Missouri woman’s photo of moms with ‘rainbow babies’ grabs hearts across the country

After the rain comes the rainbow.

And after the sorrow of losing a baby, sometimes comes the joy of another.

Photographer Alex Bolen of St. Peters, Mo., captured the beauty of both in a photograph that has gone viral over the last few days.

Bolen photographed six mothers with their “rainbow babies,” a term used for a baby born to a mother who has lost a baby through a miscarriage, stillborn birth or neonatal death.

The rainbow references the light after a dark storm.

“These mommas are just 6 out of the millions that experience pregnancy/infant loss every day,” Bolen wrote on the Facebook page of her company, Shutter Darling Photography.

“Some speak out. Some stay silent. Some have lost many. Some try for months or years. Some meet their sleeping angels. All loved and never forgotten.”

Bolen dressed the mothers in rainbow-colored gowns from Utah-based Sew Trendy Accessories, then set off smoke bombs behind them in matching colors, creating an ethereal, fairy tale effect.

The moms — Sara Markivee, Kaila Marie, Hannah Peltonen, Ashley Jones Behrle, Hillary Funk and Heather Terranova — also posed for individual photos and wrote essays about their experiences.

Terranova, a labor and delivery nurse, is pregnant and wearing red in the photo. She wrote of how she and her husband, Mike, were “super excited” to find out they were pregnant in January 2011.

The night before her first ultrasound in March, she started bleeding profusely.

She lost the baby.

“Why me?! It was our FIRST baby. How did this happen?! Why us?! I had a MILLION questions,” she wrote.

She got pregnant again and delivered baby Dominic on May 11, 2012.

Then she lost another baby at the end of her first trimester. “I felt shattered. AGAIN!?” she wrote. “I cried for weeeeeeeeks. And have never been the same since.”

She had another baby, Vinny, who is 2. And now, after many prayers, she’s feeling “blessed to be THIS close to welcoming our third baby boy.”

Grief. Tears. Prayers. The moms’ stories are sorrowfully similar.

Bolen gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Haven, this past spring, she told KSDK in St. Louis.

During her pregnancy she joined an online moms group where she began to read about the pain of women who had lost babies — nearly 24,000 are stillborn every year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She also learned the term “rainbow baby.”

Bolen organized the photo shoot to spread awareness about the losses so many women endure. She told KSDK she found her subjects on Facebook — six women who were either expecting or had recently given birth to a rainbow baby.

The response to their portrait has been overwhelming. The photo has been shared nearly 18,000 times since she posted it on Nov. 10.

It has inspired other moms to post photos of their own “rainbow babies” to Bolen’s Facebook page.

Bolen had been waiting to photograph the women for quite a while, she told Scary Mommy blog.

In the photography world, rainbow smoke photos are becoming a trend, but she knew she it was fitting for this portrait.

“I had the rainbow gown idea for months,” she told the blog. “I had been in contact with everyone just waiting for the crazy fall season to end.

“I use smoke bombs quite often. I realized I could use multiple and went for them all.”

The blog hopes Bolen’s photograph helps women who have lost a baby “feel a renewed sense of hope that their rainbow will come soon.”

This story was originally published November 15, 2016 at 10:37 AM with the headline "Missouri woman’s photo of moms with ‘rainbow babies’ grabs hearts across the country."