Paul Tuns:

Jeanne Head, who led pro-life efforts at the United Nations for decades, died on July 1 at the age of 94 in Omaha, Nebraska.

Born in Selby, South Dakota in 1932, Head earned a nursing degree and went to New York City in 1965 to pursue an acting career. She became a nurse at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Manhattan in 1967 and retired from nursing in 1997.

Head co-founded the Manhattan Right to Life Committee and Birthline Hotline in 1972 and the Metropolitan Right to Life Foundation in 1987, served in a number of positions for New York State Right to Life Committee and was a board member of National Right to Life Committee and served as NRLC’s vice president for international affairs and its – and the International Right to Life Federation’s — United Nations representative.

Campaign Life Coalition vice president Matt Wojciechowski told The Interim that Head led pro-life activism at the UN long before most other groups were active internationally and that it “would be hard to imagine where pro-life advocacy at the UN would be today without Head’s influence.”

Raimundo Rojas, outreach and events director of the National Right to Life Committee, said Head recruited him in 1993 to help with a Spanish-speaking delegation at the Convention on the Rights of the Child and she mentored him in international pro-life advocacy. He confessed “I had no idea what I was getting myself into” but that Head “knew the building, the process, the delegations, the documents, the traps, the pressure points, and the stakes.”

Rojas said “Everyone should know the great things Jeanne accomplished. The work she did. The children she defended. The mothers she served. The lives she helped save.” Head lobbied delegates at the UN, the World Health Organization, and numerous international meetings, often aiding exhausted delegates during late-night proceedings.

Rojas said Head was a “brilliant mind” and “a force of nature,” a clear-eyed “strategist who could read a room faster than most people could read a paragraph.”

He recalled that she would sit in the Vienna Café, scoping which delegates were being lobbied by pro-abortion groups so she could send pro-lifers “to shore up those delegations.”

She was knowledgeable about the documents and UN history, and she would lobby delegates to be sticklers for precise language. Delegates from Catholic Latin American countries and Middle Eastern and African Muslim nations would often ask her help for interpreting documents and finding inconsistencies in which to push back against the aggressive tactics of pro-abortion advocates at the UN.

Rojas said, “Jeanne Head fought the good fight. She defended the least among us. She taught generations of pro-lifers how to be prepared, precise, brave, and to love while fighting.”

In 2022, Head told the New York Times, why, after 52 years in pro-life activism, she was still involved with the NRLC and New York State Right to Life Committee: “I couldn’t live with myself unless I did what I could.”