I am grateful to Professor Mancuso for his words of greeting, and I wish to thank all of you for what you are doing to serve those in need of your medical expertise, especially women stricken by cancer. In the practice of medicine, you face the most fundamental realities of human life birth, suffering and death. You share your patients difficulties and their most intense anxieties. You seek to offer hope and, where possible, healing. Those who undergo surgery never forget the doctors and health care specialists who welcomed them, visited them, treated them.
Doctors are guardians and servants of human life.
In my Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae, I stressed the human significance and the ethical aspects of the medical profession. In today s cultural and social context, in which science and the practice of medicine risk losing sight of their inherent ethical dimension, health care professionals can be strongly tempted at times to become manipulators of life, or even agents of death. In the fact of this temptation their responsibility today is greatly increased. As gynecologists you care for mothers and their unborn children from conception to birth. For the child, gestation is always a time of risk and uncertainty, but when the mother is stricken with cancer the child is faced with added serious threats to health and the terrible possibility of the loss of its mothers.