working on this because I am a strong strong believer in the importance of our process our democratic process and I really felt that the amendment being proposed probably does not represent the will of Vermonters. Obviously we're a very pro-choice state. I think most Vermonters aren't aware that our longstanding existing law is to allow access to abortion without any limits but are not aware of that and are not aware that this proposal would lock that into our constitution so that there could never be any restrictions for example on elective not medically necessary but on elective post viability abortions. That is something that 90% of Americans do not support. It's the one area of broad consensus in America 87% of Californians who themselves have a law that does not permit elective abortion post viability. So to me it's it's really important that people understand what they're voting on and not be misled by some of the statements out there that are suggesting that we're like some other state where there are restrictions when in fact because of our court rulings we don't have restrictions. All right. Well thank you all for for those introductions. And so now we're going to sort of dive deeper into what proposal five is all about and sort of starting with the history of this particular proposal. So in the state of Vermont constitutional amendments need to be reviewed over the course of four years in both the House and the Senate. So what was the impetus that brought this amendment to bear as you understand it. So I think that we'll probably start over here since since I'm guessing that you can provide us with especially some of that background about how it came about. Thank you. To begin with the process for amending the Constitution is set in our Constitution. Our Constitution was written with the knowledge that there will need to be changes and things like that. It became clear to us that changes in this with changes in the Supreme Court that this the law the law of the Lamb Roe v. Wade. There was a real possibility that it could be overturned. So we were started this process before the Dodd Dodds decision and before it was overturned. And that in fact decisions about abortion rights would revert to the states. But I want to be clear. This constitutional amendment is not solely about abortion and to keep talking about it solely about abortion is to to undermine what in fact it is about. It is about reproductive freedom. It is about contraception. It is about the it is about forced sterilization. It is about the the right to carry a pregnancy to term to use birth control whether it is permanent or temporary. And that is something that since the early 1970s Vermonters have had the opportunity and the freedom to do the freedom to make their reproductive health decisions with their medical provider and guided by their medical provider and strict medical ethics. And so that's I mean so the history was we saw the some of us saw the writing on the wall and thought that it was important to put into Vermont's constitution what has been the longstanding policy and practice and value of Vermonters. Thanks. And now how about you all. Do you have a different perspective or a different history that you want to sort of add to to to this the background of this proposal. Well as as history it's not going to be very very different. I'm really appreciative that Representative Pugh pointed out that that this has been underway for some time because there are ads running now saying we responded to the Dobs decision and this actually the Dobs decision is more being used as a as a mechanism to build momentum for something that doesn't really relate to the Dobs decision because in fact it doesn't really relate to Roe v. Wade which is not what protects writers Vermonters rights as Representative Pugh said we've had it for 50 years because our own Supreme Court before Roe v. Wade had found the right. I think again Vermonters aren't necessarily aware of that. They're not aware that it's unlimited because the legislature never passed any bills until a few years ago when an unlimited right was put into statute. But that's what would be locked into the Constitution by this step that I think was really motivated by some extreme perspectives who are now using a bit of a of a misrepresentation about what it's about when it's really about locking viable baby abortions into the Constitution because the rest all of the core issues are already protected our Constitution in terms of abortion which has been raised most publicly is what the ads are about on TV under in that issue. This is not reflecting what most people want which is some oversight when it's a an abortion of a viable infant who would survive but for being injected with a with a drug to make sure that it dies before labor is induced and isn't born alive. Right. So this actually relates the next question sort of relates to something that Representative Pugh brought up with is that the fact that abortion is then actually mentioned in the proposal or in the language of article 22 at all. So from your let's start over on this side to begin with. So from your perspective is it significant or why why is it not mentioned. Why is it significant that abortion is not mentioned in the language. It is significant because although most of the discussion has related to abortion and I think that's been the case on both sides. Beyond that we don't really know what a personal reproductive autonomy is to say this is going to protect people to have contraception or to have a child nobody's going to declare it's unconstitutional or illegal to have a child that's not going to happen. So I mean a lot of these arguments I think are rather spurious. So I mean to leave. I mean if if the intent was to protect abortion it should have said that if it's not to protect abortion I guess Representative Pugh is being honest and saying oh this is supposed to protect other things but we really don't know what are the other things there are that can be protected. So yeah and I'll just add you know I heard actually it was Representative Pugh on an earlier radio conversation saying everyone knows you can look it up in the dictionary if you're wondering what it means and so I did and it actually doesn't appear in the dictionary but I found in the New Oxford law dictionary it says that there are disparate views as to what it encompasses and what it means and very unusual just three days ago is driving in a town I was listening to NPR and they had a reporter talking about an award that someone had won for protecting reproductive autonomy and she defined it as including the right to safely raise your child hadn't occurred to me as coming under that but that's how much we don't know and yet are putting into