Human rights are almost inseparable from the contemporary common-sense notion of civilization as a morally superior state of human society. In this article I argue that they are equally central to the concept of civilization as a reversible process of increasing social interdependence and cohesion as theorized by Norbert Elias. However, according to the theoretical statement included in the introduction to this special issue, the civilizing effect of human rights is accompanied by their inseparable decivilizing potential. Which of the two will be the stronger in any state of global human figuration depends on two principal factors: the resilience of human interdependencies (especially the prospects of widening the circles of intergroup identification) and the strength of centrifugal forces in the figuration, constituting a reduction of integrative effects of human rights and increasing their disintegrative influence. By tracing the emergence of global legal governance of abortion within the framework of human rights, I focus specifically on one aspect of it that is crucial for the interconnection of civilizing and decivilizing effects in this case: the status of the right to abortion law between women’s rights and human rights, and, by extension, the relationship between women’s rights and human rights in general. Drawing on the much-cited work of Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, I the established-outsiders dynamics behind the old debate on whether women’s rights are human rights or not, the consequences of which keep reverberating until today.
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