When Erica Morales, 36, died shortly after giving birth to three girls and a boy on Thursday, her story drew international attention, Reuters reports.
Morales “gave her life” to have the babies, her family said. She died at Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, The New York Daily News reports.
“She never got to hold them, she never got to see them,” Nicole Todman, Morales’ cousin told Fox10 per the Daily News. “It is so hard to know she fought so hard for her children. She will never get to brush their hair, hold their hand, watch them get married, none of that will ever happen for her.”
She never got to hold her babies because she was unconscious by the time they were delivered by C-section, Todman told CBS News.
Morales, a real estate agent, and her husband Carlos had tried for years to conceive, and finally with the help of a doctor, she was able to get pregnant, her family said.
“They were blessed with not one but four beautiful children, but that blessing came with the most unimaginable tragedy,” her family wrote on this GoFundMe page. The family didn’t disclose what went wrong, but on her Facebook page she wrote about her struggles with high blood pressure just days before going into labor, The Daily News reports.
Morales’ cousins Nicole and Christina Todman told a local TV station that they consider themselves Erica’s sisters. They were at the hospital on Thursday when Morales went into delivery.
“We are here for this,” Christina Todman said. “We are here to be a mother figure for these children because they are never going to meet their biological mother. They are going to have it through us, they are going to have it through their mother.”
Christina Todman noted that Morales was nervous about being a new mother, and because she’d suffered a previous miscarriage, she was apprehensive and didn’t want to get too excited about the babies’ arrival. Instead, she focused on doing what was best for the babies and made sure that she was eating enough, CBS News reports.
“Her focus of her pregnancy was to make sure she did everything to make sure they were healthy so she was able to bring them into the world. And she did,” Todman said.
The babies’ names are Paisley, Tracey, Erica, and Carlos.
On her Facebook page, the mother-to-be expressed her happiness, including the discovery that there were four heartbeats on an ultrasound last fall and a hope-filled baby shower in December, Reuters reports.
Last week she wrote that her doctor “said I did phenomenal. A poster child for quads.”
However, she also wrote that at 31 weeks pregnant, her blood pressure was too high, and she was being hospitalized because “u can stroke out with bad blood pressure.”
On Saturday, hospital officials released a statement expressing condolences to the family but didn’t provide a cause of death, and didn’t comment on the condition of the quadruplets, citing patient privacy laws.
On the first day that the GoFundMe page was set up, it was shared via the social media more than 17,000 times, Reuters reports and $19,000 had been raised by over 600 donors. Fortunately, the page now shows that more than 91,000 has been raised and the page has been shared some 250,000 times.