our into our constitution on issues that ought to be a part of public policy decision making in the legislature with constituent with Vermonters viewpoints instead of just throwing it to five justices of the court to make all the decisions about what it does or doesn't mean. All right what about you and Lucy what are your thoughts on the lack of mentioning of abortion and you know norms sort of flagged like well are there other things that would be limited? Certainly I'll take that it protects more than abortion we'll start there. It would protect reproductive liberty amendment would protect every Vermonters right to make their own reproductive health care decisions whether to become pregnant when to become pregnant to use temporary or permanent birth control to carry a pregnancy to term or to seek abortion care and the words and the language of this amendment were chosen very carefully in fact the language personal reproductive autonomy comes directly from U.S. Supreme Court cases for example reproductive autonomy includes a bundle of rights that come from cases decided before and after Roe v. Wade reproductive autonomy as I said includes the right to choose or refuse contraception the right to choose or refuse sterilization the right to become pregnant as well as the right to choose abortion. Einstein v. Baird I'm saying this to the two lawyers in the room and anyone who might be listening Einstein v. Baird Griswold v. Connecticut Skinner v. Oklahoma Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade. So to say that those words are unclear and their meaning is unclear I would disagree with and I would reiterate that this is constitutional amendment is is about more than abortion it is about reproductive liberty it is about who is going to make your reproductive health care decisions.  Do you really think that a law would be passed saying that you can't have your child or that you have to be sterilized I mean these are not things that have to be protected against I mean there's already law and I'm sure that our Vermont Constitution and our federal Constitution would protect those rights already so we don't really need this amendment. I just want to point out that actually in the correctional system in in California right now inmates are being forcibly sterilized against their consent and against their knowledge and against their will. That's in California. Let's let her finish and then you can have a chance to respond. Yeah thank you so I guess my only point and we're also have along the books Brighton Vermont where disabled people can be sterilized so actually and we have actually you know a history of this we also make decisions about who can and part of that is about making decisions about who can carry a child and who can who we are going to allow to reproduce so it's actually no true. Now you can have a chance to respond to that. Go ahead. Well I was just going to mention in terms of some of the vagueness or really you know I go back to it public major public policy issues that have not been debated and have not been looked like and there may be definitions for what reproductive autonomy means particularly for women but we're I'm delighted that we're adding equity for all people for men. I don't think there is much of a track record in terms of what reproductive autonomy for men means in terms of the right to decide whether or not to have a child for example. I think it raises a lot of issues that ought to be discussed as part of a legislative proposal for example. How do you balance against two different types of rights and I guess that's going to really lead into the the next question so I'll hold off maybe you want to add to that. That's fine. Alright yeah let's go to the next question which is about the language of compelling state interest and I hope that you can help us sort of unpack this term and so I think that we started I don't remember which side we started last that last time we started I think on this side so we'll we'll start with Lucy and Anne of what it what is compelling state interest. Yeah sure so legally a compelling state interest is the strongest protection that we have to protect reproductive rights or any rights for that matter. Without it we would be much less protected. A compelling state interest is a directive to the courts to use the highest standard of review in order to prevent interference or restrictions on personal reproductive autonomy. It sets a very high bar which applies when the government is attempting to restrict a fundamental right so a compelling state interest applies to fundamental fundamental rights not to laws. Alright and what it means is that the legislature must have a very very very good reason for adopting any kind of regulation or statute. There's a balancing test that the court will have to do. Again it's a Vermont Supreme Court that will be doing this balancing test and a result any kind of legislation or regulation that in the field of personal reproductive autonomy is going to be very difficult to adopt. Now maybe that's the intent but you know there are a lot of cases where it's not such a bad idea to have some regulations. Right now it's wide open. We passed Act 47 and now the government can't even regulate abortion and so maybe the legislature will think that's not such a great idea after they see what happens. But this amendment is going to make it incredibly difficult to change that law. Would you want to add something? Just briefly I think it's important to notice it's the only place where it would actually appear as language in the Constitution. It's actually a court-developed principle and that sort of locks the court in and again I think that was the intention to make it sort of lock in an extreme position that's not supported by most Vermonters and where regulation of post viability abortion with a baby that would survive is not something that people want to just leave under a basically compelling interest test which means according to our own solicitor general could not be regulated under this amendment. And when we're talking about that it's not the position of most Vermonters that there should be no regulation of post viability abortions. I can't talk to strict scrutiny because I'm not a lawyer but I can talk to what is currently happening in Vermont and in Vermont there is not the only institution that is providing abortion care in that is the medical center and doctors and medical providers have to operate under strict medical ethics and the hospital itself has outlined publicly in the legislature, publicly in the newspaper the process that goes through and so I think to keep raising the specter is a way to divert the attention from what this is. This is an amendment to ensure that something that has been in