Natural Rights: Part II The Origin and Expression of the Right to Life

Life, we all have the right to it. The questions, I hope to answer, are "Where does the right come from?" and "How is it expressed?".

Life is innately understood but like anything else, if you put enough thought into it, it can become quite confusing.

There have been several attempts to create a clinical description of what life is.
To quote Merriam-Webster:
 1-a "An organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction."  
 2-a "The sequence of physical and mental experiences that make up the existence of an individual."
This is a sufficient description for the purposes of this writing.

Where does the right to life come from? 
There are two possible origins of this right and you may chose to accept whichever suits your individual beliefs. On one hand it is granted by a Creator. On the other hand it is a right that has been established and reinforced over millennia of evolutionary process. Whichever you choose to accept, it belongs to all living things and is a natural and established Natural Right.

How is The Right to Life expressed?
The Right to Life is not granted to an individual by another individual or group. It is a part of each of us. That does not mean that an individual may not be killed, but it does mean that the right to defend one's life, by whatever means possible, cannot be taken away.

Let's go back to the Merriam-Webster definition of life. 1-a "An organismic state characterised by . . .  reproduction" If reproduction, or propagation, is an aspect of life, then the resulting offspring is an extension of an individual's life and it is also a life of it's own. All animals protect their offspring until their offspring are able to protect themselves. This is also a Natural Law that has been established by either a Creator or the millions of years of evolutionary process that have helped a species to survive and advance as a whole. So, we are obliged to protect our offspring until they are capable of protecting themselves.

The beginnings of life are apparent at the moment an egg has been fertilized. This is the case in all animal reproduction. Whether the egg is external or internal, once it has been fertilized and the fertilized egg begins the process of cellular division, life is at work. Let's look back to Merriam-Webster again. 2-a "the sequence of [. . .] experiences that make up the existence of an individual". At the moment of conception a history of that life begins. It becomes and extension of the lives of the father and the mother. Both have equal claim to that offspring and both are obliged to protect that life until it can protect itself.

I understand that this will trigger a reaction on the issue of legalized abortion. That being said, this is not the reason I am writing this. I am not looking to trigger a debate over abortion I am simply attempting to discuss the Right to Life that we all possess and how it must pertain to our society as a whole. It does apply to society in many aspects outside of the abortion issue and I will be going into those aspects in more depth later in this series.

Thank you for reading so far and please feel free to comment and/or follow.

"Natural Rights: Part II The Origin and Expression of the Right to Life" by Nathan L. Lowe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at nathan-lowe.blogspot.com.

Natural Rights: Part I, Life and Liberty

It is impossible for me to see one without the other. Every living thing exhibits these fundamental rights. From human to animal. Our society seems to have lost this instinctive and fundamental understanding. Perhaps, "lost" is not the correct word. Our society has decided to ignore these basic laws of nature.
Let me attempt to communicate my understanding of these 2 rights.

First of all Life. At the individual level, the right to life is simply the right to exist and the right to protect ones existence. It also includes the ability to propagate or have offspring which become extensions of one's own life and are therefore granted the same right of life as the parent. As a result the parent is obligated to protect the life of their offspring until the offspring is able to protect it's own life.

Secondly let's look at Liberty. Liberty, at it's root is the right of choice and the fact that no individual or group has the right to choose for another individual or group. All living things exhibit choice at some level. A fish chooses to swim up or down, right or left, eat, poop, propagate etc. There may not be a lot of contemplation prior to each choice but these are choices just the same. When we get to looking at humans, we do not only have the ability to choose but we have the ability to reason. This is where we get mucked up. We rationalize and hypothesize so that we can choose to believe these natural and fundamental laws do not apply to us. We can create "reasons" for violating these basic rights of others.

Our society as a whole has been working to take liberty away from one group to give to another for quite some time. Who or what defines one group or another and what is being taken or given is not the point. The point is that no individual or group has the right to take the life or liberty of another individual or group no matter how "legal" it may be. It still violates the natural law of things.

The understanding of these two natural rights is what lifted America to where it is in the world and the loss of this basic understanding of life and liberty is what will lead us to fall.

We have all been given Life and Liberty. Let's do more to protect it for others. Because, in the end, the more we protect others from the theft of these rights, the more we protect ourselves.

"Natural Rights: Part I, Life and Liberty" by Nathan L. Lowe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at nathan-lowe.blogspot.com.