Hello, everyone,

After getting a great deal of negative feedback on some of the standard "secular" anarchist subs on this topic, I wanted to know if this subreddit was more comfortable with finding pro-choice views about abortion.

I also haven't studied religious anarchists enough, that I'm really not sure where to do further reading. There are genuinely tough questions to answer that I admittedly just didn't know. Please, I'm very open to recommendations.

For instance, I don't know how abortion is either supposed to entirely fall away (for the most part), or in what sense a democratic anarchist society could "enforce" against abortion.

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My argument was quite simple. The traditional apologetics for the permissibility of abortion assume a framing of ethics in private property terms. Radical leftists already oppose self-ownership in economic terms.

1. I pointed out that we do not own either our bodies, or our productive potentials. Rather, we are those things. Additionally, the "my body, my choice" framing--not only assumes that women "own" their bodies like private property, but it also that "potentiality" of a child is disregarded by pro-choice logic--when in fact our "productive" capacities and their very ability to be exploited are more grounded in potentiality--a metaphysical reality that's inconvenient, because it also means x

2. The forms of feminism which undergird being pro-choice are often neo-liberalized feminism which seems strongly to turn women into self-sufficient workers, no less than men.

It's the same reality which leads young people to think sex-work is "empowering", when the only difference between a pornographer and someone sex trafficked is initial willingness, and also the "temporary" and "transactional" nature of sex work: the person is renting themselves out, rather than selling themselves.

3. In some sense, I tried to argue that many contemporary forms of capitalism are simply attempts to bring women into the workforce regardless of an individual woman's vocational calling; especially since the 70s, as inflation (particularly the housing market) has required an extra "self-autonomous person" to keep anything like the traditional "American dream" alive.

I argued that pregnancy is properly speaking, never something "forced" (in the case of sexually consenting adults). Receiving a child is always a free gift, and it's part of women's power to receive that gift that part and parcel of femininity; and that chalking that up to annoying externality of sexual relations, or something open to bad timing, is in fact profoundly anti-woman.

4. There's also been a commodification of sex and sexuality in culture. As Rene Girard and other mimetic theorists have pointed out, desire is very largely learned. Sexualizing relations--and doing so young--along with pornography.

This last point is strongly missed by secular, anarchists, I feel. They focus all their energy on ways in which the state and our economic realities pervert our desires, that the fail to see how secularism is filled with pathological mimetic desire. Placing all of our woes at the feet of the state and capitalism seems too narrow.

Whatever exactly St. Paul was up to, his motion of the fallen principalities and powers seemed more broad.

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To me, it's very important to wrap this up in an authentic discussion of freedom. Freedom is not simply the ability to exert arbitrary fiats of choice. True freedom is the ability to choose well and in accordance with your nature.

Yet, this freedom is very much creative and even indeterminate to an extent, but it's informed by ones nature. Having promiscuous sex is really a form of bondage of the will--not an expression of it.

Influenced by capitalism, people false take themselves to be free when they can choose among competing products or options. The less constrained that selection process is, the more "free" they are. However, that confused "freedom" with "arbitrary selective power".

Besides class and hierarchy, there are all sorts of ways that the learned nature of desire strongly distorts what we actually want. I'd suggest that a great deal of pornography use and unprotected sex is the productive of a will in bondage to low resolution passions--a kind of check of limit on what we actually wish to do--and so is a form of unfreedom.

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But then, I'm new to religious anarchism. What type of social structures can help here? What adjustments to anarchism do we need to make to accommodate these points? Does this show, in one way, the necessity of the church in liberation?

Do we need to bring a broader notion of the principalities and powers that control society into discussion? Also, also, how do we talk about a more robust form of freedom without falling to an authoritarianism trap?

And while secular anarchist solutions would remove many motivates to commit abortion, presumably people will still have them.

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How do we make progress? Can you all provide sources of religious anarchists that have dealt with this issue?

I recently created a Christian anarchist server. If anyone is interested in building a community come join me. So far we only have 2 people. Also, any advice helps!

Here's where I'm coming from:

I don't even love labels but I am one who could be pretty well described as a Christian Anarchist Universalist. To put a little meat on the bones of that: I'm something in the ballpark of an anarchist (even though I'm not really actively trying to overthrow the state) because I just want people to stop trying to grab control of the reins of power as their primary way of enacting good in the world. There are ways of doing good without wielding power over others, so we should probably just try to do that. Then the "Universalist" bit is basically me saying I am very, very skeptical of the idea of eternal conscious torment and honestly kinda to the point that I have trust issues with anyone who does believe that. That may be wrong of me I guess but I'm just being honest.

Both of these things are important to me to the point that I think I would have a hard time attending a church where these beliefs are not dominant or at least well-represented belief. That's making it really hard to get together with other Christians at the moment because these things are of course relatively fringe in Christianity. So I guess I'm just curious A. are there others out there at this intersection or a similar intersection of things? (I don't necessarily care if you use these specific labels, only if you resonate with the ideas) and B. where would you recommend I go to try to find community as a person at this intersection (I'm talking in-person-meeting or at least zoom-meeting community).

If nothing like this exists (and to be honest I kinda suspect it does not), does anyone wanna start a weird little informal Anarchist-Universalist church with me?

In this first booklet of the Situationist Observatory, an article that will perhaps interest you: "Hijack

religion", as well as the article "Spirituality and

spectacularity".

Here is the link to the Booklet.