place. If this passes it will be a burden on that woman. So you know they are rare but they do happen and even California restricts abortion to non-elective does not permit non-elective I mean restricts it to non-elective abortion. UVM standard is its own standard it can drop it we would have no ability to do anything and it is likely that the court itself would find that as an unconstitutional standard and then the state would not be able to act once this has passed. And the chair of the chair of the house and then we'll let you go. And just to be clear because there's confusion about this there is established precedent that with the state constitution in contrast to the federal constitution states can impose their constitutional standards on agencies. Okay now Ann go ahead. I was just going to say I read well and the chair of the house judiciary committee wrote a commentary that one can find in Vermont Digger which talks about this very issue and in fact gives the example of when could possibly there be a change to current practice and she referenced that that if for instance there were no regulations within the hospital it is very likely that the court in fact would find that putting regulations in would be feasible. I mean I think what is important also is that we can argue about how hard or how not hard it would be but in fact in this amendment in this proposed amendment there is the possibility for change. Well the solicitor general's opinion to the committee in the legislature was that it would not be an example of something that could it would be found unconstitutional if there was an attempt to restrict even if it was a viable infant. I think that that kind of leads into this next question and so that we're going to probably be able to dig into that deeper by actually addressing the question head-on which is around this term of late term abortion which you see a lot in like signs up on people's yards and in advertising so it's a lot a term that's used a lot in arguments about this act and I'd love for you all to sort of clarify for us what that term means and does it relate to the proposed amendment and if it doesn't relate you know what are you know tell us about the terms that you're using and why you're using those terms and how it's different. So let's start over here. I think anyone understands the term late term abortion means the abortion of a viable fetus a baby who could survive outside the womb so when we say that the amendment will result in late term abortions we're saying that those will be possible under the terms of the of the amendment that it'll be very difficult to even restrict something like that so and the proponents say this doesn't happen in Vermont but nothing prevents someone from coming into Vermont and establishing a late term abortion clinic there are no laws or regulations that would prohibit that if the legislature tried to prohibit that first of all they've already passed a law that says they can't so that's where some of the difficulty is here and I know a lot of this is poo-pooed by the doctor and by the doctors and by the supporters but the fact is we don't know and so when you don't know if there's something that you don't know should we be adopting this amendment for all these different scenarios that we can't tell whether they're going to happen or not because once we adopt this amendment it's going to be very incredibly very difficult to change it or to repeal it it's going to take another four-year session two two year session to adopt it and so it ain't going to happen probably so once we adopt this it's there and we're going to have a very difficult time changing it okay did you just just to say yeah we we know we know it's legal now it's legal under statute it's protected under our own constitution for all but significant restrictions it's not a compelling interest test which is what would really make it pretty near impossible to ever regulate in the future but this locks it in that's the problem it locks it in late term is a colloquial expression and i think as my partner said is is pretty well known so okay yeah i'd like to dig into this a little bit because there's a lot to unpack here late term abortion first of all is a political term it's not a medical term there are abortions that happen later in pregnancy and people who use the wording late term abortion if this is language that is designed specifically to shame patients and into restrict access to reproductive health care the amendment would protect every vermonter's right to make their own reproductive decisions without the interference of politicians it really is that simple we don't need politicians playing doctor with our health care this idea that the amendment would make abortions later in pregnancy a common occurrence is really actually pretty absurd and preposterous the vermont department of health has the statistics as representative donahue just mentioned the this possibility exists right now and has existed in vermont for the last 50 years and we've also seen a similar environment with gestational limits and viability bans and other states that have been in effect and still this isn't this has not been a practice in vermont at all so nationally abortions happen later in pregnancy like for the whole country these abortions compromise about one percent of all the abortions performed a small number of abortions that happen later in pregnancy in vermont are not elective there are no elective abortions that happen later in pregnancy in vermont there are certain screenings and genetic testing that cannot be done until the second trimester of pregnancy so people often don't learn about serious medical complications until this time the uvm medical center is the only health care provider in vermont that performs abortions beyond 21 weeks and six days as i mentioned this is rare but when it happens the hospital has a process of review as representative pew was mentioning that includes an ethics panel a geneticist and all other providers and specialists that are involved in the patient's care together they identify options in the best course of treatment for the patient to shame patients to shame these patients is cruel these are people we know and care about our neighbors family friends and colleagues who are facing some of the most difficult moments of their lives this is already the hardest decision these patients have had to make and they shouldn't be subjected to judgmental attitudes and shaming thanks yeah i want to give you a chance to maybe to respond to this and especially you know lucy is saying like this this doesn't happen now and it could happen now so it seems like you know saying that it's going to happen after the proposal doesn't seem fair i mean what are your thoughts