To the Editor:
Re “The War in Ukraine Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready” (editorial, Sunday Review, May 22):
Your editorial is rife with contradictions. It sensibly favors continued military support to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, and it acknowledges that it’s the Ukrainians who must decide what an end to the war might look like. Yet it recommends limiting U.S. assistance to avoid a wider war with Russia.
Giving with one hand and taking away with the other is a losing formula for dealing with a revanchist Russia that seeks nothing less than to erase Ukraine from the map.
Ukraine’s military successes have exceeded everyone’s expectations. Now is not the time for ambivalence or hesitation in providing Kyiv what it needs to ensure that Moscow suffers a strategic defeat. That is the best way to achieve a fair settlement that restores Ukrainian sovereignty, rather than a tenuous one that Russia will repeatedly violate.
Alexander Vershbow
Philadelphia
The writer is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, former NATO deputy secretary general and former U.S. ambassador to Russia.
To the Editor:
Thank you for starting the conversation about how to pull the U.S. back from Armageddon in Ukraine.
It is time for the administration and Congress to reassess their open-ended commitment of money and weapons to this conflict. With one million deaths from Covid-19, raging inflation, and spiraling political and social crises at home, U.S. taxpayers will quickly tire of this war, if they haven’t already.
Steve Roddy
San Francisco
To the Editor:
As an American voter, I find your suggestion that “inflation is a much bigger issue for American voters than Ukraine” deeply insulting both to me and to my fellow Americans. You are saying, in effect, that we care more about prices than about women and children being raped and killed in Ukraine, let alone the cause of freedom in the fight against tyranny and oppression.
Yes, our continuing military support of Ukraine can lead to terrible suffering, but it can also help change the course of human history for the better.
Lacking a crystal ball, we can be guided either by our moral values or by our fears, and I don’t believe that our fears will do us any good.
Eugene Levine
Fremont, Calif.
Acting to Prevent Heart Disease in Women
To the Editor:
Re “Are Women Missing Signs of Heart Disease?” (Science Times, May 17):
Even amid critical questions of reproductive freedoms, women’s health across the course of life remains essential.
Heart disease has been the leading killer of both women and men since the 1920s. Yet for nearly three-quarters of a century, heart disease was examined, evaluated and warned about in men — primarily middle-aged, middle-class white men — and rendered largely invisible in women.
Heart disease among women has drawn attention only in recent decades. But gender disparities in clinical research, along with diagnosis and treatment, remain.
This failure to see — to research, report, diagnose and treat — heart disease in a broad range of women is not only grounded in contemporary biases, but also follows a long history of research and recognition in a subset of men, while relegating women’s health almost solely to reproductive concerns.
This year, as for the last century, more women will die of heart disease than any other condition. Recognizing the toll of their greatest killer will be central to changing it.
Cara Kiernan Fallon
New Haven, Conn.
The writer is a medical ethicist and a historian of medicine at Yale University.
To the Editor:
Thank you for highlighting how medicine needs to reframe its approach to heart disease prevention and treatment of women and those assigned female at birth.
Pregnancy history is crucial for early detection of heart disease. We now know that pregnancy is a massive “stress test” on the body and that high blood pressure in pregnancy is a marker for future heart disease. With these early warnings, we can proactively reduce risk.
Gestational hypertension and pre-eclampsia were once thought to resolve after childbirth. New data tell us otherwise. These diagnoses present an opportunity to educate patients about heart disease prevention.
Patients with a hypertensive disorder during pregnancy should receive care for at least a full year after delivery. Education about risk mitigation and routine primary care is critical.
Imagine knowing decades in advance which patients are at risk for heart disease. Armed with this knowledge, we need to provide women and birthing people with the tools to optimize their heart health.
Lauren B. Golfer
Mary L. Rosser
New York
The writers are a nurse practitioner and an obstetrician-gynecologist, respectively, at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. They are co-directors of the Columbia Postpartum Health Program.
Reagan’s Stand on Abortion
To the Editor:
Re “How My Father, Ronald Reagan, Grappled With Abortion,” by Patti Davis (Opinion guest essay, May 23):
I have no reason to doubt Ms. Davis’s description of her father’s grappling with abortion based on his own moral views. However, to ignore the possibility (likelihood?) that there were political calculations present in his shifting mind-set seems disingenuous. He was, after all, a politician and certainly aware of the growing political influence of the Christian right.
Bill Gilbert
Franklin, Mass.
