Tag: Pro-Choice

Music Monday: Everything to me

One comment

Today’s song is one of my old-time favourite, Mark Schultz. Mark was given up for adoption as a baby and this is the song he wrote to his birth mother:

I must have felt your tears
When they took me from your arms
I’m sure I must have heard you say goodbye
Lonely and afraid had you made a big mistake
Could an ocean even hold the tears you cried

But you had dreams for me
You wanted the best for me
And you made the only choice you could that night

[Chorus]
You gave life to me
A brand new world to see
Like playing baseball in the yard with dad at night
Mom reading Goodnight Moon
And praying in my room
So if you worry if your choice was right
You gave me up but you gave everything to me

And if I saw you on the street
Would you know that it was me
And would your eyes be blue or green like mine
Would we share a warm embrace
Would you know me in your heart
Or would you smile and let me walk on by
Knowing you had dreams for me
You wanted the best for me
And I hope that you’d be proud of who I am

And when I see you there
Watching from heaven’s gates
Into your arms
I’m gonna run
And when you look in my eyes
You can see my whole life
See who I was
And who I’ve become

Abortion Debate

Leave a comment

A while back I advertised a debate between Trent Horn and Cecili Chadwick on the subject of abortion. During the exchange, Miss Chadwick said:

“I think it’s really interesting that every time I have been asked to debate this issue I have been debating a man…”

Trent’s response to this was rather spot-on, but I wanted to advertise an upcoming debate where Processor Chadwick will be debating with a woman! On 27th October, Miss Chadwick will be in a formal debate with my friend Timmerie. All the details are in the Facebook event below:

Screen Shot 2014-10-10 at 11.55.10 AM

Tell them about “the cells”…

2 comments

Today’s post is one of those posts which I’m writing purely for my own benefit. Who said this has to be selfless?! I’m hoping that, in the process of writing this, that the information will stay in my brain, or at the very least, make it easier for me to find when I forget it… 🙂

FMcIf any of you have heard Fr. Donald Callaway give a talk, you will have almost certainly heard him mention at some point something called Fetal Microchimerism, the biological process whereby cells from a fetus pass through the placenta into the mother’s own body (and vice versa).

The amazing thing about this process is that these cells have been shown to persist not only beyond pregnancy, but have even been found to remain in the mother’s body for decades afterwards. As far as I can tell, the scientific community is uncertain as to the consequence of the presence of these cells, with some suggesting that this is a source of potential disease, while others suggest that the child’s cells actually help to defend the mother.

When speaking about Fetal Microchimerism, Fr. Callaway reflects upon the intimate nature of the connection between mother and child. Even after a child has grown up, or even in the tragic cases of miscarriage or abortion, through Fetal Microchimerism, part of the child lives on in the mother.

Of course, where Fr. Callaway really goes to town is in the application of this biology to the area of theology. If this process is found in normal human pregnancies, then it is more than possible that this took place during the Blessed Mother’s pregnancy with Jesus. This would mean that some of the Saviour’s cells passed to His mother and remained there. The Lord’s human nature lived on in Mary’s body, even as He lay in the grave and even after He rose again and ascended into Heaven.

Not only that, if it is true that the child’s cells come to protect the mother from disease, then this has implications for Mary’s Assumption/Dormition, as well as providing a beautiful foreshadowing of the Eucharist, whereby Jesus gives us His Body, in the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch, as the “medicine of immortality”.

Horn/Chadwick Abortion Debate

Leave a comment

Last week Trent Horn from Catholic Answers engaged in an abortion debate with Professor Cecili Chadwick. The title of the debate was “Should abortion be legal?”.

The debate was at California State University San Marcos and I managed to attend. In my “Drafts” folder I had begun a short review of the event prepared, but I saw yesterday that the video of the debate was already up on YouTube!

I found Professor Chadwick’s position rather problematic, particularly given what she was willing to admit concerning unborn. I also found it a little frustrating how, in her responses, she regularly presented false dilemmas, as though one cannot be both against poverty AND abortion. But rather than flesh out my review, I’d simply invite you to watch the debate and reach your own conclusions.

St. Thomas Aquinas: Pro-Choice?

6 comments

A friend of mine recently referred to the book “Good Church, Bad Church” by Tom Kane, a former Catholic priest. I read the synopsis on Amazon and read the extract on the author’s website.  In the extract, a couple came to Kane while he was still a Catholic priest and he counseled them to have an abortion, calling upon St. Thomas Aquinas as justification:

“The great Catholic theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose theological reasoning is the foundation of Catholic morality, said that a fetus does not contain a soul until several months because there is not enough development yet to hold a soul, so the fetus, Thomas says, is not a person,” I said. “Yet the Vatican and the Vaticans of Protestantism would sacrifice an endless number of lives for a miniscule embryo that resembles an amoeba.”

“But the fetus has life,” he said.

“Yes, but what kind of life? Plant life? Animal life?” I said. “A fetus has a very primitive form of life—not yet a human life.”

AquinasInTheLouvre

Read more

March For Life Discussion: Live and let live

One comment

Today I’m continuing my series of posts in response to the Facebook discussion a couple of weeks ago concerning the March For Life.

In my previous entry I briefly looked at what I think can be done to raise the standard of dialog between pro-life and pro-choice advocates. I would now like to start looking at some of the particular issues which were raised during the exchange. Today I would like to focus upon the opening comment from a former schoolmate:

“I kinda just wish people would stop telling other people how to live their lives….I’m pro-CHOICE, not pro-telling-people-what-to-do….”

As a pro-lifer, you hear sentiments similar to the one expressed above with considerable regularity and, on the surface, such a position seems extremely commendable. In fact, it is one of the sacrosanct secular doctrines in contemporary culture.

Live and let live

I think that respecting other people’s opinion is a good thing, I do. I mean, nobody likes to be told what to do, right? However, there are some immediate problems here. For a start, the statement self-refuting. As soon as you tell someone that they should mind their own business, you’re attempting, at least in some measure, to impose your own will on another person. That means you’re breaking your own rule and not minding your own business!

In the remainder of this post I would like to look at whether the live-and-let-live ideal is consistently applied…

Read more

1 … 6 7 8 9