here well first of all i have never said we've never said that for some reason it would make it more common i don't think it would make it more common um i think it would draw people to vermont and we know as a fact that there are people who leave vermont now for elective and nobody's talking about essential abortions or health involved abortions we're talking about elective abortions for reasons other than need those people are referred by uvm out of state when they don't meet their own internal ethics standards there are providers who advertise in vermont for vermont women to come and locking this into our constitution would make it a place that more people might come nobody's saying it would increase the number but we are only talking about electively chosen third term abortions with viable infants it's that simple this would lock them in and as other states as it pointed out other states are you know pushing back and it will make it the place where you can access it and that vermont will not be able to respond by saying oh uvm's policy is unconstitutional now oh this has happened oh people are coming here they won't be an ability for the state to ever respond because we will have locked ourselves out of the conversation okay and your did you want to respond to well i just want to say that what what our opponents are suggesting here is that we should leave the door open to restrict abortion people who gets abortion and at what point they get an abortion and that somehow we're going to have like a little government you know hovering craft in the exam room looking over the doctor's shoulder second guessing their medical profession and their professional opinion about how to best care for a patient what i want to say to that is that that is dangerous and that we know that in states that have that allow government regulation through gestational limits or through viability bans that the maternal mortality rates are high our maternal mortality rates and our health outcomes for pregnant people in vermont are very very very very good we have great health outcomes and it's because we don't have this kind of government intervention in a place where the government has really no expertise all right just real quickly yeah yeah i don't know the data for california i didn't know that they had a higher a maternal mortality rate in childbirth it would surprise me if that was accurate and they they in fact have a viability test that the doctor determines it's the doctor who judges that it is a viable infant and therefore if it's for an elective purpose it should not go forward so this is not anybody going into and making the medical decision about viability and i just want to repeat we are not talking about restrictions on abortion all over the place our own supreme court has made it clear we can't do that we're only talking about very late term abortions that are not necessary for health and that involve a viable fetus that's that's it and we could carve them out we could have carved them out there was a refusal to look at any kind of amendments which indicates a clear intent to not carve them out even when elective i don't think the monitors want that were you wanting to speak or heard your sort of i mean i just i guess i just want to say that this feels like fear mongering to me this feels like talking about things that don't happen things that haven't happened in vermont passage of this prop five article 22 will not change will not alter will not expand anything about the way abortion is currently provided in vermont and i trust our health care providers i trust the medical ethics board i trust the medical practice board and ethics to infect doctors doctors would lose their license if they could do if they did certain things and i really feel that much of this is egregious misinformation and just really briefly yeah yeah because trusting in the medical profession is not the issue the medical professions hands will themselves be tied by a constitutional right act 49 already prohibits the medical practice board from doing anything that would interfere with access to abortion doctors cannot lose their licenses for giving a woman a constitutional right even if and in fact the medical practice i'm sorry the medical ethics board would probably be itself found to be unconstitutional as creating a barrier to a guaranteed right in the constitution we are tying our hands to do anything about that we're turning it over to the courts we are not tying our hands there is the possibility well you've said how extremely high a test it is yourself well maybe you could just say like what is that possibility well i think i said before that um a possibility if there were no if the process for instance that um going to the ethics board and that that was being used at the medical center at the u b m medical center if they were for some crazy excuse me sorry and some um um un unredi unbelievable would do away with all of their restrictions um i believe that that might be very well um something that is um a compelling reason it's not based on opinion it's not based on thought but it is um based on that um compelling state interest here and i just um i uh briefly and let's let because i have a tiny and then we're going to move on to the next question i mean i just want to say that that a court is not is hardly going to find something as a compelling state interest all of a sudden if the legislature wants to intervene because u vm's policies on constitutional when it found that it was not an interest at all you can't create a legislative history saying this is not a state interest to protect a viable infant in the womb uh and then suddenly reverse and say it's become compelling when medical practice has already been banned as as being an oversight i i respectfully disagree with you representative donahue and um yeah okay all right let's i think that we've sort of gotten to the point where it's um we might not get further on that question and i think that maybe moving to this next question sort of gets to a lot of questions on the minds of vermonters which is you know why are we talking about reproductive healthcare um as a constitutional matter so what is the benefit of making a constitution sort of maybe in light of some of the questions that have been coming up about you know oh does this mean that like you know now um providers will be forced to provide those sorts of things so you know what is the reproductive why why are we talking about it as a constitutional issue and so we'll start over here yeah sure so we are talking about it as a constitutional issue because when the DOP's decision came down and Roe was overturned that it became clear at that point we knew we everyone knows that the decision to regulate abortion then