The article is devoted to the consideration of the problem of determining the time when a person’s right to life and health arises. Excluding from the criteria the point at which a person acquires the right to life would strengthen the civil legal protection of the relevant subjective civil law. This may lead to the need to recognise, as the time of occurrence of the right to inheritance, that the accumulation of the composition of these circumstances cannot exist without legal capacity. It is proposed to introduce into the categorical apparatus of civil law the concept of ‘special civil capacity’. The emergence of special civil capacity and a subjective civil right to life will be linked to the above circumstances; the ability to have other subjective civil rights will be associated with the fact of birth.