The Tree of Life Upsidedown
by Drew Kawell March 10, 2012
Well I guess I'm mad at my human family, my culture and I feel it's justified. One third of my friends gone, 50 million abortions.
One third of mothers, brothers, sisters who would grow up to mold and sculpt the world, have their place in it. The landscape would look different, buildings would look different, cars would look different, had those people been allowed to live. We did not let them live and we can't take back the death of a generation, but we can't keep going on business as usual, when the genocide is still happening.
I was born into this community of people that believed your not really a person until you're a certain age. I was born in 1984, it's now 2012 and the tide is turning, the majority is waking up to the truth of an abortive and contraceptive culture. I'm waking up to it and I still have a lot to learn, but I do know now that the lie of abortion is no more then age discrimination.
Once you begin you have begun. You can't kill that person, you have to let them reach their full potential that is what it means to have hope and respect for the human family, but some it seems cares more for the idea of life then life itself.
All this talk of nature and organic and it seems everything can be natural and organic but humans. It's natural to have kids and in some cases lots of them! That's how our bodies were designed by God. Someone doesn't believe in God, well do they believe in evolution?
Even if one were to just be interested in evolution, they would have to embrace our fertility as a blessing. Why would they go against millions of years of evolution, does one think their knowledge surpasses that of millions of years of suffering and peril that our ancestors have gone through to allow us to be fertile.
Oh and some are worried about overpopulation as dooming humanity, but I see no threat to our kind by the uninhibited growth of families. Families, we can repair and nurture this environment as families, not as selfish individuals or co-habitating partners greedily consuming at a breakneck speed, but as simple, holy families.
We are stewards of this blank earth we call home, and it is an empty home. Everyone in the world could live in Texas and still have about as much property to themselves as is in a modern suburban intersection. Never should we have to put the means of abortion and contraception ahead of the ends of the person especially to concede to the lie of overpopulation.
And I'm sorry a lot of people that promote organic and pretend to love the environment have no problem taking synthetic hormones do they think that is organic and good to spoil the water with chemicals that don't break down and go into the food chain. 1
And what about Hormone Replacement Therapy for woman going through menopause, as soon as it was discovered to be slightly linked to cancer 2 it was shunned by health professionals and the media as the problem that is was. Contraception also is linked to cancer, but yet, no change. 3
I'm sorry, but I'm mad! I'm trying to learn to forgive and I'm trying not only forgive others, but forgive forgive myself for my own transgressions. Even though we have failed at times there is so much hope in our kind. We are so special from the moment of our conception.
We need to respect the blessing of fertility that our organic bodies have received from our ancestors and not take it for granted, not use contraception to use others, separating them from their whole self. That means to love totally, faithfully, become pregnant and have kids raise up simple, holy families.
Kids are our hope, new people to fan the faith and see clearly the errors of an old generation and they are the only ones with the fresh cognitive capacity to see new solutions that the old generation, would have never pondered.
We need to let them live, they are being stitched right now in the wombs of mothers everywhere by God. We are co-creators and need to nurture our mothers and give them an abundance so they can nurture those precious babies in their wombs.
So respect evolution and be organic, we can allow ourselves to be ourselves, our whole selves, co-creating with God to fill up our blank world with people that will renew the world with truth and life. The only thing holding us down is our lack of faith and trust in Jesus, Jesus, who loves us like His own branches, branches that need to be grafted onto Him.
1 http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-10-drugs-tap-water_N.htm
2 http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/MedicalTreatments/menopausal-hormone-replacement-therapy-and-cancer-risk
3 http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/oral-contraceptives
IFV's Holy Innocents (Martyrs)
By Drew Kawell December 28th, 2011
listening to a Catholic Answers podcast. The guest Father Tad, a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Yale University, is using his science smarts to address Catholic concerns within our culture.
One caller asked how many human embryos are lost due to In Vitro Fertilization. Father Tad said the CDC keeps track off these numbers. (I did a quick search myself and found in England alone IVF is responsible for 1.5 million lives lost since 1991.3) The caller also followed up with the comment that often not much effort seems to be made in the form of sidewalk counseling at these IFV fertility clinics. Bingo!
It hit me like a load of bricks how little attention is focused on IVF, perhaps because it is too radical to defend life this young? I visualized a group of people praying the Rosary in front of a Fertility Clinic with a few signs and instantly saw how odd that would look to the non-sympathetic passerby. "Protesting a fertility Clinic, are you mad? If you’re so pro-life wouldn’t you want to encourage woman to have babies!? These Catholics are so confused!" They would say. But wait!!!
Of course, the protesters are not there for the precious boy or girl whom ultimately is born; but rather for his or her brothers and sisters who are mercilessly selected and disposed of throughout all stages of the IFV process! These brothers and sisters pay the ultimate price through no choice of their own to be elected as martyrs at the hands of the fertility clinic workers.
There is no visible horror involved at a fertility clinic, right? Just a few petri dishes and beakers, perhaps when embryos get thrown out they look like nothing that we can recognize as human beings.
Still some say despite perspective it is no great loss to kill an embryo, but on the contrary I would argue the beginning of a human life on this earth is one of the most beautiful orchestration of all time. Genes, like solar systems coming together in perfect harmony to create systems that is you and I forever!
