[Matthew Shea]

Humans do not have the ability to endow themselves with life and they should not have the ability to choose to end it. Period. I feel that way about abortion, euthanasia, captial punishment and pretty much every matter of life-vs-death with the sole exception of self preservation (if your life is threatened). For example, if a pregnant woman's life is being threatened, perhaps by cancer, and the treatment will result in the death of the baby, then the mother's life has to take precendence.

Beyond that, the taking of a human life by another human is always undeniably and forever wrong.

Now, having said that, I do not approve of government interference in these matters as there may be a situation where something worse will happen as the result of a person not being able to make a life or death choice. In that case, the person should be able to pick the lesser of two evils. Government does not have the wisdom to look into the details of each individual scenario and make a proper moral decision. The citizens should be trusted, in the case of abortion and suicide, to make their own judgements. I can't abide by euthanasia, though. It seems a cowardly way out and ropes others into something (death) that cannot, of itself, ever be considered "good." Furthermore, euthanasia obligates the provider to make an informed moral decision as to the viability of the patient's life and to the potential impacts to society of taking a particular life. We're dealing with a very serious moral judgement that any person of good conscience should not force another person to make. If you really want out that bad, there are plenty of easy ways to do it without involving others. A bottle of aspirin would be plenty to end your life.

As for capital punishment, if we can keep criminals safely away from society and permanently remove the threat they caused without taking their life (which we certainly can), we have an obligation to preserve that life. At the very least, there is something to be learned from them. At best, they may be reformed and move on to try and make up for the wrongs they committed, even if they never make it out of jail.

Edit: in terms of abortion, if people used birth control appropriately, 90% + of abortions would be completely unneeded. At the very least, this makes abortion a last resort, an undesirable outcome and something that could have easily been prevented.