This page is continued from Basics of Law >>>> Positive Law v. Natural Law:
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reproductive rights
(1966)
1. A person’s constitutionally protected rights relating to the control of his or her procreative activities; specifically, the cluster of civil liberties relating to pregnancy, abortion, and sterilization, esp. the personal bodily rights of a woman in her decision whether to become pregnant or bear a child. * The phrase includes the idea of being able to make reproductive decisions free from discrimination, coercion, or violence. Human-rights scholars increasingly consider many reproductive rights to be protected by international human-rights law.
civil liberties
(17c)
Freedom from undue governmental interference or restraint; especially, the right of all citizens to be free to do as they please while respecting the rights of others. * This term usu. refers to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and other liberties associated with the Bill of Rights.
In American law, early civil liberties were promulgated in the Lawes and Libertyes of Massachusetts (1648) and the Bill of Rights (1791). In English law, examples are found in Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689). — Also termed civil right.
“I mean by civil liberty that liberty which plainly results from the application of the general idea of freedom to the civil state of man, that is, to his relations as a political being — a being obliged by his nature and destined by his Creator to live in society. Civil liberty is the result of man’s twofold character, as an individual and social being, so soon as both are equally respected.” Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government 25 (Theodore D. Woolsey ed., 3d ed. rev. 1883).