I have never engaged in a debate with another of my fellow columnists; they have the right to their opinions, and our community is a forum for these to be expressed, and for all of us to weigh them and measure our own responses.

But I was moved by a letter to the editor we received from reader Jean Rosenfeld (May 28) in response to George Weigel's column, "A Patron Saint for Life" (May 21), and I thought we needed to debate this question further as a loving community.

Ms. Rosenfeld is a mother, as am I, and it is from this vantage point that I want us to speak today. I am not questioning St. Gianna Beretta Molla's canonization or her history; nor am I questioning her decision to save her unborn child at the cost of her own life. Our community of faith will find strength in this, will find heroism and will find ultimately living faith.

What I am questioning is the very same thing that Ms. Rosenfeld questions, the damaging potential to women of emphasizing the way Saint Gianna died. "No Catholic woman," writes Mrs. Rosenfeld, "should ever feel less a woman if she chooses to save her own life in similar circumstances. I taught my three children that their first rule is to love themselves and care for their own health, because unless they did, they could never be able to care for anyone else." Ms. Rosenfeld is a very wise mother, and Mr. Weigel is not.

The abortion debate is one that is most difficult for women like Mrs. Rosenfeld, myself or other faithful Catholic women to enter. On the one side we have the Mr. Weigels of this world who choose to ignore all of the other issues at stake here, issues about the dignity of women, about misplaced romanticizing of motherhood and suffering, and finally about setting up impossible standards which few living women can meet. On the other side of the debate we have secular feminists, who claiming to speak for women's rights and freedom, ignore all of the issues that make women into more than just bodies but complete human beings with souls, ethics and a responsibility to a universe beyond themselves.

Contemporary Catholic women are caught in the middle, as Mrs. Rosenfeld demonstrates, and this does not advance the cause of Life to which we are committed. We need to speak up, and we need to speak from the wisdom and experience of being women, raising families, losing children, making tough choices and discerning all of this in the presence of God.

No Catholic woman --- no, no woman, should ever think her own life unworthy, and I think this is at the heart of my discomfort with the way St. Gianna's story is being retold. I doubt she believed herself unworthy; after all, she was a physician, a highly educated woman, apparently in a very good and nurturing marriage. Her decision to have the doctors save her child, and not her, was an individual decision made in the circumstances of an individual life. She was not typical, she was privileged and the complexity of her motives and faith is something we cannot know.

But women, and especially poor or minority women, do not need anyone to tell them to be sacrificial, to give everything up for others, to always be the last to eat, the last to go to sleep, the first to awaken, to be the one most tired, most over-worked, and often most alone. Women do not need to sacrifice to be held up as a model of womanhood; they have been doing it for centuries, to little fanfare and even less reward. On the contrary, psychologists and educators tell us that women need to hear the opposite: that they are worthwhile, that they have dignity, that their life actually matters.

Several pilot programs in high schools around the country have proven that the single most effective tool for preventing teen pregnancy is to give girls a sense of their own identity, to help them build up a healthy respect for themselves and for their bodies, to have them understand and actually envision the potential for their future. The best way to prevent the tragedy of abortion is not to have women die so their children may live; it is to have young women respect themselves enough to know two things:

---First, that there is a future out there waiting for them, that they can be the next great architect, designer, chef, writer, doctor, engineer, pilot, teacher. That this future will need their undivided attention to come to fruition, and that premature sexual relationships have the potential of destroying this future.

---And second, that they are part of the fabric of the universe, interconnected, intertwined; that pregnancy is the most visible way that our dependence on one another in life comes into the world. It is an ethic that connects all of life and all of humanity, that respects the dignity of both mothers and children, that cannot ever condone the taking or devaluing of either life.

I love Pope Paul VI's phrase, "If you want peace, work for justice." If we want to make abortion completely unnecessary, there is work we can do as a community of faith, justice work --- the work of educating our young women; the work of providing scholarships, training, jobs, futures; the work of valuing them in every way, of not allowing their exploitation by media, by men, by the workplace; the work of stopping domestic violence everywhere and always; the work of providing healthcare, pre-natal care, support, role models, financial assistance, all of the things that a young woman wishing to carry a pregnancy to term will need.

Perhaps then, we can look at St. Gianna's life in a very different way, and rather than focusing on her tragic death because of complications after a birth --- a death all too common in most of the world --- we can focus on her life. We can hold up the model of self-confidence that carries a young woman through the incredibly challenging task of becoming a physician; we can celebrate her choice to dedicate herself to the care of children in pediatric surgery; we can point to her heroism in doing all this while also raising three children.

This is the part of St. Gianna that will bear fruit in the quest for Life. I add her name to the group of hermanas I count in heaven, and I will respectfully request her watchful eye over our young women, that they may shine with the divine spark of God, and understand themselves to have dignity because they have been wonderfully made in God's image.

Cecilia González-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.