Re: 'Is America in her final days?' [Maynard letters, Village News, 4/7/22]

The answer to the author’s rhetorical question is still a resounding no! But rather than deconstructing his denigration of the Democratic Party and many of its minority members, I offer this challenge: name one bill, proposed by Republicans since 2016, that would have significantly aided working class Americans.

What are Republican state legislatures doing? Job No. 1 appears to be criminalizing abortion: the avowed intent is to “save the babies.” That sounds good; does eliminating legal abortion actually save babies? No, because making abortion illegal doesn’t reduce the rate of abortion. Search on " Guttmacher Abortion Before and After Legalization" for citation. And that approach has a terrible side effect.

Abortions are usually part overall reproductive health care. So when those organizations are defunded overall, reproductive health care suffers. There’s irrefutable evidence for this. California is a blue state. It has the lowest maternal mortality and infant mortality rates of any state. By contrast the red states have much worse rates, with Mississippi being the worst of the lot. “Thanks” to those red states: “The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed country and the maternal mortality rate is higher than it has been in decades.” Search on “Maternal Mortality Rate by State 2022” for citation.

Banning abortion is only one of the activities that Republican-led state legislatures occupy themselves with, rather than working on legislation that would benefit their working class constituents. Other time wasters include:

1. Politicizing the pandemic.

2. Legislating to prevent Critical Race Theory being taught in public schools: it had not been taught and there is no intention of doing so.

3. Preventing trans girls from competing in school sports.

4. Preventing mention of any topics related to other genders in public schools.

5. Restricting free access to voting.

6. Favoring states’ rights over federal legislation

7. Looking for the next topic to divert attention away from their inaction.

Fortunately, we don’t see that kind of thing here in California. Rather, we have an exemplar of what a Republican legislator should be in San Diego’s own Marie Waldron (District 75).

John H. Terrell