Knights council donates trailer load of goods to Pro-life Utah for mothers in need

IC photo/Laura Vallejo

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Volunteers load the goods donated by the Knights of Columbus to Pro-Life Utah.

KEARNS — Catholic teaching is that all human life is sacred; as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops states “the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society.”

To help promote the dignity of life, the Knights of Columbus’ Bishop Hunt Council at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Kearns recently collected and donated more than $5,000 worth of portable cribs, diapers, car seats, clothes and other supplies for new mothers.

“One of our main points as Knights of Columbus is life,” said Chad Vargo, the council’s Grand Knight.

The Bishop Hunt Council is always looking for initiatives that support the dignity of life, and this year they wanted to make sure they were giving back to the community, Vargo said.

“One of the big aspects of being pro-life is that we usually hear people saying, ‘Oh, you only care about the mother who is pregnant, but you don’t care about them when the baby is born,’ so we wanted to prove them wrong,” he said.

To do so, the Knights worked with St. Francis Xavier Parish’s three main cultural communities: Anglos, Hispanics and Samoans.

“They partnered together and that’s where most all of the donations came from,” Vargo said.

In addition, the council worked with St. Jude Maronite Catholic Church in Taylorsville, “who also wanted to get involved, and through a bishop of [a ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] who told me they wanted to help,” Vargo said.

To distribute the items to mothers in need, the Knights partnered with Pro-Life Utah. This organization advocates for the lives of children in the womb and also has a Life Grant Program that provides mothers with emotional support, monetary grants, baby supplies for up to one year and other support as needed.

Pro-Life Utah and the Knights of Columbus have a longstanding relationship, said Mary Taylor, president of Pro-Life.

“They have done so much for us,” she said, pointing out that in 2021 the Utah Knights of Columbus donated an ultrasound machine for the Pro-Life Utah mobile unit, and also regularly contribute funds or goods like the March 6 donation.

Supporting new mothers is a way of preventing abortions, Taylor said.

“Millions of babies are dead because we didn’t provide the support that we should have been giving all along to the moms, but we are not going to let that happen again,” she said.

The Life Grant program “exists to help women who are struggling with an unplanned pregnancy and financial complications that make her feel like abortion is her only options,” reads the program application that is available through the Pro-Life Utah web page.

The donation from the Knights will help at least 100 mothers and their babies, Taylor said.

By donating the goods to Pro-Life Utah, the Knights “who have helped with providing free ultrasounds, can also now support the mothers after the birth [of their child],” Vargo said.  

No matter where a person comes from, what language they speak or the color of their skin, “life is important from conception through natural death, and we as Knights of Columbus take that to heart,” he said. “It’s important that regardless of who that baby is, what the religion they might be born to, their life is important. He/she is a child of God, and we want to make sure that we are there to support them at all times.”