GUEST COLUMN: New Mexico is prioritizing ideology over children’s lives

My daughter almost died this summer — and New Mexico’s government let it happen.

In June, she had a life-threatening seizure after a doctor prescribed her a medication for six years longer than she should have been taking it. But because there is no critical care in our area of New Mexico — or almost any area of New Mexico, really — we had to fly her out to El Paso.

And what is our government focused on instead? Bathroom signs.

While families like mine fight to stay alive, and as our state’s health care structure collapses, our state government is prioritizing gender ideology.

House Bill 7 — now law — mandates that public bodies, including public schools, protect access to gender transition, including social, hormonal, and surgical transition. Public bodies that fail to comply can be fined $5,000.

You’d think this issue would be at the top of New Mexicans’ minds, seeing how much energy our government has spent on it. But here’s what most people don’t realize: Only 15% of New Mexicans know this law, per recent polling from Independent Women, and 88% of New Mexicans do not want teachers and nurses to be able to transition children behind their parents’ backs. That includes 87% of Hispanic voters like me. Yet HB 7 flies in the faces of these voters. And more than half of the state — 54% — have never even heard about the bill.

The luxury concerns of radical elites have caused destruction nationally as is, but especially when our state lacks critical health infrastructure, our Legislature and governor can’t afford to waste resources on mandatory pronoun announcements. Instead of working to get us the doctors and nurses and functional schools and child care we need, they give us policies the majority of us oppose and, in doing so, deprive us of basic parental rights in schools.

As a mother, nothing infuriates me more than watching the government claim to “protect kids” while letting them suffer. Several children have died in New Mexico’s foster care system recently, including one 16-year-old boy who committed suicide earlier this year, despite the state having promised that it would respond to a 2020 class action lawsuit that claimed the state’s foster care system “lock[s] New Mexico’s foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.” In the months following the boy’s suicide, a court-appointed arbiter found that the state “has not made significant progress in its efforts to come into compliance with the settlement’s terms … Children and youth remain at imminent risk of harm and time is of the essence.”

This — not bathrooms — is what we’re worried about in Deming. Will our kids make it home safely from school? Will the doctor they saw last month still be in practice tomorrow? Will children in the state’s custody be taken care of? Unfortunately, the state has needlessly added to our concerns and forced us to be worried about whether or not our children’s schools will be transitioning our children behind our backs.

Parents like me are not extremists. We are the 88% — the quiet, tired majority who value family, safety, and the right to raise our children without interference from activist lawmakers. I love New Mexico. I was born and raised here. But our leaders are betraying the very people who elected them. Their negligence put my daughter’s life at risk — and she is not alone.

If we don’t reclaim our priorities now, we will lose more than just hospitals and doctors. We will lose our children to a system that sees them as political props instead of people.