Another woman dies for the Coming of Love

The Seventh Sign is not a very good movie but one scene has always stayed with me. Demi Moore, pregnant with the babe that could possibly be the Second Coming is in hard labor and things are tense…someone is going to have to die, and the doctor asks her, “will you die for him? Will you die for him?” Moore answers yes, and the babe is born with a good strong, healthy sounding wail, while she dies.

I remembered that scene because as a mother, I understood it, deep down inside. It’s a question fraught with so much emotion, so many questions, and once again, just as we saw in Canada, two weeks ago, it is a question that has been answered with a yes.

[Rita] Fedrizzi, 41, who refused the abortion and cancer treatment, found out she had cancer about the same time she learned she was pregnant, the Vatican paper said.

“She was aware that if she gave birth she wouldn’t have had any hope of surviving,” the Vatican newspaper wrote. “Despite that she went through with her choice, the choice of welcoming new life even at the cost of her own death.”

Besides [her 3-month old son] Federico, born after six months of her pregnancy, she left two children, ages 10 and 12.

“Rita’s choice, which I always shared, was a choice of faith,” her husband, Enrico Ferrari, told the Italian news agency ANSA. “Whenever someone recommended abortion as the only way to escape (death), she would say, ‘It’s as if they’re asking me to kill one of my other two children to save my skin.’

She welcomed Federico as a gift, the husband was quoted as saying.

The Coming of Love is no small or ordinary thing. It is very, very great, which is why, sometimes, it is so very hard for earthbound humanity to grasp.