When Michigan mom Jessica Hanna was 14 weeks pregnant with her fourth child, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Doctors suggested she abort the baby. Hanna, a devout Roman Catholic, refused.
She chose not only to carry her baby to term — but to spread the message of her faith-filled journey with nearly 60,00 followers on her Instagram account, @blessed_by_cancer.
Jessica delivered a healthy baby boy, Thomas, in May 2021. And she was deemed cancer-free shortly after his birth.
But the story, sadly, did not end there. The cancer returned, at Stage 4, in December 2022, and she died on April 6 this year at the age of 41.
In an interview with The Post in the days before Mother’s Day, her widower, Lamar Hanna, 41, publicly discussed for the first time his beloved wife’s triumph and loss.
Doctors initially wanted to scan Jessica to see how far the cancer had spread, but it meant ending the pregnancy.
“They were saying, ‘We really need to know what we’re dealing with here to know how to proceed,’” Lamar recalled.
Terminating the pregnancy was never an option.
“Never,” he said. “If anything, it made Jessica more resolved.
“Jessica would confront them and say, ‘Why would you even suggest that?’ They told her, ‘It’s just standard procedure. We have to.’”
In a 2022 interview with Eternal Word Television Network, Jessica explained that she was a lifelong pro-life advocate. “You’ve talked the pro-life talk, now you’ve become the woman that everybody uses in their arguments — what if the woman’s life is in danger?
“Now it’s time for me to walk the walk.”
Lamar met Jessica while they were both earning their pharmacy doctorates at Wayne State University in Detroit. During their 12-year marriage, they had three other children.
She was diagnosed with cancer in December 2020, while she was 14 months pregnant.
She underwent surgery to remove the 13-centimeter tumor from her breast. The news got worse.
“She had a lobular carcinoma, which is more branch-like and harder to detect until you actually go in,” he said. “Almost all of her lymph nodes in that same underarm, 43, had cancer in them.”
Since she was pregnant, doctors couldn’t perform the scan to see where the disease had spread, but determined it was likely to have affected multiple organs.
“That’s when she decided, ‘This is what the Lord wants of me. This is the suffering he’s called for me and I’m going to pick up my cross,’ and she started to share her journey on Instagram,” her husband said.
On her page @blessed_by_cancer, Jessica prayed the Rosary live from her hospital bed with her followers, and shared every part of her cancer journey until her final days in the hospital.
She also posted about her chemotherapy sessions, which she began 20 weeks into her pregnancy, and continued until Thomas, who is “perfectly healthy and strong as an ox,” was born.
“She said, ‘I want to make sure people know you could still treat your cancer and not have to abort your baby,’” Lamar said.
After every chemo appointment at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, Jessica would pray at the tomb of soon-to-be saint Father Solanus Casey at St. Bonaventure Monastery.
A couple of weeks after Thomas was born, Jessica was able to do complete body scans, which revealed that she was cancer free, which she attributed to those prayers.
“The first thing she did when she got those results was get on her knees and give thanks to God,” Lamar recalled.
Once she was cancer free, Jessica dedicated her time to speaking at Catholic churches and pro-life conferences.
“After the events, people would line up and be like, ‘You changed my life. You got me closer to God,’” he said.
In December 2022, Jessica started getting an uncomfortable feeling under her arm and in her neck, and was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.
For most of 2023 and almost all of this year, until her death in April, Jessica was in the hospital.
The GoFundMe page set up during her final months raised $240,000 dollars in donations from all over the world.
Lamar, who takes his four children to the cemetery to visit their mom every Sunday after 9 am mass, is keeping Jessica’s Instagram page alive — because he knows that’s what she would have wanted.
“I just saw a message the other day from a lady in South Africa. She said she was born Catholic, fell away, and because of Jessica, came back to the faith,” he said.
Jessica had asked her social media followers to offer up masses in her honor if she passed away, and set up a P.O. Box where they could send mass cards and letters.
“The post office left a voicemail,” Lamar recalled. “And said, ‘You need a bigger box.’”