falls to states and in order to protect this um this right that vermonters have had for 50 years long term for future generations and to provide peace of mind for moms for grandmothers for people who have who have children it is really important that we enshrine this right long term and the constitution is quite frankly our this is the this is the most protective thing that we can do in the state of vermont the vermont constitution is our highest legal document so that's why it makes sense okay thoughts over here sure um I think we all have to remember that our supreme court 50 years ago already determined this this was a right in vermont it didn't say you couldn't have any restrictions at all but it established it so so the dobs decision didn't suddenly change things in vermont so I think that's important I think that I agree that this would not change anything you know the next day what it would change would be our ability to to give protections if we started having problems I had something else I meant to say in response oh I'm sorry that you referenced in your question I'm recalling about doctors being forced to do abortions which of course would not be would not be you can't compel somebody to do something but what you can do is say you can't practice here unless you participate conscience protection and clearly once again this legislature already determined that was not a compelling interest for the state of vermont so it wouldn't be something we could change course on we're one of only two states that doesn't give conscience protection to providers so a provider could in fact be restricted in their ability to find work in vermont in a place where they weren't forced to violate their own specific personal conscience in terms of for example post viability babe and I think that in addition the problem is again this is so open ended we're trusting that all these things are going to happen we're trusting that the medical center is going to continue with these ethical provisions we're trusting that they're going to do the right thing we're trusting that the court will do the right thing and and by putting this in the constitution we we are now locking locking this in and making it virtually impossible to make any kind of changes any kind of revisions that the legislature in the future and the people may find isn't such a bad idea we just want to clarify one thing just about out of time so quickly and then very quickly and it has to do with compelling the constitutional amendment the constitution is about it's a limit on government authority and government power it cannot compel the uvm medical center or individual physicians as representative Donahue just mentioned from like from following their own ethics practices and their own standards of practice with and having conscience protections which they do it's a check on government power so just to correct the law on that I mean in fact yes it's a check in the government power it also can apply to entities not to persons not to individuals but to entities so yes our hospitals in this state could be found to be breaking the constitution in violation through their own policies and there would not be something that we could do about it Planned Parenthood New Hampshire has a post-conscience protection for doctors saying that it would violate it would be a barrier to access abortion so that too would be permanently locked out of the purview of Vermont citizens all right so we're just about out of time so I want to give each of you about 15 to 30 seconds to just sort of summarize your position maybe distilled in relationship to what you've heard today and what you want to leave voters with knowing about your side on the proposal so let's start over here I urge people to vote against this it's open-ended it's unclear it could be applied to private action and one of the major concerns is that it will allow and enshrine and lock in late-term abortion of viable fetuses and I think that's wrong and I don't think that's what Vermonters want all right and over here I would say that to the people watching this if you remember one thing it is this proposal five will ensure that important personal health care decisions remain between you and your health care provider not politicians it's that simple Vermonters have had this freedom for the past 50 years passing proposal five will ensure the rights we have today won't be gone tomorrow every person in every pregnancy is different would you rather navigate your pregnancy with your doctor's expertise or would you want a politician telling your doctor what to do all right well thank you so much for joining us and for these thoughtful I think this was a great example of a really divisive issue where we had a conversation where we put the things on the table and we're able to talk to each other in a courteous manner so thank you and I hope that everybody watching at home learned something today and we encourage you to go home and vote on November 8th or before if you you should have received your ballot in the mail so hopefully this discussion has informed how you'll vote on proposal five for article 22 thanks so much for joining us


Hi everyone, I'm João Martins and I'm here to talk about ClicquoS, which was returned by me and my colleagues at NEC, as well as some other people at the University of Bucharest. So the view of the network, as taught in schools, or something like this, and systems with a network in between containing switches and routers. Pretty simple. But as we all know, the reality is quite different. Toolboxes are a commonplace in today's networks, existing as many as switches and routers. They are useful for many reasons. Security, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Monitoring. Traffic shaping. Dealing with adverse exhaustion issues. Performance optimization. And others, often more dubious nature, such as this advertisement dissection box. Obviously, these middle boxes are very useful, but they come with a number of problems. The most clear one is the price. These middle boxes are extremely expensive, both in the price of the box and the cost of managing the box. It's difficult to add new features as we get vendor locked in. Also YSISCO box, for example, we get stuck with them with upgrades and firmware and whatsoever. They are difficult to manage, often requiring specialized personnel to deal with each kind of middle box. Harder middle boxes cannot be scaled on demand, and that can be shared among different tenants. Finally, it's hard for new players to enter in this hardware market. So clearly, moving these middle boxes into software and in the clouds would certainly solve most of these issues. The question that still remains unanswered is whether we can build these software middle boxes in commodity hardware while still achieving the high performance as seen by the hard middle boxes. We believe so, and that's what we want to propose at ClickOS. In one sentence, ClickOS is a tiny, mini-OS-based virtual machine that runs ClickModularRouter software on top. So let me talk about Click. ClickModularRouter is a network processing framework initially designed for making routers. Its main concept is around processing elements. Users create a configuration specifying connection of these elements. These elements can have parameters, which are then exposed as variables in the proxy slash profile system or by sockets. For ClickOS, we managed to compile 262 out of 300 available elements at Click. As you can see on the listing on the side, you can see the classes of these elements. You can observe the variety of packet processing we can do with it. Furthermore, programmers can write new elements that allow them to extend the runtime. So in the figure in the middle, you can see a configuration that just receives packets from the ATH1 interface, decreases the TL and forwards back to the packet out. So in this slide, you can see an example of a very simple firewall in Click. We received packets from the net front element, going to the IP filter that allows only UDP packets with the source 10.01 and destination 10.01. And packets as much as criteria are for the back to net front element otherwise dropped. So what is ClickOS then? As we all know, there is a pervitualized filter machine, has a slightly modified guest kernel and applications running on top. In case of ClickOS, we use MiniOS as the guest operating system. It has a single address space, which means a system calls in a cooperative schedule. And on top of MiniOS, we run Click and we call the whole thing ClickOS. So the work we did and many contributions are having a generic build system in order to build this ClickOS filter machines, which are 5 megabytes in size. And we also use it for other purposes. You have to emulate the Click control point for MiniOS. So Click is a process or through it as a kernel module, so the way to communicate with it, we had to change it to that as a VM. Doing optimizations for the reduced boot times, we started with something like one second and going down to 30 milliseconds. And finally, optimizations to the data plane to achieve 10 gigabits time for almost all packet sizes. So I will focus on the last item, which we think has higher contribution for the Zen community. So we started doing performance analysis into the ZenIOS subsystem. Let me just give you a quick overview of how it's organized. So first, we have a NIC. In our case, we use Intel EXBE 10 gigabit NICs. And then we have DOM0, which hosts a network driver for it, the DOM0 or the driver domain. And this driver is attached to a software switch, say the Linux switch or OpenVSuite in more recent versions. To the switch, you attach a virtual interface called VIF, which is managed by the network driver, by the Netpack driver. The Netpack driver connects to a network entailment over the Zen ring. Netchannels are used for notifications in the Zen bus for contraintualization. Further, we added two new elements from Netfront and two Netfront, so that click can interact with Netfront driver. So our goal is to achieve 10 gigabits line rate for all packet size, meaning 813,000 packets per second for maximum size packets, and all the way up to 14.88 million packets per second for minimum size packets, as the table can show. So the problem is, when we put all of this together, there were several issues. For instance, OpenVSuite could only forward 300,000 packets per second. When we plug in Netpack and VIF, it was only forwarded 350,000 packets per second. And when we put all of the pipe together with MiniOS Netfront driver, we had only 225,000 packets per second, which, as you can see, is still one-fourth of line rate for maximum size packets. So the many issues with this pipe are the following. The back-end switch, Linux Bridger OpenVSuite, are not prepared to handle really high packet rates. But although it's still able to achieve 10 gigabits relying on new features to the TSO or the Aero, while this for instance is good enough for middle boxes, this is far from ideal, where the switch needs to handle million packets per second. Regarding the back-end and front-end communication, packets always need to be copied from the guest to the back-end domain. This copy between domains are normally done in batches of packets, although it's still one of the main causes for low packet rates. In addition to this copy, NetBuckworks works with a packet metadata that structures such as SKBs or M-bursts in previously, in which its allocation and manipulation are really expensive. Last but not least, the MiniOS Netfront is not as good and functional, is not as fast and futureful as the Linux Netfront. So you saw 255 in Linux, we get 430,000 packets per second. And the reverseive path on MiniOS is even worse, we were getting 8,000 packets per second. After careful analysis, we started optimizing things up. First we started with transparent decelerate things without modifying either the guest or the XenRing IOProtocol. For this we started by changing the back-end switch to useValue. I'll go to a little bit more in detail, but basically the NIC enters a special mode called NetmapMode where the host that is connected and the packets are sent by the Netmap API. So for this modification, NetBuck only required slight modifications and mostly to remove packet metadata manipulation, in which we don't need the VALUE switch. We also applied some of the previous optimizations into supporting multi-page IO rings, which has let us batch more packets, roughly batching, extending the ring to be represented over multiple pages, which lets us batch 1,000 packets in the ring. We also had to change the front-end for this, but the compatibility is still kept if the front-end doesn't support multi-page rings. So this optimization is already known by the Xen community and I think it's still available, is already available on the blog drivers. So applying all of these changes, the results were actually pretty good. We were getting 2.7 improvements from IZM-sized packets and 4.2 for Minimum-sized packets. So before going forward, let me give you a little bit of a view about Netmap in VALUE. Netmap, as I mentioned earlier with the VALUE switch, is a fast packet IO framework that is able to send 1488 million packets per second in one core with 900 megahertz. It roughly corresponds to 1665 cycles per packet and it's currently available at FreeBSD9 and also on Linux. Netmap requires minimal device driver modifications to work, but what makes it special in my opinion is that the critical