Chicken Breasts, Chicken Wings

Long before my dad started his poultry business, we raised a few native chickens in our backyard. We started with a hen and a rooster my grandfather gave us. In no time the hen started laying eggs in a nest we carefully prepared.

When the hen had laid a clutch of about 12 eggs, it sat gently on them, making them warm with its breast and wings for about twenty-one days until they hatched into chicks.

During the brooding time, we stayed away from the nest so as not to disturb the incubation process except to feed the hen. When all the chicks had broken through their shells, the mother hen led them daily out of the nest into the yard where they were free to roam and pick up feeds. Watching the mother hen clucking and its chicks chirping happily was a delight to us.

The mother hen was very protective of its chicks. At any sign of danger, like if we tried to approach its chicks, the mother hen would flap its wings vigorously and make noise as a warning sign that it would fight if we continued getting to its brood. Then the chicks would gather under their mother's protective wings.

Even at a young age, I had an idea of a mother's protective instincts from watching mother hens and their chicks. Of course, I also learned it from my own mother who bore her brood of eight children (too many by today's standards), loving us and protecting us all from any harm, and making sacrifices for us to grow and flourish in life.

A mother's womb where new human life is nurtured and then brought out to the world is like a hen's warm breast and body that transforms a nest of eggs into chicks at the proper time. A mother's womb is supposed to be the safest place a child can be.

The arms of a mother embracing her baby as it feeds from her breast are like the mother chicken's wings spread around the chicks to provide them warmth and protection.

From my childhood experience, I saw with my own eyes how chickens value their young. Human mothers value their babies in their wombs and are eager to see them see the light of day. Unfortunately, there are exceptions . . . millions of exceptions.

According to statistics, in the U.S. alone, at least 2,300 babies a day are denied by their own mothers their right to see the light outside their wombs. That is 1.3 million a year, and 63.5 million since seven men in black judicial robes 43 years ago shamelessly appropriated unto themselves the power that exclusively belongs to the Author of all life.

Where we are today, the highest people in power (some who claim to belong to the Church that teaches the preeminence of the sanctity of human life) advocate and promote the merciless slaughter of infants inside their mothers' wombs and even those babies who accidentally escape the death verdict. They even fund this crime with the people's tax dollars. There is blood in their hands.

Would it be a wonder if the Author of Life were to tell the purveyors and promoters of the culture of death: “Be like the hens." And to those who are supposed to call them out: "Be not chickens.”

And would it be surprising if the Author of Life were to say: “If you don't stop these dastardly deeds and repent, I will also deny you life -- eternal life to which you have prematurely and mercilessly sent your own offsprings.” #

“Thou shalt not kill.” (Exodus 20:13)

"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." (Psalm 139:13-16)