The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture will award the 2025 Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal—the nation’s most important award for heroes of the pro-life movement—to Anthony J. and Phyllis W. Lauinger of Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a Mass and dinner on May 3, 2025, at the University of Notre Dame.

“Tony and Phyllis Lauinger have worked side-by-side for more than 50 years to defend the inherent equal dignity of all members of the human family, born and unborn,” said Jennifer Newsome Martin, John J. Cavanaugh Associate Professor of the Program of Liberal Studies, associate professor in the Department of Theology, and director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. “Through their professional efforts and personal witness, especially in their local community and in their home state of Oklahoma, Tony and Phyllis have consistently modeled the self-emptying love that the Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal was created to honor and celebrate.”

Tony and Phyllis Lauinger, together with a small group of close friends, co-founded Tulsans for Life in 1973. Tony has served as state chairman of Oklahomans for Life since 1978 and vice president of the National Right to Life Committee since 1995, which seeks to defend human life through education, legislation, and public policy. As a physician, Phyllis has dedicated her medical expertise to providing free health care to Tulsa’s uninsured through Xavier Medical Clinic and has delivered pro-life lectures to various audiences. They are the parents of eight children and grandparents to 19.

“The Lauingers are a witness to the power of love to transform the world,” said Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame. “In their married life together, as parents and grandparents, and in their professional work to promote care and protection for the unborn, their mothers, and their families, they model Pope Saint John Paul II’s teaching in Evangelium Vitae that ‘the family is summoned to proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life’ (EV 92).”

Tony is a native of Tulsa and graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. After meeting Phyllis during her medical studies at Columbia University Medical School in New York, the couple married in 1971. A few months after their first daughter Elizabeth was born, the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade expanded abortion access across the United States. As parents of a newborn, Tony and Phyllis were galvanized into action by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Not long after that tragic day in 1973, Phyllis, by then a physician, and I were asked to give a talk at our church about abortion,” Tony wrote in a 1995 essay for National Right to Life News. “We didn't know much about it, except that it was terribly, tragically wrong, but we hurriedly got some materials and started to learn.”

Tony and Phyllis soon gathered a group of friends in their living room to discuss what they might do to support women and families through both direct action and the democratic process. The group they started, Tulsans For Life, eventually became part of Oklahomans for Life.

Tony and Phyllis have been part of the Notre Dame family since 1990, when their daughter Elizabeth enrolled in the School of Architecture. All eight of their children have graduated from Notre Dame, and Tony and Phyllis have served on the executive advisory committee of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture since 2012.

“Elizabeth, who used to play on the living room floor during our Tulsans For Life meetings, graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1995,” wrote Tony. “I can't help but be grateful that the same daughter whose timely birth led her parents into the right to life movement later charted a course that led her brothers and sisters to the school named for, in the words of the alma mater, ‘Notre Dame, Our Mother.’”

The Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal, named after Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical, is the nation’s most important lifetime achievement award for heroes of the pro-life movement, honoring individuals whose efforts have advanced the Gospel of Life by steadfastly affirming and defending the sanctity of human life from its earliest stages.

Previous recipients of the medal include Dr. Elvira Parravicini, founder of the Neonatal Comfort Care Program at Columbia University Medical Center; Robert P. George, legal philosopher and political theorist; Dr. John Bruchalski, founder of Tepeyac OB/GYN; Vicki Thorn, founder of Project Rachel post-abortion healing ministry; the Women’s Care Center Foundation; Mother Agnes Mary Donovan and the Sisters of Life; Congressman Chris Smith, co-chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, and his wife, Marie Smith, director of the Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues; Supreme Knight Carl Anderson and the Knights of Columbus; the Little Sisters of the Poor; the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation; Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Emerita, at Harvard University; Helen Alvaré, Robert A. Levy Endowed Chair in Law and Liberty at the Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason University; and Richard Doerflinger, former associate director of the secretariat for pro-life activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Announced annually on Respect Life Sunday, the first Sunday of October, the Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae award consists of a specially commissioned medal and $10,000 prize presented at a banquet following a celebratory Mass in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. For more information about the Evangelium Vitae Medal, visit ethicscenter.nd.edu/programs/culture-of-life/evangelium-vitae-medal/

Story updated 10/6/24 at 1:47 p.m.

Originally published by Kenneth Hallenius at ethicscenter.nd.edu on October 06, 2024.