Racial Bias in Maternity Care and Healing Black Birth | Kimberly Seals Allers

Today we talk to Kimberly Seals Allers, founder of Irth, an app where Black and brown parents can rate practitioners in order to address bias and racism in maternity and infant care. She is also the host of Birthright, a podcast about joy and healing in Black birth that seeks to change the narrative around Black birth being a necessarily traumatic experience. Kimberly is an award-winning journalist and five-time author, and she is an outspoken advocate for maternal and infant health in marginalized communities. 

We talk about Kimberly's introduction to the birth world as a young black mother and the fear she felt facing down the statistics of birth outcomes for black mothers. We then talk about the negative birth experience that Kimberly had in a hospital that had come highly recommended by her friends and how the realization that she had been treated differently due to her race led her toward her advocacy and eventually toward the development of Irth. 

We talk about what Irth is and how it helps black and brown women to be able to research and find a birth provider that is not going to bring racial bias into their care, as well as how it helps those women to report on their own birth experience with a provider in order to inform their community and provide data that can then be used to incentivize birth providers to improve their quality of care. We talk about how racial bias shows up in the medical community and how we can tell whether a birth provider is allowing those biases to influence their practice. 

We then talk about how the Irth team approaches providers that need coaching on their practices, and provides them with the data that shows where improvement is needed. We talk about cultural alignment in the birth space and how that can help to improve overall outcomes. Finally, we talk about the Birthright podcast and how sharing stories of success and joy in Black birth helps to move the narrative away from fear and allows more space for healing and progress.

To learn more, visit https://irthapp.com/

For Any Questions, Email Us at media@birthcircle.com