I’ve been thinking about human rights in art and literature. Two specific things come to mind. In my English class, we read Melville’s Billy Budd, a Christian allegory about impressed sailors. In my anthropology human rights class, we talked about “the Rights of Man,” سے طرف کی Thomas Paine and my mind drifted to the name of Billy’s original ship, the Rights-of-Man (abbreviated to “Rights.”) It was an obvious allusion to Thomas Paine. It was incredibly blatant symbolism that Billy was impressed onto a ship called the Indomitable. Impressment is just one of the times in history in which the human right to choose was violated and Melville deals with it in his novella.

The سیکنڈ scholastic memory I have about encountering سوالات on human rights involves the two plays my advanced acting class put on. It’s evident in Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, but مزید specifically the play link سے طرف کی the Junction Avenue Theater Company which analyzed the South African Apartheid effect on a variety of different relationships, from a perverse co-dependence of mistress and servant to the strain on loving ties between mother and daughter. One of the best points made in the piece, however, was a short monologue made سے طرف کی the photographer, Saul, the ‘narrator’ of the play, so to speak. He went through his photographs and showed them to the audience one سے طرف کی one. I share it here:

“This is the face of the Russian theater director and communist Meyerhold. Experimentalist in revolt against Stanislavsky’s naturalism. He fought for the Red Army and spent time in a White Russian prison camp. Later he died under mysterious circumstances during Stalin’s regime. The body of his wife was found in their apartment with forty-two stab wounds.
This is the face of the Chinese poet who was publicly executed for his activism.
This is the face of Salman Rushdie. There is a price on his head, for writing a novel.
This is the face of Mayakovsky, an intellectual anarchist who drew the October revolution round him like a cloak. He committed suicide on April 14th 1930. His last words were ‘I demand the right to piss in multi colors...’
This is the face of Walter Benjamin. He committed suicide to avoid Hitler’s concentration camps. ‘There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.’
This is the face of the Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker. She drowned herself off of the coast of Cape Town. Her last words were, ‘poetry cannot survive apartheid...’
I need to speak with آپ and hear your stories. Come out of the underworld, come out of the world of nothingness and dust, let these تصاویر bring آپ back... These spirits no longer speak to me, as if they ever had a chance.”

This was my پسندیدہ monologue of the play, and Saul was my پسندیدہ character, because he was often the one who addressed the issues that the other characters were not dealing with. Saul played the role of the revolutionist, the man who spoke out. Freedom of speech is a very important human right. I think one of the most important. Particularly because he was speaking out against the crimes against basic human rights, much like the people he was speaking for.

Additionally, last سال I saw the play Mitzi’s Abortion سے طرف کی Elizabeth Heffron at A Contemporary Theater in Seattle, Washington. The phrase on the playbill I think was a very apt one “One side does not fit all.” The play made me think of the age-old سوال of what are the rights in this situation and who has priority? Does the fetus count as a person? If a mother-to-be is killed, the murderer can be charged with double homicide. A brief side story. My mother told me of a story in which a pregnant woman was caught trying to drive in the two-or-more carpool lane, claiming her unborn child as the سیکنڈ person. Whether the situation is humorous, serious, legal, یا moral, it is omnipresent when dealing with the issue. Is it the mother’s right to choose what happens to her body? The fetus cannot reason for itself yet, but does that mean it does not have the right to live, the right to eventually learn and develop reasoning skills?

St Thomas Aquinas brought up his view on “delayed ensoulment” which he shares with Aristotle and St Augustine. The view shows that a fetus does not get a soul until quickening when it’s developed enough to begin movement in the womb. His religious view was that God only bestows a soul on a being that is fit to receive it, which, in his opinion, is not until it’s senses are developed enough to اقدام around. This was later argued سے طرف کی scientists and theologians of instantaneous ensoulment, یا that when the sperm meets the egg, the child immediately has a soul, and therefore counts as human. The truth of the matter is that we will never really know for sure when a child receives a soul, if one believes in souls in the first place.

It’s a difficult problem. As the mother is a rational, able bodied human being, capable of logic and understanding, then her welfare must also be considered. But do her rights as a person, as a woman, overrule the ‘rights’ of a child who could potentially grow into a rational, able bodied human being, capable of logic and understanding?

Inevitably, as has been voiced over at the link I come out "pro-choice" on the issue, but that does not stop my wonderings on the subject. It is, inevitably, a conflict of rights. And in the end, we cannot really decide whose rights are مزید important, the child's یا the mothers, because everyone's rights are equal (or they should be). Which is why I end up coming out pro-choice. Because I think abortion is such a complicated issue, it should be resolved on a personal level as a matter between the mother and her unborn child.