Letters: Idaho law puts women with pregnancy complications at risk. Women like me | opinion
When facing severe pain and bleeding, most people go to the ER and receive all means of care available. However, as a pregnant woman experiencing a miscarriage, likely ectopic, I was sent home twice with Tylenol and a warning only to come back if I lost consciousness.
The recent editorial about the illegalization of care for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages pointed out how Idaho’s abortion bans would put women’s lives at risk, but I would like to clarify that it already does.
When I went to the ER, I learned that my sweet baby, Sylvia, had already died. There was no heartbeat. I longed for and loved this baby. I did not want an abortion. However, the application of Idaho’s laws meant that I had to risk my life carrying my dead baby for three more excruciatingly painful weeks until my body pushed the tiny body out at home, alone. I was terrified for the whole three weeks that my fallopian tube could burst or that I could die from blood loss, but as a survivor, I feel the need to speak out for the moms who will die if these laws remain unchanged.
Idaho’s total abortion ban causes a deadly lack of medical care for women experiencing pregnancy complications and an unjust legal risk for doctors. Please change our laws so that mothers like me do not die for lack of a procedure that is readily at the fingertips of doctors.
Tara Brandenburg-Weeks, Boise
Don’t thank me for my service in Vietnam
On March 29, 1973, Military Assistance Command Vietnam ceased operations, marking the official end of the American misadventure in Vietnam. Some say it was the first war we lost. Actually, it was the first one we ran away from. Better to have lost it honorably, but even better never to have begun it in the first place.
Vietnam is where we began learning how to lie to ourselves about who we are and what we stand for. Much of the bitter division in our country today originates from those first Vietnam lies.
And now I learn that March 29 is Vietnam Veterans’ Day. Imagine my surprise. I enlisted because I believed I had a duty to serve. I spent much of ‘68, ‘69 and ‘70 in Vietnam. I lost friends there. But I also helped to burn, bomb and poison a country that posed no threat to me or mine, a country that had humiliated invaders for a thousand years.
I stepped up when my turn came. Thank me for that, if you must. But do not thank me for anything I did in Vietnam. You did not benefit from it. Neither did America, or Vietnam.
Chuck Yates, Caldwell
If politicians want someone shot, they should pull the trigger
Now that the Legislature has passed The firing squad bill and Governor Little has signed it into law, I think the governor, the bill’s sponsors Bruce Skaug and Doug Ricks, and the Senate and House majority leaders should all be required to be members of the firing squad.
Gordon Barkley, Emmett