Why some parents dislike the term 'rainbow baby' (2024)

After 24 hours of labor that was mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting, Teresa Mendoza met her daughter. Then, just one day after her due date, the baby died.

"Sylvia was my first pregnancy," the Washington-based nurse tells TODAY.com, adding that her pregnancy was routine. "I had an appointment the day after her due date and it was there that we learned she had died, unexpectedly of course, and unexplained."

"She had dark hair, long fingers and big feet; we like to think she would have been a dancer," Mendoza recalls. "Our families were able to be there, meet and hold her, celebrate her existence and grieve her death until we said goodbye."

This was not Mendoza's last pregnancy, though. When she last spoke with TODAY.com, she was pregnant with her fourth child, her "rainbow baby."

What is a rainbow baby?

Psychologist Dr. Jessica Zucker, author of "I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, A Movement," tells TODAY.com that people generally refer to a baby born after a pregnancy loss, infant death, stillbirth or miscarriage as a rainbow baby. In fact, Zucker has a rainbow baby of her own.

Similarly the, American Pregnancy Association defines rainbow baby as symbolizing "hope, healing and something beautiful after a dark and turbulent time. This is much like the rainbow’s symbol of promise and light." There is even a Rainbow Baby Day: Aug. 22.

Why do some parents reject this term?

Mendoza explains the storm and rainbow reference might not be the best imagery to describe the loss of a pregnancy or baby. "Referring to anything with her as darkness or a storm felt like it focused strictly on her death rather than her very real life," she shares.

"Pregnancy and infant loss is already so very stigmatized and shrouded in families feeling isolated and pressured to ‘move on,'" she says. "My kids are siblings. One of them is dead and others are alive. I don’t feel the need to call their existence anything other than they are their sister’s brothers and she is their sister."

Meg Konig, a photographer and mom in Colorado, first heard the term shortly before she miscarried her daughter, Hope. When she delivered her son, Everett, after her loss, Konig says she wasn't "in love" with the idea of calling her newborn a rainbow baby, partly because she doesn't want to define Everett in relation to Hope.

"For me the term aligned with the idea that we wouldn't have 'tried for another baby' if we had had a successful birth with our previous pregnancy," Konig says. "It's been many years since our miscarriage, but when I think of losing Hope and then of having our son Everett, I think of it as two separate events."

Konig published her thoughts in an essay on the Colorado Springs Moms Collective and discovered she was not alone in her discomfort with the term.

Her baby Hope was not "a kind of tumultuous event that we had to overcome," Konig wrote. She wasn't the storm: "We want to remember her, herself, as the rainbow."

The mom of four echoed Mendoza's feeling that there's pressure to "get over" or "move on" from a loss. Storms pass, and then a rainbow appears. Loss doesn't clear up like a storm does.

"Loss cannot be compared or measured. My loss with Hope was deeply impacting, and I had to work through it for a very long time," she says. "The timeline for grief varies by each person, and there was no grand rule book or timeline for bereavement."

"Some things don't need a positive spin"

Zucker attempts to clarify the potentially problematic phrasing, noting that it might be helpful to step back and look at the phrase "more broadly," saying, "Many women think, 'My loss is not a storm, how dare we talk in contrast seeing the loss as a storm?'" She tries to reassure them by saying, "Of course your baby is not a storm but the situation may cause tumult in your life ... and that’s what the storm is referring to."

Both Mendoza and Konig mention the importance of recognizing their emotions.

"A tremendous amount of healing and connection is possible in sitting with sadness, acknowledging it and working through it," Mendoza says. "There will always be someone missing and the profound longing and sadness I feel from that are OK emotions to carry. Some things don’t need a positive spin."