Gianna Beretta Molla
1922 — 1962
A pediatrician, wife, and mother who treated her career and family as a unified vocation. When doctors discovered a fibroid tumor on her uterus during her fourth pregnancy in 1961, she chose the option that preserved the baby — surgical removal of the fibroma — explicitly asking that her child's life be saved above her own. She died of septic peritonitis one week after giving birth.