Italian mother dies after refusing cancer treatment to save her unborn child

At the funeral this week of Italian mother Azzurra Carnelos, who died last week after refusing cancer treatment in order to save the life of her unborn son, she was hailed for her courageous sacrifice and for her love of life.

Speaking at Carnelos’s 17 April funeral, Father Massimo Rocchi, director of the Brandolini Rota Institute in the northern Italian town of Oderzo, noted that she would have turned 34 the next day, telling her family: “She will celebrate heaven and you will celebrate here on earth.”

“Live in this light: a light of courage, a light of strength, a light of love. There is no greater gift than giving your life,” he said.

Carnelos, a former student of Rocchi’s, was a senior financial analyst at a bank who died of breast cancer after refusing to undergo treatment in order to save her unborn child, Antonio, who is now eight months old.

She was first diagnosed in 2019 after having a premonitory dream of her grandmother, who died from the same disease, which prompted her to get a scan that showed she had a tumour. She began chemotherapy treatment, and her cancer went into remission.

Three years later, she married her husband, Francesco, in 2022 and despite fearing that she would never be a mother due to her previous cancer treatment, in February 2023 she discovered that she was pregnant.

By July of that year, however, Carnelos discovered that her cancer had returned and, instead of heeding doctors’ advice and beginning chemotherapy again immediately, she opted to delay her treatment in order to carry her baby to term.

Her husband left his job and cared for Carnelos full time, sleeping and having all of his meals at the hospital until she finally passed away on 13 April at her home in Oderzo.

In 2012, a similar story from Italy touched the hearts of the world when Chiara Corbella Petrillo, a Catholic public speaker, chose to delay cancer treatment in order to carry her unborn child to term after two previous children died shortly after birth.

She passed away in June of that year at the age of 28, and her cause for sainthood was opened in 2015, five years later.

One of Italy’s most famed saints, Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, died in a similar way, passing away in 1962 after refusing to terminate her fourth and final pregnancy to treat a benign tumour on her uterus.

These stories are particularly potent in Italy, which suffers from a very low birth rate that Pope Francis has often referred to as a “demographic winter”, calling on Italians to be open to life and to have more children.

During the funeral on Tuesday in the Oderzo cathedral, a photo of Carnelos smiling after giving birth to her baby was displayed.

Rocchi in his homily noted that in the traditional Marian prayer of the Salve Regina, “we often say to the Madonna: ‘We turn to you, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears’.”

“Yes, I think Azzurra’s illness was a valley of tears, between warning signs, treatments, hopes and relapses, but this valley now is illuminated by a dazzling light, by a large bright rainbow that unites the earth to the sky,” he said.

Carnelos provided her family a witness of “a light full of love, a light full of hope,” Rocchi said, adding that she “has written a page of the Gospel”.

Rocchi noted that after Carnelos’s marriage to her husband in 2022, “Her first thought was that she wouldn’t be able to become a mother due to the treatments“. Instead, “Antonio arrived, a gift from God from heaven”.

“But the disease returned, stronger and more aggressive than before and with very little hope,” Rocchi lamented, noting that Carnelos’s greatest desire was to become a mother and “this desire was so great as to even give up her health”. It was, he said, “a painful choice shared with her husband, but her gaze was on the gift of life”.

At the funeral Mass, Francesco said of his wife: “With her sacrifice she gave us life. She had one desire: to give birth to our Antonio.”

Carnelos’s mother recalled how the cancer caused the expectant mother to lose her sight, but said her daughter was determined to see as well as she could, “to admire her son”.

She said the family “always prayed a lot, we always came to Mass on Sunday evenings”, noting that at church they were assured that Carnelos was being prayed for.

Some of Carnelos’s final words, her mother said, were, “Don’t worry mom, everything will be fine…you teach Antonio the prayers and then leave it to Francesco, Francesco will take care of it”.

Rocchi in his homily addressed the family directly, saying: “A mother who gives birth to a child, always gives life, even more when this could compromise her health – and Azzurra did not hesitate to do so.”

“Now she is the angel of your family, the angel of her little Antonio and her husband. An example for all of us, a testimony that life is stronger than death and that, as Jesus told us, ‘there is no greater love than giving life’,” he said.

Photo: Azzura Carnelos and her husband Francesco. (Credit: family photo, via Crux.)

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