St. Gianna Beretta Molla

Who they were

Gianna was a modern professional woman in every visible way: a Milanese pediatrician with her own practice, a skier and mountain climber, a wife who wrote love letters, a mother of three. Pregnant with her fourth child in 1961, she developed a large uterine fibroma. Of the options, she chose the surgery that saved the pregnancy, and told her surgeons and her husband explicitly and repeatedly: if it comes to a choice, choose the child. The delivery came in April 1962; septic complications followed, and she died a week after her daughter was born, at thirty-nine. She was canonized in 2004, the first canonized woman physician, with her husband and that daughter, herself by then a physician, in the square.

Why people turn to St. Gianna Beretta Molla

Mothers in complicated pregnancies, couples facing frightening prenatal news, and physicians trying to practice medicine as a vocation. Her page should be written with care: she is not a stick to beat women with harder choices; she is a woman who made hers with full knowledge and asked her doctors to respect it.

How to ask their intercession

By name, the mother's and the child's. Sensitive-protocol adjacent: warm, no triumphalism, and a line acknowledging that pregnancies end in grief too, with her prayers belonging to those mothers no less. ---