To the Editor:

So far, so-called “women’s issues,” which are really everyone’s issues, have been missing from the debates. I want to see the candidates discuss: women’s reproductive health and freedom; the wage gap; domestic violence; the #MeToo movement; body shaming; underrepresentation on boards, in corporate upper management, in academia and in STEM fields; child care availability; and widespread cultural misogyny.

After all, we do make up more than half the population.

Diane Kravif

Los Angeles

To the Editor:

International relations have been consistently ignored. President Trump has seriously disrupted longstanding treaty commitments, agreements and positive relationships with many of our allies, while fawning over dictators. The United States is perceived as unreliable and untrustworthy. How would the candidates improve our foreign relations?

Jeanne Pierrette Dross

Albany

To the Editor:

Having lost a son to heroin use, I want to ask the following of the candidates: Our “war on drugs,” declared by President Nixon in 1971 , is a dismal failure. The historian Alfred McCoy wrote recently in The Nation that “ instead of reducing the traffic, the drug war has actually helped stimulate that ninefold increase in global opium production and a parallel surge in U.S. heroin users, from just 68,000 in 1970 to 886,000 in 2017.” Drug deaths reached 192 a day in 2017, with many of them between the ages of 12 and 25. That is a silent Parkland … every day. What is your solution to this catastrophe?

Bill Williams

New York

To the Editor:

One egregious omission to date from the Democratic debates is the future of Social Security, which according to recent projections will face a critical funding shortfall by 2034. This threatens the well-being of millions of Americans. Efforts to discredit and undermine the program, whether through benefit cuts or privatization, will ultimately erode the nation’s entire social welfare system.