Vatican praises woman who refused cancer treatment to save child

Published: 2005-01-26

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican praised an Italian woman who sacrificed her life for her unborn child, calling it an act of "love and faith." A 41-year-old woman from northern Italy died Jan. 24 from skin cancer, just three months after giving birth to a healthy baby boy. Soon after Rita Fedrizzi was diagnosed with melanoma last year, she discovered she was pregnant. She refused doctors' recommendations to abort the fetus and to undergo treatment that would have been harmful to her unborn child. The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, headlined its Jan. 26 story about Fedrizzi "A gesture of love and faith in order to let life win." The woman's husband, Enrico Fontana, said his wife had told the doctors that carrying out an abortion would have been like "killing one of my other two children to save my skin." Fedrizzi made "a choice based on her faith, which I always shared with her," Fontana said.

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