Women across the country are donating their old wedding dresses to the Angel Gown Program which turns the garments into bereavement gowns for babies who have died in hospital NICUs.
Donated wedding dresses are being turned into bereavement gowns for babies who die in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU.
The NICU Helping Hands’ Angel Gown Program began in 2013 after workers noticed the need for these garments while providing other services to those families.
The group’s use of wedding gowns has been a symbolic way of conveying the love, honor, respect, and happiness felt by a bride to the baby who is not able to survive.
Dresses are sent to one of 700 volunteer seamstresses across the country and are re-fashioned using very strict standards to provide the best garment possible.
Recipient families are not charged at all, with packaging and shipping costs covered by donations.
More than 8,000 wedding dresses were donated to the program in 2014.
In some cases where a death
