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

05/07/2021

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

This episode was sponsored by:

Please donate HERE

We are a 501 3c Non-Profit. Our aim is to prevent and heal birth trauma through education. Women need to understand their options and rights in childbirth so that they can have a safe and healthy birth.

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

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https://birthrightpodcast.com
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Podcasts are sponsored in part by Empowering Fearless Birth
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In the United States, the quality of maternity care for Black women in medical institutions has been lagging far behind the standard for a very long time. In the year 2020 alone, the maternal mortality rate for Black mothers was more than double the amount that it was for white women. The problem arises from deeply ingrained racism in the system of maternal care that can't be solved with racial bias training. The way to truly begin facing it down is to collect enough data that it becomes impossible for institutions to ignore.

Sarah and Kimberly talk about the Irth App and how it is being developed to affect systemic change by allowing black and brown women to rate their experience with birth care providers which then can be used to protect other women and to call on providers to improve their quality of care for women of color. They also discuss the Birthright Podcast and how sharing stories of joy in Black birth can help to reshape the narrative of fear so that future birthing people can approach their experience with confidence.

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 positive Black birth stories as a tool in the fight for birth justice and to reverse the narrative of negative statistics that is common in mainstream media coverage of Black maternal health.

This episode was sponsored by:

Please donate HERE

We are a 501 3c Non-Profit. Our aim is to prevent and heal birth trauma through education. Women need to understand their options and rights in childbirth so that they can have a safe and healthy birth.