Letters to the Editor for June 11, 2022

This is in response to Carol Edmund’s “Equal Rights for All of Us.” Carol, I want to thank you for sharing your opinion for safe and legal abortions for women in their reproductive years.

When Roe vs. Wade was decided, I had just graduated from college. As an adult woman in her reproductive years, I had the right to get reproductive health care, birth control and, if need be, an abortion. Planned Parenthood offered women of all ages reproductive health care, birth control and abortion. It was a decision decided by each woman and her physician how an unwanted pregnancy should be handled.

This has been a battle decided nearly 50 years ago and now we’re back to square one?

How can we call ourselves Americans and force half our population (female) to have no legal rights for safe reproductive health care which may include abortion? Our founding fathers didn’t want religion and government to be mixed. If women lose their reproductive rights, we are forcing them back to back-alley abortions. How many women will lose their lives?

Let me be clear, I have no desire to force women to have abortions. I don’t want to make that choice for another person, but I fully support each woman the opportunity to make her own decision without judgment.

After all we live in the USA! What will be next and what other citizens will be forced to give up their rights?

Ilona Strull

Carson City

Gun rights need to remain

While the school shooting in Uvalde is a horrific tragedy, it pales in comparison to the lives lost to authoritarian regimes throughout history. The Second Amendment was not written to protect hunting or shooting sports, it was written to shield us from tyranny. Surrendering our right to self-defense will create a society of unimagined horrors. Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka are testaments to the unspeakable evil this would unleash.

The Second Amendment underpins all our freedoms; without it we are lambs for the slaughter. Surely, gulags and killing fields await those who resist the erosion of our rights by autocrats who view dissent as domestic terrorism.

Mike Rodgick

Carson City