Kimberly Seals Allers she/her/hers, Founder, Irth & Executive Director, Narrative Nation, Inc.

Kimberly Seals Allers is an award-winning journalist, five-time author, international speaker, strategist, and advocate for maternal & infant health. A former senior editor at ESSENCE and writer at FORTUNE magazine, Kimberly is a leading voice on the racial and socio-cultural complexities of birth, breastfeeding, and motherhood. She is the founder of Irth, a new “Yelp-like” app for Black and brown parents to address bias and racism in maternity and infant care. Kimberly also created Birthright, a podcast about joy and healing in Black birth that centers on positive Black birth stories as a tool in the fight for birth justice and reverses the narrative of negative statistics common in mainstream media coverage of Black maternal health. Learn more at KimberlySealsAllers.com. Follow her @iamKSealsAllers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Session

Battling Bias: Learning from the Lived Experience to Improve Perinatal Care & Advance Health Equity - 2022 Data from IRTH App’s Digital Platform

Implicit bias has been well documented as directly linked to the Black maternal mortality crises and high rates of Black infant deaths. However, there is an underlying issue that drives Black maternal/ infant mortality; systemic racism that leads to biased care that does not support healthy pregnancy, birth, and successful breastfeeding for Black women. This session will discuss findings from the analysis of reviews submitted by doulas to the Irth App, a robust database of Black patient experiences of maternity and infant care. Irth (as in Birth, but without the B for bias) is the first-of-its-kind review and recommendation engine designed for Black and brown women and birthing people to find and leave reviews of prenatal, birthing, postpartum, and pediatric experiences of care.