Media Release 4 September 2024
Right to Life celebrates the granting of the St Gianna & Pietro Molla Award for service to life and family presented to the founding President of Right to Life, Ken Orr. The annual award was made in Christchurch on 28th August 2024, by MIchelle Kaufman, Chief Executive Officer of Family Life International NZ, in the presence of Father Shenan Bouquet, Director of Human Life International, who is currently visiting New Zealand on a public speaking tour.
The award citation states that it was made for “the outstanding contribution to serving life and family by defending the life of unborn children and for consistently holding governmental and other agencies accountable through persistent inquiry.”
We are all called to defend life from conception to natural death. Ken Orr is humbled by this award, and states that he has only done what we are all called to do, defend the lives of God’s precious infants, protect their mothers from the violence of abortion, and protect the vulnerable from being killed by a doctor with a lethal injection or assisted in suicide under the End of Life Choice Act. He is indebted to others for their inspiration, example and support.
St Gianna Beretta Molla (1922-1962), an ltalian mother and pediatrician, is a pro-life Saint, as when diagnosed with a fibroma in her uterus during pregnancy, she refused medical advice to have an abortion and have her womb removed by undergoing a hysterectomy. Instead she had surgery to remove the fibroma, resulting in septic peritonitis, and she gave up her life in order that her unborn daughter Gianna would live, which she did.
St Ganna died on 28th April 1962 from septic peritionitis, a week after her fourth child Gianna Emmanuela Molla was delivered after a caesarian section. St Gianna Beretta Molla was canonized on 16th May 2004.
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