While I have always voted for Democratic candidates, I do disagree with one main issue usually favored by Democrats, namely, so-called "abortion rights."
Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas was historically the last anti-abortion Democratic incumbent in the House of Representatives, but lost his primary election and subsequently retired from office. The Democraic Party was not always so openly supportive of so-called "abortion rights," but in recent years, that seems to have increasingly represented the party's stance. Outspoken pro-life Democrats are now quite few at any level of government. I do favor most Democratic Party positions, but abortion is an important exception. I don't just talk the talk but also walk the walk. I have children by both birth and adoption, raising them in part as a single parent.
I don't oppose voluntary sterilization or contraception, but also don't consider abortion a "human right," as I believe each human life--yours and mine--began at conception, when our gender and all other characteristics had been decided and we were first set in motion to live and grow. If our birth mother had had an abortion, we never would have been born. We would have had no right to life. Our life would have ended right then and there. You might even say that we had been killed in utero.
All persons spring from 2 birth parents, which does not give those parents the right to eliminate them, either in the womb or after birth. None of us ever asked to be conceived and born, but once our life had started, as it alwasy does in the womb, we had the right to go on living, just like anyone else. Nor do I support the death penalty. Let nature take its course. Nature has given us pleasure via sex so that humans would continue to be conceived and to be born. We can always kill each other at any stage of development, but we should never facilitate nor condone doing that. So, yes, I do oppose both abortion and the death penalty--supporting "Life from womb to tomb."
No longer is a birth to an unmarried woman stigmatized. It is not so easy to be a single parent or even a married parent, I would say, after having been both during my lifetime. But I am grateful for my all children by either birth or adoption, having already lost an adoptive son and a Cuban foster son. Every life, every living person, at any stage of development, should be encouraged and helped to go on living. Death will come to us all soon enough, but all of us. even those whose birth parents didn't want them, have a right to life.
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It had occurred to me after that last post on the blog, when I was unable to erase the 3 round black objects that had shown up there since they did not appear on my draft, that I could then have copied and pasted that whole draft onto a word document. Then pasted that word document back on the blog to see if the 3 black objects still showed up again. I don't know how they ever got there to begin with. It's like interference I had once before from the blog gods and goddesses, who seemed quite blind, deaf, and immune to any appeal.
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My late former husband was blind, but went on to win a MacArthur Award. He won that award about 2 or 3 years after he divorced me to marry his younger office sweetheart. But the award was based on his lifetime of work, to which I had long contributed. I always had wanted him to get all the credit, so had stayed completely in the background.
Here again, our family was with President Jimmy Carter before my husbnad had left us. My son Jon with whom I live now us the little boy I am holding onto there. He was hyperactive as a child.
The MacArthur Fellow: Thomas C. (Tom) Joe won a prestigious MacArthur Fellows Award (often called a "genius grant") in 1986. He was an influential social policy expert who helped develop the nation's Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program and the earned-income tax credit.
And who had helped him develop those programs? It was Yours Truly, although we were no longer together when he actually was granted the award. I suspect that many wives, like me, who had been divorced by their husbands after more than 2 decades of marriage, had contributed to their former husbands' success, only in my case, all the more so, because my husband was totally blind and had never held a job before our marriage. I married him at age 21 with no members of my family in attendance at our wedding. But just when my extended family was finally starting to accept my husband, he eloped to Las Vegas with a young woman in his office to divorce me and marry her all in a single day, And she had helped him to completely empty our joint bank accounts, leaving me with zero dollars for my own family.
The kids and I at first had started deliverng phone books from a wagon just to earn cash for groceries. I did eventually receive child support but rejected any offers of spousal support, because I did not want to feel beholden to my ex-spouse, even after all the sacrifices I had made to support his career. I did have a subsequent serious marriage proposal, but hesitated to marry again. Readers already know that when my ex died in 1999, I was not mentioned in his obituary nor invited to his funeral, but showed up anyway much to the apparent surprise of his then-widow.
After my ex-husband's death, I joined the Peace Corps as a medical volunteer in Honduras in 2000 and went on to write 2 books whose titles appear above. At age 88, I now live in West Virginia, with my son Jon, adopted as a baby from Colombia. My last humanitarian trip to Honduras was in June 2024, as reported on this blog. Now my passport has expired and I don't know about ever going back.
I recently attended my great-grandson's high school graduation in Florida, as was reported here. So what's next? I don't really know. Now I just take each day as it comes, with no particular plan in mind. I am just glad to still be alive.
