At 14 weeks along, Catherine Mornhineway was excited for her June ultrasound.
Her morning sickness had stopped two weeks earlier. She could feel the baby kicking.
A mom of three, the black-and-white sonogram looked normal to her. She wondered if she might even get an early reveal of the baby’s gender.
The ultrasound technician went quiet. She told the couple she needed to fetch someone for one more measurement.
Soon after, Mornhineway, 30, and partner Andrew Ford were ushered to another room. A doctor told them that their baby likely had anencephaly, a severe birth defect that occurs in about 1 in 5,250 babies. It causes little or none of the brain and skull to develop.
Most people terminate, the doctor told them. This was incompatible with life.
The shattering diagnosis was confirmed by a second ultrasound. They also learned the baby was a girl. A termination would allow the couple to grieve and move on with their lives. But it didn’t sit right hearing terms like “surgical removal” and that their baby would be discarded.
For three weeks, they agonized about what to do until Mornhineway saw an Instagram post mentioning a Gray’s Anatomy episode about a mom in the same situation. In the TV show, she had the baby and donated its organs and tissue after it passed.
It resonated. The couple wanted something positive to come from their pain. They wanted to make this delicate bundle of life, who they knew might only live for a few hours, a fully loved and remembered part of their family.
So Mornhineway resolved herself to carrying the baby to term knowing so much more heartache lay ahead.
“I was just like, that’s my little girl,” she said. “I’m going to carry her and spend as long as I can with her.”
A precious gift
Organ and tissue donations from newborns are extremely rare.
Fewer than 120 U.S. children who died before their first birthday donated organs or tissue in 2024, according to data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
The network does not keep data on how many of those donors were newborns. Lifelink, an organ procurement organization that operates in the southwest Florida region, said this case was the first they knew of in Tampa Bay and only the third such case the nonprofit has seen in more than three decades.
Most organs can only be donated when donors are in the hospital and on ventilators to keep their organs viable until after they die. More than 100 children under one year of age are on the network’s waitlist.
As her pregnancy was considered higher risk, Mornhineway was referred to the Women’s Center at HCA Florida Brandon Hospital and assigned nurse navigator Laurie Van Damme.
A nurse navigator’s role includes coordinating care for patients. This felt like uncharted territory, Van Damme said, but she quickly understood how much it mattered to the couple.
She reached out to LifeLink and persuaded them to be involved.
“I knew it was going to be something we were going to see through and kind of fight for,” Van Damme said. “They put me in contact with someone in their organization that was willing to walk down that road with me and, more importantly, with them.”
As the weeks went by, Mornhineway’s pregnancy became obvious.
Ford told the family’s two youngest children, Raeya, 4, and Malakai, 2, that the baby was going straight to heaven to be with their nanny.
Their oldest, Chloe Neve-Ford, was 12. They felt she deserved the full story.
“We just wanted her to understand completely and wholly what was gonna happen, so that she was never confused and didn’t feel like we hid it from her,” Ford said.
The baby now had a name too, Haven. It came from a trip to Ormond Beach the family took soon after making the decision. Mornhineway saw several road signs for Winter Haven and the word kept popping up.
“The meaning of haven is, like a safe place or like a lighthouse in the dark kind of thing,” Ford said. “It was just perfect.”
A moment in the sun
Haven Sariah Renee Ford was born by C-section on Dec. 11 at 10:31 p.m. She weighed 6 pounds, which was more than expected considering that her head, the heaviest part of a baby, was not fully formed.
The newborn was put immediately on life-support so LifeLink medical staffers who attended the birth could perform tests to determine blood type and the viability of her organs.
For the four days that Haven lived, her family tried to squeeze in a lifetime of love.
She was held and kissed; she met her three siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. They made hand and foot imprints and a mold of Haven’s hand. Chloe put nail varnish on her sister’s tiny toenails.
Nurses were in out out of her room continuously rearranging the tubes and wires that kept her alive and monitored her vitals so relatives could hold her and talk with her.
“Everybody that held her cried, you know, but was also happy they got to meet her,” Ford said.
Haven’s last day was Dec. 14.
Her parents wanted to take her outside so she could just once feel the sun and the breeze on her face. After some discussion, hospital staffers agreed.
Mornhineway, who was still recovering from the C-section, sat in a wheelchair holding Haven with Ford pushing her. Nurses flanked them in front and behind wheeling life-support devices and a monitoring screen.
Doctors, nurses and hospital staffers lined both sides of the corridor to form an honor walk, a hospital tradition for patients becoming donors. They stood silent as the family passed, some wiping away tears. An instrumental version of Cristina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” played over hospital speakers.
The family took Haven to Adam’s Garden, which is entered through a wrought iron arch. Founded by Van Damme, its centerpiece is a memorial wall with plaques carrying the names of babies that were stillborn or died shortly after birth.
Ford’s sister, Maggie Zboch read aloud a statement Haven’s parents had written.
“God sent her here to save another life; she has also saved ours in so many ways. That brings us peace.”
Haven’s life support was turned off that afternoon.
Her parents put on music and rested on the bed, able for the first time to hold their new daughter without wires and tubes coming between them.
“She was a trooper,” Ford said. “She kept taking her own breaths for three and a half hours.”
The three of them were sleeping when Haven passed, Ford said.
Soon after, Haven’s organs were removed by Lifelink recovery surgeon Jacentha Buggs. The girl was the youngest donor Buggs had ever operated on.
“It’s an incredibly selfless thing for this family to do. In one of their darkest moments emotionally, to bless another child with the opportunity of life,” she said.
Valves from Haven’s heart will likely be used on several young patients on a waitlist. Her placenta was also donated to be used for skin grafts.
A partial heart transplant had been planned but the intended recipient could not undergo surgery due to an infection.
Haven’s parents hope their story will inspire others to be donors. They are still managing grief, but it’s tempered knowing that Haven may have brought about another family’s Christmas miracle.
“It’s a life and it’s just such a beautiful experience even knowing what we had to do and what was going to happen,” Ford said. “It’s just so worth it.”
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