Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade, put a spotlight on reproductive rights. The decision reminded us that reproductive rights, while at times broadly defined, can be giveth and taketh away. Reproductive rights, like any other legal rights, are whatever we, as a society, say they are. The folks in power (with a modicum of input from those not in power) define the law.

In ancient times, one could be executed for almost anything under Draco’s Code, including stealing cabbage or another man’s apples. Draco was the 7th Century Greek legislator and the first to introduce a written penal code, hence the origin of the commonly used legal term, Draconian. Before Draco, Greece’s laws were either settled by blood feud or through a series of oral laws passed down from generation to generation.

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