U.S. bishops highlight ‘champions of the pro-life cause’ with annual award ceremony

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 2, 2023 / 14:30 pm

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops this week revealed the recipients of its annual pro-life awards, highlighting the work of three American activists who the bishops said have “dedicat[ed] themselves to pro-life activities” through work and activism.

The USCCB said in a press release on Monday that Margaret Hartshorn, Aurora Tinajero, and Kathryn Moseley would receive the conference’s 2023 “People of Life” awards, joining the ranks of several dozen other recipients on whom the awards have been bestowed over the past 15 years. 

Hartshorn is the chairman of the board of Heartbeat International and co-founder of Heartbeat International’s Option Line. The Option Line is advertised as “the only 24/7, bilingual, internet-based, pro-life call center in the world,” one that helps in “connecting callers to their community-based pregnancy help center for life-saving and life-changing help.”

Hartshorn and her husband “have been dedicated to the pro-life movement” since 1973, the press release said, with the couple “not only working with the educational, political, and legislative arm of the movement” but also having opened their home to pregnant women for decades. The two also opened the first pregnancy center in Columbus, Ohio, in 1981.

Tinajero, meanwhile, has been active in pro-life work since the early 1980s, the announcement said; she previously worked as Spanish ministry director at the Catholic Pro-life Committee of North Texas and also “organized the first Spanish Congress with pro-life leaders from 14 Spanish-speaking countries and 17 states” in order to “train Spanish-speaking clergy and lay leaders to develop parish pro-life initiatives.”

In 2011, former Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix commissioned Tinajero to help “organize the second Bi-National Hispanic Congress in Phoenix.” She is a mother to five daughters and a grandmother to 24 grandchildren. 

The bishops also gave a posthumous award to Moseley, an assistant professor of pediatrics emerita at the University of Michigan who passed away in June of this year. 

A board-certified pediatrician and neonatologist, Moseley worked to “address race-based disparities in health care especially concerning African American unborn babies and their mothers”; she also served on the ethics committees of both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Board of Pediatrics and was the national secretary for the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities.

Moseley also served as the director of bioethics for the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. She is survived by her husband and daughter.

The awards were established by the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities in 2007. The People of Life Campaign says on the USCCB’s website that it honors the work of people who “dedicate themselves to promoting respect for the dignity of every human person” in the spirit of St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae.