Irth Started as a Mother & Son Project — Now the App Is Becoming ‘Yelp for Safe Black Birth’

Kimberly Seals Allers likes to say that Irth, the app she created to give BIPOC birthing people the power to review their doctors, is something she wished she had when she was giving birth. “I was doing all the research… really hoping to have a great birth experience,” she explained in a discussion with SheKnows Editor-in-Chief Erika Janes at the SHE Media Co-Lab Whole Life Health event at SXSW in Austin, Texas, this past March. A journalist by trade, Allers leveraged all her research skills to find a good hospital and a doctor who would care for her. But in the end, all her careful vetting didn’t matter. Related story Ashlyn Harris Shares How Youth Sports Impacted Her: ‘Sports Absolutely Saved My Life’ “I went to a highly rated hospital and walked out wondering what just happened to me,” Allers recalled. She found herself fighting for the type of care she knew to be standard practice, and was floored by “the level of disrespect, the ways that the things that I was asking for were ignored.” Initially, Allers blamed herself. “Did I do something wrong? Did I miss something in my research?” she recalled wondering. But as the disturbing experience...