I just read an essay asserting that Sen. Susan Collins should leave the country if she supports the Brett Kavanaugh nomination.

Maybe she better, because this would be a total betrayal of what she claimed she stood for the one and only time I voted for her. If she defies us, her constituents, if she votes against the best interests of our state, our country, allowing a corrupt, fascist president to choose his own judge and jury, she should never be welcome in Maine, or anywhere in the free world again.

I am a woman old enough to remember what was endured before abortion became a legal choice. I am a woman who availed herself of that legal choice but had a mother who almost died without it.

I am a woman who remembers when birth control was illegal for both married and unmarried women, and when it was available only to married women.

I remember holding the hands of my friends when they endured a back-alley abortion, and I was grateful that they did not end up on a slab in a coroner’s office like my mother almost did.

I am a woman who all my life has fought so no daughter of mine, no granddaughter of mine, no aunt, cousin or niece of mine, or any woman would ever again not have autonomy over her own body. Now in my 70s, certainly beyond such concerns for myself, I fear for those for whom it is a concern, and what it would mean to all of us to lose it.

Susan Collins must pay a heavy price for a betrayal of this magnitude, for she also is a woman. Such a betrayal is worse when it is one of our own.

Diana Lovejoy

Buckfield


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