Image of a human cell showing microtubules in green, chromosomes (DNA) in blue, and kinetochores in pink, during first mitosis. 6
To think that we have the power over other people's lives despite science’s clear understanding of a person's beginnings. We are playing God and we are doing it very poorly; because fertility clinics pay for sperm and have no limit on donations, one man has been able to supply clinics around the U.S. with his genetic material technically fathering 149 children!4 Also, according to a national study IVF has been connected to higher occurrences of birth defects.5 This is all monstrous, but murder is still worse; throwing tiny living embryos down the drain in an effort to procure one healthy child.
If God loves and cherishes each of us no matter how small. How could we conceive of electing some human persons martyrs so that a man may put his own plan in place over God's natural plan of using marital love. If you don't believe in God's love for us; at least let us ponder what message are we sending our kids, could we be sending them the message that it is okay to kill those smaller and younger then us? Human life is but a relative thing not worth saving?
Yeah, if human life is so insignificant, are the 7 billion humans on earth not worth saving? But as the mystery of Christ who is Lord of all the universe entered into our world that first Christmas, taking the form of that tiny almost invisible embryo makes human life worth saving, because He saved us first.
Faith aside, how beautiful a thing to see those tiny DNA spindles unknown to each other separated from the beginning of time until their very moment of fusing. But of course this is indiscernible to the naked eye, but it is discernible.
A human life begins at the moment of conception this is proved by our scientific advancement that we can all witness with powerful lenses (electron microscope) pointed toward new human life’s first moments, and that human life is worth protecting because we are all equals in our shared but distinct humanity.
Life does not require faith to protect it, because we can see it! Science has no problem with this, it is the warped ideologies of men that want to put down life at any cost, that have a problem with this. But if men and woman took a deep long look at the science and put human ideologies aside they would understand a totally unique person comes into the human family when that last DNA spindle has fused and conception is over.
So...what...out on the sidewalk? Protesting an IVF fertility clinic because we know they are killing human life, makes scientific sense. And to those that hold human life important and don’t want to pass on the mentality that human life is cheap to the next generation it makes social sense.
1) The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing, by Frank T., Jr. Vertosick
2) From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds by Alexander Tsiaras
3) http://services.parliament.uk/hansard/Lords/bydate/20110720/writtenanswers/part025.html
4) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06donor.html?pagewanted=all
5) http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/2/360.full
6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitotic_spindle
When Attraction becomes Distraction
By Drew Kawell August 15th, 2011
I love coming home to my wife and two kids after a long day’s work, but the other day I found myself distracted by what she was watching on T.V., not because it was on too loud, but it was ruffling me in another way. The security of my Catholic home had been invaded by barely clothed, runway models.
The show in question was a checked out library DVD; the infamous Project Runway. Now to be fair, the show appeals to the budding clothing designer in my wife, ordinary materials stitched together to make an outfit, but all I can see is the curvy female bodies modeling those outfits. As a catholic husband and father it is disconcerting to be attacked by the allure of lustful thoughts.
These days the temptation of exposed woman's bodies is not only on seemingly benign television shows like Project Runway, it is everywhere; email banner ads, magazine articles, ball games, church! There is no escape!
I have heard Kimberly Hahn1 recently refer to our current generations as an "adulterous" one. That was a jolting reminder to me that all of this exposed flesh in our society is not normal and shouldn’t be justified.
We are creatures made by God, made for good. Seeing an attractive female body is one of the quickest ways to trigger a man’s most powerful desire for attraction. A God given desire so powerful it has kept the human species in continuation and it is a good desire so long as it is an ordered one. Disorder of the desire, lustful thoughts, can lead to premarital sex or extramarital sex. Just look at King David and Bathsheba in the Second Book of Samuel. David looked at Bathsheba’s body while she was bathing and his look eventually led to adultery and the murder of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband. Now this was David, who God proclaimed was: “a man after my own heart” 2. Yikes! If David is capable of such atrocities as a result of lust, then us Catholic men better be on guard!
God wants us to have life, and as we can see with David, lust is a severe determinate to that life. Adultery, broken families, murder/abortion are just a sampling of the disorder created, sewn by the thread of lust. God wants man to see the life giving goodness of woman’s body, it is woven in His plan for healthy families and culture, but post Fallen man needs eve’s body to be modest in order to see her for the whole woman she is, not the selfish pleasure that her body can give. Even within marriage man must pray the Holy Spirit guide his look to see his wife for a holy gift not an object.
Now I understand men have a choice not to have lustful thoughts even if the temptation of exposed flesh occurs, just as we have a choice to not get angry if someone flips us off. I would love to live in a world though were people don't flip me off and woman on and off screen are affirmed to dress with a little more discretion. Oh yeah, and woman please cover your midriff; an area where a new human life can form just inches below the skin should be covered like the tabernacle it is.
During the rest of the duration of Project Runway, I did some reading at the kitchen table careful to avoid the screen with my eyes, not because I don't appreciate woman’s bodies but because the temptation to lust after a woman; especially one that is not the mother to my kids, is a distraction I don’t want. A distraction that could get in the way of my pursuit toward a generation of men and woman focused on family and Christ, not selfish pleasure.
1 http://www.lighthousecatholicmedia.org/store/speaker/kimberly_hahn
2 http://www.usccb.org/bible/scripture.cfm?bk=1 Samuel&ch=13
3 Picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Gerome_Bethseba.jpg
