Since then, the women have worked with more than 100 pregnancies, and in 2006 Angel Watch became a pilot program of Intermountain Healthcare. Through their work, Tanner and Kasteler support a couple's decision, whether it's to terminate the pregnancy or to proceed, offering permission to grieve. If the couple chooses to continue the pregnancy, the women also offer permission for the parents to engage with their unborn babies.

"Kay and Carolyn asked what my biggest fear was," recalls Marci Decker. "I said, 'How do I put a lifetime of love into whatever time I have with her? How do I show her how much I love her, how much I wanted her?"'

To which the Angel Watch founders responded: "Why can't you start now?"

This carpe diem approach was actually something that Tanner and Kasteler learned from Lori and Lars Paulsen.

A 2004 ultrasound showed that little Lars Paulsen, named after his dad, had a heart and brain growing on the outside of his body, the result of the rupture of the amniotic wall. "They said to picture a rubber band shattering, so it was like shrapnel in the womb," says Lori. "Wherever he was hit with it, he had damage."

Ending the pregnancy early wasn't an option, Lori says, because of the couple's firm belief that "what's meant to happen will happen." The choice, then, was whether to just wait out the pregnancy or to make the most of the time that was left.

One day, while walking through a pile of leaves near her house, Lori spoke to her unborn baby: "Little Lars, can you hear the crunch?" This was an epiphany moment for her, Lori says; this notion "that we could still make him feel life." So the Paulsens sat their other three children down and told them that beginning that very day they were all going to teach little Lars about things he would never see or experience. They were going to, as Lori puts it, "love this baby into the world."

There were hikes to see the sunset, a sleigh ride, trick or treating, picture books. On the morning of little Lars's scheduled birth, big Lars took him for a ride down I-215 at 135 miles per hour in a borrowed sports car. "Little Lars kicked the entire time," Lori recalls. He was born several hours later and lived 65 minutes.

Sometimes family and friends wondered if maybe all this bonding would painful. But Lori has a different take: "The people who terminate the pregnancy or try to push the bonding away, I can't see they're mourning any lighter," she says. The whole experience was so life-changing for her family that Lori has written a book for young children about the process; she is looking for a publisher.