Irth App asking providers to drop biases that Black mothers face in health care

The Irth App is calling on health care providers to get rid of the biases that Black mothers often face and experience in maternal health care.

Maternal health advocates declared Thursday as Irth Day at the Brooklyn Public Library to take a stand against those maternal health care biases.

Bruce McIntyre and his longtime partner Amber Rose Isaac gave birth to their son in 2020 – unfortunately, Amber lost her life that very same day.

“Amber was always advocating for herself, she felt like she was never being heard…As soon as she became a pregnant, unmarried, Black woman, it seemed like that care started to shift,” said McIntyre.

McIntyre says that what killed Isaac was not pregnancy complications, but racial biases and negligence in the health care system. That’s where the Irth App is stepping in to help.

Irth is a Yelp-like app that serves as a resource for Black mothers to rank their care, leave feedback and find providers in the area that help to provide health care without bias.

“It’s the way for us to leave reviews, publicly shared reviews, of our doctors, hospitals, pediatricians. It’s all about publicly crowdsourcing where we are getting good care and where we are not,” said Kimberly Seales Allers, founder of the Irth App.

Allers says that the health care reviews you see online today don’t always factor in racial biases, and she hopes that the app and Irth Day bring awareness and fairness to the injustices Black women face.