Roe v. Wade v. Cyborg
Abortion is a matter of agency, choice, and social complexity. It expands one’s ability to choose how they want to participate in their own bodily autonomy and genetic succession on an individual level. When we take this to the intensity of anarcho-transhumanism, it then isn’t merely a matter of cis women’s rights but something far more. Legal rights and who gets them are a state mechanism, to be given and taken at the discretion of an elite minority. Rights are only given to a population that is actively testing, pushing, and threatening the power of that minority. Since these rights act as concessions in exchange for mass pacification, once this pacification happens, the state then works to remove those rights.
For the anarchist, the matter of abortion isn’t about it as a legal right and focusing on only one group of people having that choice, but rather it’s about something deeper and broader. The liberation and extension of it in regards to one’s own body, no matter if they identify as a woman or not, and actively fighting for that beyond just seeking state protections for cis women. The state cannot protect that which it constantly seeks to take and only gives when it has to. The fight for abortion then becomes a fight for free association and how deep one’s bodily freedom goes into that.
Abortion, then, to the anarcho-transhumanist, becomes a matter of using technologies, old, new, and emerging, to then expand this. It is then up to anyone who wants a womb to decide whether or not to have their own children, not just those born with wombs. As you can see, the matter of abortion is extended with each new radicality. The centrist liberal only thinks of abortion, generally, in matters of rights for cis women. Abortion, according to anarchists, is a matter of liberation for anyone born with a womb. The anarcho-transhumanist then thinks of abortion as a matter of liberation for anyone who wants a womb. Well, not even just that. Let’s allow people to have kids without going through the hassle of having a womb to begin with. The point of all this is to show that anarchist transhumanists want to push this topic beyond its present biological constraints. Think of it as not just “my body, my choice” but more bodies and more choices.
Criminalizing abortion from this perspective is about enforcing coercion, control, and social rigidity. This is a blatant violation of morphological freedom that is trying to prevent, limit, and stop humanity, and more specifically, you as a person, from becoming more in alignment with your own personal development through the choices available to you. Basically, this enforces a biological status quo on you, the essence of bio-conservatism, which furthers its grasp by controlling not just reproduction but also gender identity and presentation. This is done through framing femininity, motherhood, and childbirth as a singular identity that conforms to a rigid set of social relations. What Being calls a socio-monoculture, which enforces the aforementioned essentialist view of biology but also identity.
So then, the fight for abortion is the fight against those who deny not just biological participation but also participation in identity and forcing any pregnant person (or merely anyone with a womb) to become a slave to their bodies and to society. No matter the circumstances or reasons. Putting you into an intricate cage that is made from multiple layers of oppression. The escape then comes from bringing to light this complex assortment of intersecting hierarchies, rather than by reducing or narrowing the focus of the issue. Because the attack on abortion is really a larger assault on us as cyborgs.