Meet the Speaker: Sarah Denny Lori, Ph.D.

Sarah Denny Lorio, Ph.D. is a speaker, podcast host, and part-time ethicist with the National Catholic Bioethics Center. She holds a Ph.D. in Bioethics from the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome and an M.A. in Theology from Notre Dame Seminary and Graduate School in New Orleans, LA. Her doctoral research focused on the differing philosophies that affect the practice of women’s health in the United States of America and argued for a “third way” of sex education that teaches young people fertility awareness-based methods both as preventive medicine and as proximate vocation preparation.

Throughout the last 14 years, Dr. Denny Lorio has taught at both the university and high school levels: working as an ethics professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, teaching and coaching young women at Archbishop Chapelle High School, and speaking and leading international trips for college students as a campus minister at Louisiana State University. Trained in two methods of fertility awareness—Creighton Model FertilityCare System (2013) and FEMM (2024)—her passion is to empower women through a deeper knowledge of the great gift and beauty of their bodies and sexuality. In her work, Dr. Denny Lorio consistently seeks to integrate the demands of medicine with the dignity of womanhood and highlights the essential role of human freedom in the education of young women. She is in the process of developing a high school curriculum focusing on these issues as well as creating similar resources for parents. Dr. Denny Lorio currently lives in New Orleans, LA, with her husband, Alex.