Over the past month or so, a debate has been renewed about our culture. Oh, did you think it was a debate about abortion? Not really….oh sure, with the Planned Parenthood videos coming out, the topic has been abortion, but really the debate is about our culture. To understand this, I need to try and present a broad outline of a historical concept of civic society.
Since the dawn of recorded human life, what we call the cradle of civilization around four great river basins (five actual rivers), society has struggled to figure out the best way, or at least a good way, to create a civic society. In my European History class, we keep this concept central in our study of the rise of civilizations. Early on, we compare the early law codes. On another day, we investigate how women were treated in various early civic societies. These investigations are a part uncovering what kind of rules and mores a civic society should have. The students and I will talk about the comparisons, and then usually talk about a comparison of that time to our own.
When we move West in the Mediterranean, we study the unique attempts that emerged in the small city-states of Athens and Rome, at roughly the same time in 500BC. Both attempt something hitherto unknown, allowing the people to have more of a say in the dealings of the civic society. Both attempts actually took over 100 years (nearly 200 in Rome’s case) to fully emerge as the Athenian Democracy and Roman Republic that we know of.
In all of these cases, in fact I would argue in ALL of human existence, what is at stake is a wrestling match over how to properly balance rights. Or, another way to say it is that every civic society has to find a way to decide which of the many rights a person might have should be more important than another. No where was there ever any suggestion that somehow all the rights are equal and balanced. Everyone, from the earliest Egyptians or nomads descending into the Attica peninsula or on the Pacific Coast of the Andes Mountains, knew that the rights were held in some sort of a precarious balance, but not one that was equal.
You can see this as you look at any civic society’s punishment codes. Were all rights equal, then all moments when those rights were broken would end up in an equal level of punishment. They aren’t, because the rights are not all equal.
And yet, throughout almost every society, one right has always gone to the top. That is the right to life. It isn’t always called this; John Locke in the later 1600s, writing in England, might be the first to proclaim it in those terms. However, with any fair study of these various civic societies, the right to life has dominated in culture. There are a few exceptions, and those exceptions almost always deal with either babies or with strangers. Let’s focus on the babies for that is where the issue for our own country becomes visible.
One could offer that perhaps in Sparta, with its concept of having the Council Elders judging each baby (with those considered ill-formed being rejected and then killed) or the Phoenician cities (like Carthage and Tyre) with its open concept of child-sacrifice to Molech were the exceptions. Dr Josephine Quinn of Oxford University’s Faculty of Classics wrote “Child abandonment was common in the ancient world, and human sacrifice is found in many historical societies, but child sacrifice is relatively uncommon.”
In both places, however, I would offer that they still held to the right to life being on top of all the rights with the exception of their babies. They had laws and punishments against murder, for instance. In other words, they chose a unique civic decision that broke with the more common belief that the right to life was most sacred in all cases. Here’s where modern USA culture comes under scrutiny. As the Professor noted, such civic decisions to attack the children, society’s most vulnerable, was unique among civic society. And, such actions were condemned by their neighbors.
In other words, the decision to move right to life for children down in the balance of rights was not accepted by other civic societies. And yet, in the 20th century, the United States…the supposed bastion of protecting rights…has actually joined the exceptions. Here, then, we come the connection with abortion.
What we are told in America is that the right for a woman to choose what happens to a baby in her womb, including choosing to kill it, has now taken the historically unique position of being a more important right than that of the right to life by the other human….the one growing in her womb.
Let me stress this—in the entire history of the world, rarely does any society move the right to life down in the balance of rights…and yet here in the USA, we have done precisely that as it relates to babies. We know there is this balance of rights and that some rights are more important than others. We know, for instance, that a person has something of a right to food, and yet that right for sustenance does not supersede another person’s right to property…thus the hungry person cannot steal food from another. Or, we know that one has a right to property, but not to claim another human as property, hence denying their right to liberty. Or, the right to property does not normally mean that someone can kill another person about said property….that person’s right to life still takes precedence in some cases.
Yet, with a baby, comes the torturous logic that somehow here, a woman’s right to choose has a greater value than life. To be clear, a woman does have every right to choose when and where she has sex. Yet, once that woman has chosen to have sex, she then must accept the potential consequences of a baby. She made a choice; that she now regrets the decision should not allow her to deny the right to life for the other human growing in her womb.
Of course to navigate around this, many anti-right to life (dare I say “right to death”) abortion supporters choose other torturous logic that what is inside the womb isn’t alive. Or, it isn’t alive enough. The failure of logic here is so obvious that to really discuss it is silly. Ask any woman who is pregnant what they are carrying and no woman or man says “oh, it’s just a bunch of cells” or “it’s my fetus.” Even if it were “just a bunch of cells,” everyone knows from our friends in the environmental movement that even the smallest life form is worth saving, and we will spend millions to attempt to protect those various life forms. Or, ask the space fans who are eagerly waiting on information from our various deep space satellites or the Mars Rover…what would they say if NASA reported finding clear evidence of “a bunch of cells,” even alien cells we had never encountered before? Would they just brush it off or loudly, happily proclaim that “life has been discovered on” another planet? We all know the answer there.
I personally believe that everyone alive in the USA today knows this to be true, including all of the abortion supporters. A baby is alive in the womb of a woman. I’ve had several deep heart-to-heart discussions on the topic where, privately, off the record, each person will admit it is a baby in the womb. But, as soon as the logic becomes visible in their minds, they banish it in order to protect the thing they wish to protect more…placing the woman’s right higher.
Look, as a historian, I do get some of this. Women have fought valiantly for centuries to be equal players in civic society. Abigail Adams asked John for his support for the ladies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were heartbroken when African-American leaders would not support their inclusion in the 15th Amendment discussion about voting rights. Coming more vocally to life in the 1960s and 1970s, women’s rights leaders were eager to find a way for a woman to have even more control of when she had children thus being more accepted in the work force. I get all of that.
However, that journey notwithstanding, our country has made a horrible decision to side with the very small minority of civic societies that has moved the right to life down, as it relates to babies. The women’s right movement is not made stronger with abortion legal, it is rather made morally weaker as it continues to support the allowance to kill a baby in the womb.
We made that terrible decision in 1973. We are not stuck with it. As a society, we need to determine now to NOT join the other outliers such as Carthage. Yes, we should also be clear to defend women and their right to equally participate in society. We should and must do more to help the widow, the fatherless, the abandoned woman. But the ill of a weak male who abandons his pregnant girlfriend or who tries to use sex as a power play over a woman does not, should not, MUST NOT let us lose our moral compass in regard to the right to life for a baby.