By Inimai Chettiar

When my daughter was born, she didn’t eat. It wasn’t just fussiness or adjusting. She did not eat at all. Every bottle was a full-blown hostage negotiation.

The doctors assured me nothing was wrong. “She’s just sensitive.” “Try a different bottle.” “Relax.” Relax? I thought. Sure, let me grab my stress ball while my newborn starves.

As a woman of color, this unfortunately felt familiar: the polite head-tilts, the “let’s just wait and see,” and the insinuations that I was exaggerating or inexperienced. Meanwhile, I was watching my newborn fade in front of me. I will never forget the helpless feeling of looking into her tiny face scrunched up in pain, her long eyelashes wet with tears, and not knowing how to help her. The mismatch between my terror and their calm felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake from.

Feeding my baby seemed like one of the most fundamental and urgent things in the world to me, and yet I found myself brushed off, delayed, and dismissed. At my wit’s end, I looked online for resources. 

In my research, I turned to something I’d long been skeptical of—ChatGPT. I’d heard the cautionary tales about using AI for something as serious as health: misinformation, data privacy concerns, and parasocial human-AI relationships that have been popping up in the news as more people start to depend on our computer overlords to fill the gaps left by the humans in our lives. But with nowhere else to turn, I bit my tongue and downloaded the app. 

I typed: “My baby is refusing every bottle and screaming in pain. I KNOW something is wrong. Please help.” ChatGPT replied, summarizing my concerns: “Infant presents with persistent feeding refusal and distress. Recommend urgent evaluation for allergy, reflux, or oral aversion.”

It sounded about as emotional as a spreadsheet—exactly the tone I needed to be taken seriously by doctors, I soon learned. My rapid-fire breathlessness had prompted eye rolls and exasperated sighs from doctors. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, had infinite patience. It was always ready for my next question with a tone of pleasant neutrality. 

In navigating our fraught healthcare system, AI—to my surprise—became a lifeline and helped me advocate for my daughter more effectively. It built a clean clinical timeline from my messy notes, flagged research I’d missed, helped me track patterns I hadn’t seen, explained new research in plain language, and helped me ask better questions. I used it to draft requests for expedited appointments, rewrite insurance appeals when we were denied, push back on doctors, and negotiate pricing with out-of-network specialists. 

Many people of color are all too familiar with “code switching,” or deliberately speaking in a calm, factual voice considered acceptable in clinical and professional settings. While the real me was in absolute terror, AI helped rewrite my concerns to come across as detached, cool, and respectful—and the doctors started listening. Two months in, we had diagnoses, medications, and specialized formula. 

Of course, AI poses some very real and concerning threats: displacing workers, automating creativity, and contributing to the climate crisis, to name a few. The public discourse around its use and future in our society has largely been focused on these issues, and understandably so. 

But there’s another story worth telling. In a broken medical system that often dismisses parents of children with health issues and categorizes women, especially Black and Brown ones, as hysterical or entitled, why did it take artificial intelligence for me and my child to be taken seriously?

I’m not the only one using it this way. In the quiet corners of the internet—Reddit threads, Facebook groups, parent forums at 2 a.m.—people are using AI to navigate our medical bureaucracy. They are using them to write disability claims, decode hospital notes, and translate discharge instructions. One mother used it to write the post that caught a specialist’s attention and got her son seen months earlier. Another used it to create a chart that finally convinced insurance to approve treatment.

Parents are drowning, and AI has become the life raft they never expected to grab.

I don’t want AI to replace doctors. I want doctors to stop treating women in my position like hysterical noise and ignoring our pain unless we communicate like we’re emotionless robots.

I want a world where a mother’s real-life observations are taken seriously, not responded to with a shrug and a prescription for herbal tea and deep breathing.

In the meantime, in a healthcare system that too often renders patients and their caregivers invisible, AI helped me become impossible to ignore.  

Inimai Chettiar is a mother of two who serves as President of A Better Balance, a national legal organization advancing pioneering workplace policies to support mothers and families, including paid leave and pregnancy accommodations. After a complex fertility journey, high-risk pregnancies with disabilities, and navigating her daughters’ medical issues, shifting how our society treats mothers has become her work and lived reality.

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