resources such as NIC registers, physical addresses, and packet descriptions on the NIC are not exposed in any way to the user space application. The Netmap ring shown in the figure is a copy of the NIC ring, which its content is validated by the kernel before pushing packets out. NICs works under a special mode, which is connected by the host stack, but this mode change is done in runtime when the application registers an interface. So Netmap is built around this shared memory region that is mapped to user space, which contains pre-allocated packet buffers and a softer ring. Packet are sent over LAN badges per system call instead of one per packet, as it normally happens. Now VALUE was built as an extension to Netmap and it's built around the same concepts. So the graph on top shows you a comparison of packet forwarding between two 10 gigabit NICs in FreeBSD bridge and open V-switch, whereas in the VALUE's case it's only between two virtual ports. Access to these virtual ports is done with the Netmap API, whereas each virtual port uses a separate memory region. In VALUE, the switching fabric is a coupled from the switching logic, which means that the other kind of module can extend the switch to implement their own WUCA punches. The default provided by VALUE is a layer 2 learning bridge. So regarding the previous optimizations we did, we changed the underlying switching remove packet manipulation, but are able to batch more packets with the Zenio ring. Performance was better, but it was still far from ideal. For example, Mimim's aspect is 1.2 million packets, which is still 10 times lower than what we want. So the next optimization we did was to replace the Zenio rings with the Netmap ring regarding the VALUE port. We basically ended up with a much thinner netback that involved much less processing, delegating most of the packet processing operations into VALUE without having to deal with these skibbies. We mapped all the memory regarding VALUE ports all the way to the guest. The Netmap buffers are also mapped to guests so that we don't need to do the extra grand copy between domains for packets to arrive at the back end. With the Netmap ring, the data structures are not overrides by requesting response model as we normally see in the Zen ring. This means that the guest, when he sends an IO request, doesn't need to parse an IO response on the way back. So the naturalization mechanisms on our front-end and back-end are somewhat similar, and event channels are also used for identification. There are two event channels, one for transmit and one for receive. These event channels on the back end will act mainly as a proxy to Netmap operations from and to the guest in VALUE. So in the end, we got really good, really major improvements with this netback hand, but we also break other guest support. But to show that our organizations do apply to other guests, we also implemented the Linux Netfront Compact with this new back-end. So let me speak to you a little bit how the back-end and front-end works. So when we do a network attach of an interface with the VM, what happens is the following. Back-end registers a new VALUE port and calculates which pages belong to the ring and grant them to the guest. The reason for the grants are then shared to the guest via the Zen store. The Netmap buffers that are granted as well are contiguous phases in guest memory. A page fits two buffers, so after granting the ring, we'll need to take a look to these buffers and grant them as well. Although there are a lot of grants to be shared, so these need to be included in the ring instead. The guest on the other side will grant the ring grant references, map them, and after that look at each slot on the ring and grants and maps the grant reference regarding the buffer for each slot. So the darn side of this is basically we have higher memory requirements with this back-end and front-end. We allow that the administrator chooses the ring size depending on the VM workload. So the table on the side shows how much memory and grants are exchanged between back-end and front-end. So we have a minimum of 135 kilobytes per ring with 64 slots and for both rings we require 66 grants and 270 kilobytes for the minimum ring size. But let me say that the default on Netmap is 1024 as a ring size, which is actually the one who offers best performance, but at the cost of the bigger chunk of shared memory. Roughly four megabytes for four rings, for both rings, RX and TX. So let me give you also talk a little bit about the synchronization in our back-end front-end. Now, our back-end is based on Netmap. And Netmap is made for user process and kernel instead of VM. In a Netmap application, operation is done in the sender thread context, which means that the process wants to send packets and switches to the kernel, the process will not access simultaneously to the ring and change int indexes. Well, in our case, back-end and VM ideally run simultaneously, ideally run on different contexts, and different CPUs, virtual CPUs and physical CPUs. So when we want to send the packets, in our case, what happens is that we fill the ring, we update the cursor on the ring for the nice packet to be filled, and the number of slots available in the ring, and we notify the back-end. Meanwhile, back-end will process the packets, and when he's finishing processing, he will notify back to the guest, which means that he finished work and he is idle. When the back-end is processing packets, what the guest will do, he will grab a copy of the ring indexes and update this copy instead of the shared memory region. And the notification comes back. He will update the shared memory region accordingly and notify back the back-end if there is work to be done. So this way, we avoid that the front-end and back-end change simultaneously the same variables on the ring. So as alternative, it could wait until the back-end notifies back with the work done, but this turned out to be efficient. In our case, we only wait when there are no more slots to be used. So I explain to you how we're optimizing apps that will proceed to evaluation. So we first started evaluating the CLICK OS VM's performance. So we started by doing a TX NRX measurements in one of our low-end machines, which has four cores, 3.2 gigahertz. We have one core for VM and the remaining core for DOM zero. The Y-axis shows you rates in million packets per second and the lines for better readability in gigabits per second. And below are the packet sizes on the X-axis, and each bar represents a different ring size. So we can see that on our X, we are able to achieve 9 million packets per second in receiving packets and up to 14.2, which is 95% of line rates on TX for minimum size packets. It's actually a really good result. And