Kristi Coulter posted the following resonant comments on Facebook after RBG’s passing…
Quick Q for all the straight, non-disabled white guys who are posting “RIP America” and “Here comes Gilead” and otherwise rolling over and playing dead tonight: what’s it like to be so fucking weak? No really, I’m curious. I wouldn’t know, because like most women and POC, I wouldn’t have so much as made it out of high school if I allowed myself to be half as helpless in the face of adversity as you’re acting. In private chats, women are strategizing about how to play hardball over RBG’s seat while you’re out here dropping Handmaid’s Tale references as though a) it’s a foregone conclusion and b) you have *any right* to be making fan fiction out of something that would happen to us, not you. RBG’s death is bad news for all of us, but you are (now more than ever!) the safest and most powerful people in America. Consider acting like it and doing something more useful, or at least less shameful, than standing on the sidelines giving dramatic monologues in which you lack all agency.
Addendum: an influx of ‘but I am a straight, non-disabled white guy and I’m not like this’ has entered the comments. Yes. This is why the first sentence of the post contains a *descriptive clause* identifying specific behaviors I observed among a subset of the demographic. If you weren’t making defeatist and doom-porn comments on social media last night, then the post is *not about you.* Clauses: they are worth understanding.
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Unlike many, even most of my friends here, I don’t see RBG’s death as putting my right to bodily autonomy in jeopardy. The fact that it hinged on one person means it was in terrible jeopardy all along. The fact that *nine people* stand between me and the multi-decade legislative siege against my autonomy has always been madness. Not that much has changed, including the reality that my body is inherently ungovernable and I will continue to do whatever I want with it for the rest of my life.
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Or when going through an abortion together doesn’t mean a few hours for you in a clinic waiting room, but several days of being physically present and/or emotionally available while she self-manages the abortion at home via safe medications that your state has made it a crime to possess.
Or what it means for you if she’s caught and asked to name her co-conspirator(s). (GOP legislatures often seek to portray women who have abortions as victims, after all.) Maybe you’re married to someone else, you or have a job where a criminal conviction would be disqualifying, or the relationship was a casual or new one, or you just quite understandably don’t want to be charged with a crime. How will you navigate that possibility? Will you seek to avoid a paper trail? Will you say she’s lying? Or will you own up to your role in the crime?
It’s good to get out ahead of the ethical and practical dilemmas you might face, so if they happen in real life you’ll already have a mental framework for working through them. (And Griswold is on the chopping block after Roe, so a future thought exercise on the impact of state contraception bans might be useful too.)