America’s First-Ever Rainbow Clinic Is Here to Help

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), around 1 in 170 American births result in stillbirth each year, with Black women twice as likely to experience a stillbirth than white women. The data also shows those who have previously experienced a stillbirth are five times as likely to experience another stillbirth or severe maternal health complications.

Stillbirth isn’t just a maternal health crisis; it’s a mental health crisis too. Many women struggle to cope emotionally after losing a baby and experience anxiety around a new pregnancy. The solution to these issues is multi-pronged, but with greater awareness, support, and high-quality care, studies have found that more than 25 percent of stillbirths in the United States are preventable.

Enter Mount Sinai’s Rainbow Clinic, the first-ever Rainbow Clinic in the US. Based in New York City, the clinic was created in partnership with nonprofit PUSH Empowered Pregnancy and was modeled after Tommy’s Research Centre’s Rainbow Clinic at St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, England.

“The Mount Sinai Rainbow Clinic hopes to provide a supportive environment, medical expertise and compassion for patients who have experienced a stillbirth,” said the director of the Rainbow Clinic, Joanne L. Stone, MD. “There is a real need to take care of patients with a history of stillbirth and do our best to prevent a recurrence of the stillbirth. By a thorough evaluation, monitoring and personalized care, we think we can accomplish this.”

The specially-trained staff all work together to take an empathetic, hands-on approach to patient care. According to PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy, “Standard prenatal care simply isn’t adequate for a family who is expecting again after a previous stillbirth, neonatal loss or traumatic miscarriage. The average OBGYN cannot accommodate all the needs a family has in getting through subsequent pregnancies.”

From more frequent ultrasounds to a focus on mental health, at Mount Sinai’s Rainbow Clinic parents who have previously experienced a loss can get the care they deserve.

“We evaluate all the information to try to understand the cause of the prior stillbirth and tailor the care based on those findings. We provide social work and nutritional services, extensive fetal monitoring and expertise by our MFM (Maternal-Fetal Medicine) physicians to provide care in the most sensitive way possible,” said Stone.

Patients interested in requesting an appointment with Mount Sinai’s Rainbow Clinic can do so here. If you are unable to travel to New York for an appointment and are looking for resources around pregnancy loss check out The Bump’s Miscarriage & Pregnancy Loss Guide.

About the expert:

Joanne L. Stone, MD, MSHCDL, is the Chair of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Stone is a well-known expert in the field of maternal-fetal medicine and previously served as the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Division Director and Fellowship Director for the Mount Sinai Health System. Stone leads the Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai, which was established as a partnership with PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy in March 2022.