The Gerard Health Foundation announced on Monday its second “Life Prizes” awards dinner is slated for January 22, 2011 in Washington, D.C.
The inaugural event in 2009 drew over 1,200 attendees, with Laura Ingraham serving as master of ceremonies.
The foundation will award $600,000 in prizes to up to six recipients who have demonstrated “success in saving human lives” through efforts such as scientific research, public advocacy, legal work, and other methods.
“Our foundation has a profoundly simple mission: to save lives,” said Gerard Health Foundation founder Raymond B. Ruddy in a press release. “Life Prizes works to honor those who have best accomplished this noble goal and to inspire the next generation to break the mold.”
The winners will be announced this October. They are selected by a committee from a group of 7-12 finalists determined by the foundation. The finalists are chosen from nomination packages that have been distributed to over 100 pro-life organization leaders.
Last year’s winners featured six champions in the pro-life movement. This included Jill Stanek, a nurse who fought the infanticide of abortion survivors at hospitals, and Lila Rose, whose undercover video projects have exposed statutory rape cover up and medical misinformation at Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide.
Another award recipient, Kay Cole James, the founder of the Gloucester Institute and of Black Americans for Life, challenged audience at the 2009 dinner toward their own activism for life.
“Welfare mother, alcoholic father... Born into poverty on a kitchen table. Yes, I was that child—actually, lucky to be born at all!” James said. “My challenge to you is to dedicate your life to the most important civil right issue of our day: the right to life.”
Also receiving awards were Margaret Hartshorn, the president of Heartbeat International, a preeminent network of more than 1,000 pregnancy resource centers; Richard Doerflinger, the associate director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities; and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