we see that it's a line rate for all the packet sizes. Also, for ring bigger than 512, we are able to achieve line rate, always line rates for all the packet sizes, for most of the packet sizes. Next, after doing experiments just for 10 gigs, we figured how we were scaled for multiple nicks in VMs. So the bars in the graph represent VMs just transmitting packets, and the lines represent the VMs doing forwarding traffic. For this experiment, we manually pinned event channels, affinity nicks interrupt affinity to avoid starvation in the hardware and the VM. Actually, the setup was quite sensible, as we easily one of the nicks would not receive any packets. So for this experiment, three cores are reserved for DOM zero and three other cores for VMs assigned in a round robin fashion. So what we can observe is that for smaller packet sizes, it doesn't scale quite well, but for bigger packet sizes, we are able to get up to 40 gigs in VMs just doing transmit and up to 30 gigabits for VMs forwarding traffic. Just one as a side note, regarding the forwarding rates that are represented on the graph, the lines in the graph correspond to the rates measured at the receiver machine. So these are not the rates in duplex, just to facilitate understanding. I should add that the transmitter in the forwarding experiment, it's doing line rate for all the cases. So the rate actually corresponds in duplex is a double. Now, this graph shows you the Linux performance, gas performance. The bars represent KVM rates measured with internal packet chain with vertio backends and V host enabled with all the cores pinned, all the CPUs pinned. Zen measured as well with internal packet chain and our optimized version of Zen with user space net map packet chain. Let me point out, you can see that the results are really good on our case, but this experiment is not exactly, it's a bit unfair because we are not using the host stack on the optimized version, thus bypassing any SKB processing and all of that. But what the graph shows is not, what the graph shows at how fast we can go by using our backend and frontend and a net map application. Next is, we actually implemented a few middle boxes and check it's performance. So each VM uses one core for different mega boxes. The first middle box is the most simplest one to get the baseline management, which just receives packets and transmits packets. The other net mirror just simply flips the destination and source MAC addresses. We have a standard-compliant IPv4 router, a firewall loaded with 10 rules, almost standard-compliant carrier-grade net, whereas each packet is assigned with randomized source and destination parts, just to stress it. A software BRAS, which checks for a decision session, strips PPOE headers, performs IPv4 cups, rewrites MAC addresses, a load balancer, based on five tuple, assigned in a router with fashion, backs packets with the source MAC address, so that the backend switch can split packets based on that field. A flow monitor that keeps performance per flow packet comes in rates and an intrusion detection system, based on regular expression matching, contains a single rule that matched the string A, B, C on the beginning of the packet. So you can see most of these middle boxes are just a proof-of-concept, but the ones actually more ready for production, let in future flow-like carrier-grade net and software BRAS, with all that amount of processing can still do really good performance in ClickOS. Next, we measure delay comparing the other existing approaches. So we use in ClickOS a simple ICMP responder click configuration, and all the VMs in the tests, all the tests where the VMs are idle, just to get the baseline reading, and the next general boxes to pings and measured RTT. So we can see that ClickOS matches somehow, that matches almost the delay with DOM0, but comparing, and we actually improved by half, we decreased by half the delay in a standard DOMU, and performing better than KVM as well. So as main conclusions, I presented you guys ClickOS, which is a tiny virtual machine tailored at network processing, very small, with 5 megabytes of size and runs with a minimum of 6 megabytes of RAM, can be booted on demand in 30 milliseconds, can achieve 10 gigabits throughput using just a single core, for almost all packet sizes, and can run a wide range of middle boxes with high throughput. As a future work, we are starting to be exploring performance on NUMA systems. We are, at the moment, the performance is not quite good, but since the latest changes in Zen for VNUMA support and NUMA affinity support, that are being pushed to the mainline, the performance will change for sure. High consolidation of ClickOS VMs in a single server, up to running, for example, 1000 VMs in a single server, and doing survey chains with these VMs, which means traffic being forward to each of these VMs until being forwarded out to the external world. And so, that's it for my talk, hope you guys like it, thanks. All using the same netmap interface, can each guest see the other, Hangouts under Dustin to the other guests? So don't you lose some security here, some isolation? That's why we, so you can implement your own lookup. So for example, us, we implement static lookup. So for example, a guest can only send packets to that interface. That's for sending, but what about to reading? Because all of the packets, all of the physical NIC buffers are mapped to the guest. No, no, no, no, not the physical NICs, not the physical NICs. So the physical NICs are tied to the switch. So the guest only sees a visual port. So it's not the NIC, the NIC buffers are not mapped to the user space. Okay, so there is an additional copying to... Yes, there is a copy within the switch, but not between the guest and the back end. Other questions? Is it open source or is... Sorry, sorry. Is it open source? We will be open sourcing. It's in the... Are they the squad or in the first part of next year? The worst case. We basically took the decision last... How much memory are you using in your mini-S base domain? Sorry, sorry. How much memory are you giving to your mini-S base domain? For 1k ring size, we give 16 megabytes. For example, for 64 ring size, we use 6 megabytes of memory. So during the definition of this project, it was considered to use the Mirage OS approach of an appliance or was it compared against it at some point? So our focus were... So Mirage is a rock ammo, which is focused on type safety and we thought that that could be an overhead given that the packet processing needs to be really fast. But as well, ClickOS started like 2 years and a half ago. So Mirage was not at the stage at this point, but even though it wouldn't fit. If you know that. Any other questions? Let's give them a hand.