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 aspect of the medical profession. In the face 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 mother. You well know how delicate and dramatic such a situation can be, especially when the woman faces pressure from society and family to end the life within her in order to ease her own situation.