Marilyn Pryor Lobb was born in Vivian Street, Wellington in 1936 to her Australian father and European-Maori mother.
14 Facts About Marilyn Pryor
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2.
Marilyn Pryor's maternal grandfather was a grandson of Patrick Gilroy.
3.
Marilyn Pryor attended first year chemistry classes at Victoria University of Wellington where she served as a lab assistant, as well as an assistant dental technician to the New Zealand Medical Research Council.
4.
In 1958 she married Geoffrey Marilyn Pryor and left full-time waged employment.
5.
Marilyn Pryor was a devoted conservative Catholic and strongly supported her church's opposition to abortion in New Zealand.
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Marilyn Pryor served on the National Executive Council of the Society for Protection of the Unborn Child - later renamed Voice for Life, and served as that organisation's National President.
7.
Marilyn Pryor founded an anti-abortion pregnancy support service, Pregnancy Help, at the same time.
8.
Mrs Marilyn Pryor authored criticisms of New Zealand's ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1984, as well as criticisms of New Zealand abortion law twenty years after passage of the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act in its final form in 1978, as well as an account of abortion policy in the Netherlands in 2001.
9.
Marilyn Pryor subsequently joined the New Zealand National Party instead, and lost nomination for its Kapiti electorate to Roger Sowry in 1987, who later served as a Cabinet Minister under the administrations of Jim Bolger and Jenny Shipley in the nineties.
10.
Marilyn Pryor was made a Papal Dame of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St Gregory the Great in 1996, and helped to establish an administrative pastoral office for Cardinal Thomas Stafford Williams in Wellington, at the same time that she continued her anti-abortion activities.
11.
In 2004, Mrs Marilyn Pryor contracted motor neurone disease, which swiftly took hold.
12.
Marilyn Pryor died on 15 March 2005, aged 68, at her home in Paremata.
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Marilyn Pryor was buried three days later in Whenua Tapu Cemetery in Pukerua Bay, Porirua with her husband who had died three years later.
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Marilyn Pryor is survived by three of her four children.