This week the Supreme Court rolled back an important human right: the right for women to unequivocally control their own bodies, the right to never have to give birth against their will.
To me and many others, it felt like a huge step backwards. So what does that mean, to move backwards, culturally and socially?
It’s a trap to view civilization and culture in terms of linear progress. Human history and pre-history includes thousands of diverse cultures, each contributing unique and valuable ways of speaking, thinking, moving, preparing food, celebrating, crafting, etc. Many cultures and civilizations have fallen or disappeared that were more civilized, by many measures (quality of life, cooperativeness, personal freedoms) than any human system of living that exists today.
But it’s also a trap to not acknowledge that some ways of living are more civilized than others. Civil rights–the degree to which at all members of a society have equal freedoms and protections under the law–is a worthy metric. So is nonviolent conflict resolution, the degree to which we can coexist and mediate our disagreements without stabbing or shooting each other.
This morning I watched a video on YouTube about a pride of lions, six brothers, that came to dominate a large swatch of territory in South Africa. They did so by hunting buffalo, slaying their rival males, killing the cubs of those rival males, and impregnating the females. As the lions aged, they died, one by one, mostly from gruesome injuries inflicted by prides of younger, stronger lions.
Totally natural behavior, for lions.
Human civilization, at its core, is an attempt to move away from this “natural” way of living, to introduce more safety and security, to create and distribute wealth and abundance, to create and enforce the social constructs we call “rights”: the ability to go through life with certain entitlements (food, shelter, relative safety, freedom, access to education, access to healthcare, etc.).
But there will always be people who feel that we are too civilized. People who feel that the strong should dominate the weak, and that only some privileged members of a society should be afforded full rights (the right to vote, the right to healthcare, the right to not be murdered by police).
So while human civilization, in its broadest sense, is a tree with a million branches, a marvel of sociocultural evolutionary complexity, there are also linear metrics by which we can and should judge progress. Technology and science can help us pursue more civilized ways of living by increasing our understanding of the world and making us more powerful and wealthy, but the important metrics are ethical ones. How are we helping and protecting each other? How are we collectively improving our lives?
When we choose love, when we choose acceptance, when we choose equal rights under the law, when we create and implement greater human rights, we move civilization forward.
We progress.
Anonymous
There are many things people are forced to do against their will – mandatory vaccinations, paying taxes, going to school, wearing clothes in public etc. so I don’t see why it’s weird to you when women are no longer allowed to kill their babies in some states.
J.D. Moyer
Hello Anonymous. A fetus is not a baby, and I suspect you already know that. It was already against the law in all states to abort a viable fetus. The legal requirement to pay taxes or wear clothes is not equivalent to forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term (or to seek unsafe or highly costly alternatives).
What you might not understand is that outlawing abortion might lead to the actual murdering of babies. Do you think all women who are forced to give birth will find the perfect family to adopt, or fall in love with their baby? There is such a thing as unwanted children in this world, and tragic, awful things happened before abortions were widely available. If you are really against murdering babies, you should be supporting access to abortion.
Abortion is healthcare. Women who have abortions need them, they don’t want them. Keeping abortions legal, while at the same time preventing the number of abortions needed (with sex education, increasing access to birth control, preventing rape, and creating a culture of consent) is the best way to reduce harm. I have no issue with anyone who wants to reduce the number of abortions because they find the procedure to be morally wrong. But removing access to healthcare and taking away reproductive rights is the wrong way to go about it.