Kimberly Seals Allers Built Irth So Black Families Could Rate Their Care

Let me tell you about Kimberly Seals Allers.

There’s a journalist who had a birth experience so disrespectful it changed the course of her career — and instead of just writing about it, she built a tool that lets every Black and brown parent rate their care before the next family walks in blind. Her name is Kimberly Seals Allers, and she created the Irth app.

The Work

Kimberly is the Founder and Creator of Irth, a “Yelp-like” review and rating app where Black and brown women and birthing people can read and leave anonymous reviews of their prenatal, birthing, postpartum, and pediatric care. The idea is as simple as it is radical: if bias is real, make it visible — and make hospitals accountable for it.

Before Irth, she was a senior editor at Essence and a five-time author. Her 2017 book The Big Letdown: How Medicine, Big Business and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding laid out the economics and politics that shape who gets supported to breastfeed — and she’s a co-founder of National Black Breastfeeding Week.

Her commentaries on race, mothering, and health have run in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and HuffPost, and she spent years running on-the-ground, community-partnered research projects in cities like Birmingham, New Orleans, Detroit, and Philadelphia to understand the lived experience of birth and breastfeeding in communities of color.

The Roots

Kimberly finished her master’s degree at Columbia University just days before giving birth to her first child. Unwed and on student insurance, she was treated at a hospital ranked among the best in New York — and left feeling disrespected and violated. She spent years wondering why a hospital that treated others so well treated her so poorly.

The research eventually caught up to what she already knew: implicit bias shapes the care people receive. So she built the metric that measures it.

Why You Should Know Her

Here’s why Kimberly Seals Allers matters right now: Black women are still far more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes in this country, and part of the reason is that too many people go into the delivery room with no information about how they’ll be treated. Kimberly turned her own worst experience into a public accountability tool — one that puts power back in parents’ hands.

She didn’t just survive the system. She made it answer for itself.

Quick facts:

• Founder & Creator, Irth App
• Award-winning journalist; former senior editor, Essence
• Five-time author, including The Big Letdown (2017)
• Co-founder, National Black Breastfeeding Week
• Master’s degree, Columbia University

Photo: Nicky Quamian-Woo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons