(ThyBlackMan.com) As I said in the first piece I wrote for ThyBlackMan, I’m going to talk about the things that I (and many others I’ve talked to) believe in, and what those principles mean when you think about them.
We believe that all people have certain rights, which are theirs from birth and which cannot be taken from them. Many people believe these rights to be imbued by God the Creator; others see them as inherent to consciousness and self-awareness. But everyone agrees that these rights are fundamental to all people. These rights are absolute; they can only be restrained when exercising them would interfere with the rights of others to exercise the same rights.
These rights don’t depend on any particular personal characteristic or on membership in any particular group. These are rights inherent to all people. They attach to the individual, not to any group.
The right to live is fundamental; without life no other right has meaning. Intentionally depriving an innocent person of his life is a crime in every civilized society in existence. The only legitimate 
reasons for depriving another person of his life are the defense of yourself or another person who is in danger of being killed, or conviction for a capital crime after having been tried by a jury of peers. Anything else is immoral and outside the bounds of civilized behavior.
The determination of personhood is one fraught with difficulty. In times past, the personhood of people was denied because of race, ethnicity, religion, mental capacity, and various other criteria. We believe that none of these criteria are valid determinants of personhood. A human being is a person from birth until death, automatically and without qualification.
Many believe that personhood imbues a human being even before birth. There are varied beliefs about when an unborn human being becomes a person—some believe this occurs at conception, some when the heart starts beating, some when a response to pain is evident, some when brain activity begins, some when viability outside the womb is possible. But almost none of us believe that personhood only begins at birth. For this reason abortion, particularly late-term and partial-birth abortion, is widely considered immoral and unconscionable.
We recognize that a woman pregnant with an unwanted child has rights also. This is not a simple problem. Protecting the rights of both the woman and the unborn child is important. However, today the unborn child isn’t considered to have any rights at all. We don’t believe that to be morally supportable. How to protect these children is something that needs to be discussed calmly by everyone, but this is something that seems to be difficult to do from either side today. At the least, we should provide counseling and assistance to the women who are carrying the unwanted children until the children are born, at which time good homes can be found for them.
When I talk about counseling and assistance, I am not talking about something provided by some disinterested government agency. This is something that we as concerned members of our communities should be doing ourselves, through our churches, community centers, and other voluntary agencies. This would benefit us all in many ways. It would give us much more control over how this counseling and assistance is provided. It would demonstrate to our families, our children, how adults take care of those in our society who need help.
Similarly, states are beginning to pass laws allowing assisted suicides. We don’t believe that it’s generally possible to assist someone in taking his or her own life in a moral way. We understand the condition of irreversible, terminal illness as a factor that might make suicide seem like the best of a bad set of options. But if such a condition isn’t present, the right to live and our responsibility not to take an innocent person’s life makes assisting in suicide immoral.
I’d welcome hearing from you in the comments section, to discuss the topics I’ve brought up in this piece, or anything else that relates to the natural right to live that we all have. As I said before, only by finding common ground with each other can we discuss the things we disagree on calmly and with mutual respect.
Staff Writer; Douglas Loss
