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**MAY 3, 2022**
On TAP
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**** Advice to Progressive Menfolk
What to say after you find out that the Supreme Court is going to
overturn
**Roe v. Wade**
Comrades, friends: At the risk of gender-essentializing and
woman-splaining, I feel obliged in this difficult moment to offer a few
gentle words of advice. These may save you from episodes of verbal
fumbling and failed
**politesse**. They may even preserve you from physical harm. Perhaps
most important, they will save those of us who felt, in the first
moments after the Politico
****story broke
about Justice Alito's draft majority opinion in the crucial abortion
case
**Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health**, like we might literally be sucked
from our homes into a vast whooshing vortex of howling chaos and rage,
from the burden of treating you with solicitous kindness at a time when
that is simply more than we can manage.
So here goes:
1.
**Don't be surprised.** Don't you dare be surprised.
2.
**Don't say, "Well, why do you care so much?"** And don't then add
your choice of corollary: "You're a lesbian/you're too old to get
pregnant/you want children/you're responsible and would never need an
abortion ..."
3.
**Don't be snarky, or jocose**
**.** Don't get the better part of the argument. It's too soon. It
may be too soon for many years yet. Besides, what good does it do? Whose
abortion does it pay for?
4.
**Don't be optimistic**
**.** I for one will simply start shrieking if I hear any version of
"Woo-hoo! They just handed the Dems the presidency in 2024!" Or "Well,
that ends the filibuster debate-at last!" First of all, there's no
reason to believe that any of that is definitive. Second, it's better
to treat this one for the time being like a forbidding sodden cloud with
no silver lining. Please.
5.
**Do respect our grief**
**.** You don't have to understand it but you really do need to
respect it. Stand aside and let us have it, as you would if one of our
parents had died, or if the Supreme Court had just picked up the
inadequate charter of our rights and crumpled it into a little ball.
Like that.
6.
**Do tread lightly**
**.** "How are you?" might be a nice start. And, for that matter, a nice
end. Treat your friends who think of themselves as women, your friends
who work in the reproductive rights and justice movements, your friends
who are not straight white men and are staring into the con-law abyss,
the way you would, say, someone dear to you who was experiencing a
sudden-onset, crippling, nauseating, head-pounding insufferable
migraine. (That reminds me, I think I'm getting a crippling,
nauseating, head-pounding insufferable migraine.)
7.
**Listen, don't talk**
**.** Even those of us who totally, 100 percent saw this coming, who
said from podiums and in Zoom talks that this Court would indeed, yes,
almost certainly, overturn
**Roe**, still have a lot to process intellectually and emotionally. Our
words might be a little incoherent, or repetitive, as we work it
through. This is big. Keep listening.
8.
**Give it time**
**.** The Politico leak has shaken an awful lot of people out of their
denial. But there are four more Kübler-Ross stages of grief yet to go.
Eventually, I guess we'll get to "acceptance," although I sure hope
that isn't the same thing as getting comfortable with defeat.
We will learn more. We will make plans. Something will shift. But not
right away. Right away, it's just going to hurt.
****
~ FELICIA KORNBLUH
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