Key takeaways:
- Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, ending the decades-long constitutional right to abortion.
- DAOs like TheChoiceDAO are springing up to collect crypto donations for abortion providers.
- Some activists saw the crypto industry’s lacklustre response to the end of Roe as a missed opportunity.
Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court this week, ending the decades-long constitutional right to abortion and making legal abortions unavailable in large parts of the United States.
Crypto Fundraising After End of Roe Tepid
In a few days, crypto community members formed decentralised autonomous organisations (DAO) and non-fungible token (NFT) projects to raise donations in cryptocurrency for pro-choice groups.
ChoiceDAO, whose primary contributors include the creator of Girls Who Code and core contributors to ConstitutionDAO and Ukraine DAO, aims to raise $1 million for reproductive rights groups. LegalAbortion.eth, a UnicornDAO project, provides potential donors with a wallet to which they can send crypto contributions, which will subsequently be converted to cash and distributed to seven preselected pro-choice organisations. CowgirlDAO is selling an NFT collection to earn $3 million to raise funds for abortion access.
The crypto community’s reaction has been modest, and compared to the crypto support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, donations to pro-choice campaigns have been little so far.
Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian feminist activist organisation Pussy Riot and the head of UnicornDAO, said that the crypto community should speak out more against the loss of bodily autonomy in the wake of Roe’s overturn.
“I’ve seen people who identify themselves as libertarians and support people’s rights and non-invasion of governments into people’s rights and people’s bodies – they support things like Canadian truck drivers, but now are being silent about what’s happening to women,” said Tolokonnikova.
“I want to encourage people to be more empathetic, because I know that the space still disproportionately consists of mostly men. Maybe it’s more difficult for them to get connected to a problem that does not concern them directly.”
‘My body, my choice’: Anger over US Supreme Court abortion ruling. Image: David McNew
A Missed Opportunity For Crypto?
Some privacy and crypto activists, like Lia Holland of Fight for the Future, saw the crypto industry’s lacklustre response to the end of Roe as a missed opportunity to demonstrate the practical value of crypto.
“This may be the moment where the rubber meets the road on the promises that crypto and blockchain make,” said Holland, the Fight for the Future’s campaigns and communications director. “We have not truly seen DAOs – or crypto, quite frankly – in the U.S. prove themselves as tools for marginalized people to fight oppression directly and evade state surveillance on the scale that surveillance is about to be conducted.”
Holland said that the value of Web3 might extend well beyond fundraising in the case of abortion access.
“Digital rights activists are concerned that we will see similar de-platforming, both in terms of financial and essential health information and support that we saw in the wake of the passage of FOSTA-SESTA,” Holland said, referring to a controversial law meant to combat sex trafficking, which prompted a wave of censorship and de-platforming at Web2 companies.
The suppression of abortion-related material by Big Tech has already started. Facebook and Instagram have taken action against postings advertising abortion medication by removing them and banning the offenders. Meta (FB), the parent company of Facebook, informed staff on Friday that they were not permitted to discuss the ruling publicly on Slack.
Though Holland does not downplay the importance of funding, the value might come from having a location to exchange information and give help without the risks of Web2 monitoring and de-platforming.
“There could be – and I think, so far has been – an opportunity lost [for the crypto community] to respond to a moment like this by saying, ‘Bitcoin fixes this’ or what have you, which is essentially the conversation that happened when OnlyFans said they were going to stop hosting sex workers under pressure from payment platforms,” Holland said.
She continued, “We need the signal of crypto to be acting strongly and responsibly, to provide real utility for the people and organizations that very well may be about to need it the most we’ve ever seen in the history of the internet.”
ChoiceDAO, for its part, aspires to become more than a crypto fundraising mechanism someday.
A spokeswoman for the DAO said that the idea is to kickstart a flywheel of engagement that will lead the DAO to continue to develop and work on critical projects in the future.
A concentration on pure capital disregards the community, which is in many ways more powerful than money.