A rainbow baby is a baby born after pregnancy loss. I am a proud mom of what I sometimes call a quadruple rainbow baby - one TFMR, three miscarriages, and eventually one living child.
I use the term “rainbow baby” not to simplify that story, but to increase visibility of pregnancy loss and the reality of pregnancy and parenting after loss, which is often far more complex than it appears from the outside. There is something about having a specific term that can name the experience. It can hold the truth that this is not just “a pregnancy like any other,” but one shaped by grief, fear, hope, and history.
At the same time, I’m aware that language can flatten things if we’re not careful with it. So I try to use the term in a way that expands meaning rather than narrows it.
In Judaism (as in Christianity), the rainbow appears at the end of the Noah’s Ark story as a sign of G-d’s promise not to flood the world again. But it is not only a symbol of reassurance. It is also a reminder: the flood happened. The storm was real. The destruction was real. The rainbow does not erase that.
One traditional interpretation is that the rainbow functions as a reminder of divine restraint: that even in a world where destruction might feel imaginable or even justified, there is a commitment to not return to total erasure. The rainbow is not a reward. It is a boundary. It marks a promise that the world will continue, even when continuation is not something anyone could claim to deserve.
I’m agnostic leaning atheist, so what feels meaningful to me is less the theological claim and more the ethical posture embedded in that framing. There is a kind of humility in it.
A rainbow is not “everything is fine now.” It is not a guarantee of complete safety in perpetuity. It is a reminder that both things can be true at once: there can be beauty and there can be loss; there can be relief and there can be fear; there can be survival and there can be memory.
This is what the idea of a "rainbow baby" has come to mean to me.
Because there is nothing I did to earn or deserve my living child. Statistically, after recurrent pregnancy loss, about 75% of people go on to have a live birth, which also means about 25% do not. And those numbers sit alongside the lived reality that so many people do everything “right” - every possible medical intervention, lifestyle change, supplement, stress reduction strategy, prayer, hope, or attempt at control - and still do not end up with a living baby.
It is very human, especially for those of us who do end up with a living child, to look backward and search for meaning. To try to locate the reason. To believe there must have been something we did correctly that others did not.
That narrative is comforting. It creates a sense of order. It makes survival feel earned.
But I don’t think it is accurate. And I think the “rainbow baby” concept, at least the way I hold it, resists that idea of deservingness. It asks us to sit with something more uncomfortable: that outcomes like this are often not moral, not earned, not explained. They are partially medical, partially biological, and often random in ways we cannot control.
I feel immense gratitude for my living child. And I also feel very aware that this could have gone differently, and that would not have meant anything about my worth or my body or my effort. It would not have made me any less of a parent.
It is luck. It is also privilege - access to reproductive healthcare, medical support, and time and resources that not everyone has. Remembering that feels like part of the humility the rainbow invites.
In my clinical work, I see how common self-blame is in infertility and pregnancy loss.
People are told explicitly and implicitly that their bodies are problems to be solved. That if they try hard enough, optimize enough, eat the right things, manage stress correctly, think the right thoughts, or become “healthy enough,” they will get the outcome they want. And when that doesn’t happen, the blame often quietly turns inward.
This is reinforced by a broader cultural stigma around reproductive loss and infertility - where people search for reasons in behavior, morality, effort, or identity. As if loss is a reflection of failure rather than a reality that sometimes happens without explanation.
To me, the idea of a rainbow baby - especially through a Jewish lens - pushes back against that entirely. It refuses the notion that any of this maps onto deservingness.
It says: this is something I am grateful for, not something I earned. That distinction allows space for both gratitude and grief, without turning survival into a verdict about who is worthy.
The word “rainbow” also carries another layer for me as a queer parent.
The rainbow is, of course, a symbol of LGBTQ+ pride. My queer identity has shaped my reproductive story in ways that are not always visible from the outside.
At times, I’ve experienced ambivalence about parenthood that is deeply connected to that identity. I haven’t always felt fully supported or safe in my queerness, and that has led me to question things like: Do I have enough community support to become a parent? Do I trust medical systems to hold me and my family well? What does it mean to bring a child into a world where I’ve seen firsthand how painful exclusion can be? And what if my child experiences something similar?
And then, after I did choose parenthood and went through recurrent pregnancy loss, I also struggled with another layer: whether my grief was “allowed” to be as big as it was, given that I hadn’t always felt fully certain or unequivocal in wanting a child.
There can be a subtle narrative that ambivalence makes grief less legitimate. That if you weren’t 100% sure, you should not feel 100% devastated. But that is not how attachment or loss works.
The term “rainbow baby” helps me hold the full complexity of that experience. It makes space for the fact that my identity, my history, my uncertainty, my grief, and my parenting are all part of the same story - not competing versions of it.
It also affirms something important to me: that I can be a queer parent who holds complexity without needing to resolve it into a simpler, more palatable narrative.
So often, LGBTQ+ parents face countless additional layers of complexity in our family building experiences that straight, cisgender parents don’t have to think about: financial costs, medical trauma, and limited community or family of origin support. There can be so much grief, pain, and trauma in navigating all of this in addition to pregnancy loss and/or infertility, and none of that just disappears after a living baby is born. In fact, many queer parents continue to face discrimination and oppression long after their children are born.
Those broader realities are part of why the term "rainbow baby" resonates with me as a queer mom as well. My reproductive story was never only about pregnancy loss. It was also shaped by navigating medical systems as a queer person, wondering whether there would be enough community to raise a child, and continuing to parent in a world where discrimination does not end with a live birth. The rainbow, for me, can hold all of those layers at once.
When I say I am a rainbow baby mom, I do not mean “everything is sunshine and rainbows now.”
I mean something closer to: the world can be unfair and painful and often doesn’t make sense, and I am still here, trying to stay present in it.
I mean: I can be profoundly grateful for my living child and still know that I did not earn this outcome.
I mean: I can hold grief and joy at the same time without collapsing one into the other.
And I mean: I try, in my work as a therapist and in my life as a parent, to sit with people in the reality that so much of this is not about deserving, or effort, or moral worth - but about being human in a world that does not distribute outcomes evenly or predictably.
For me, that is what the rainbow ultimately points to. Not a promise that everything will always be okay. But a reminder that storms have happened, storms still happen, and still, there can be moments of color in the aftermath.
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