Dear Editor,
This is in response to Lesley Fortriede's letter from Jan. 23. Disregarding the galls that knot around the definition of childness or fetusness (e.g. does the definition of "human being" include the concept of being born?), what struck me dumb was her stating, "This is not about the right of a woman to do what she wants with her body. A woman involved in this type of situation, in my view, loses the right to do what she wants with her own body when she chooses to have sex."
What disturbs me about such a statement is this notion that personal choices somehow forfeit basic human rights - and to avoid being pigeonholed into the crowd who like to use such phrases without backing them up with examples, I offer this one: The basic human right to bodily self determination. Unfortunately, as stated, Ms. Fortriede's statement is a comment on "human" rights - that is, the rights about what we consider to be "human" - not civil or legal ones, and herein lies the danger.
Aside from the obviously flippant abuses of such a statement (I can picture Jon Stewart's headline spoof on "The Daily Show" sounding something like this: "Women's rights exist only until the moment of coitus. After that, it's a free for all!"), the serious implications are that our "basic" human rights (as we define them in this country anyway) are indeed a privilege and not an intrinsic right at all.
Are civil rights a subset of human rights, or vice versa? Ms. Fortriede's statement seems to indicate the latter. Such thinking, perhaps unbeknownst to her, is antithetical to the American legal code (at least in theory - practice is another issue). However, in the interest of fairness, such thinking does have a legal precedent. See, for example, the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 for a rigorous demonstration of how civil rights precede human rights.
Brent Blackwell
Instructor, Department of English
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