Let’s talk about abortion and Health Freedom. 
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It’s a tough subject and right about now, half the people giving me their attention are getting ready to be angry because I might propose the RIGHT to have an abortion and half the people reading this far are getting ready to be upset because I might propose a woman has NO RIGHT to have an abortion. But before we consider the legal rights and wrongs, we need to consider how we got where we are.
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Let me set out some historical facts on the subject: I was born in 1943 and for the next 30 years, until Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court in 1973, abortion was not only a huge taboo and a bad, shameful thing to even contemplate, much less actually do, abortion was also pretty much unavailable for ordinary women unless they resorted to illegal medical procedures, foreign travel or what were literally back alley procedures or attempted desperate , often deadly, measures for inducing one.
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I entered Medical School in 1966, 7 years before Roe v Wade and, as you can imagine, spent a lot of time in the Emergency Rooms of the hospitals I was assigned to, as well as their obstetrics and gynecology wards.
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I was mostly trained in the New York City Hospital System.  Conditions were terrible, the doctors varied from horrific to superb and the “teaching material”, which is what patients were called, were in desperate need of whatever services they were lucky enough to receive.
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Women who get pregnant and do not want to remain pregnant WILL have abortions.  They WILL exert the most fundamental of rights over their own Health Freedom.  I personally have had my hands on the dying body a 14 year old victim of rape and repeated incest with a wire coat hanger protruding from her vagina as she expired.  She died from sepsis (massive infection) but not before she told me that she induced an abortion because she wanted to stay in school so she could become a doctor.
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She was, in a primitive and ultimately lethal fashion, attempting to exercise her Health Freedom:  the right to total self-determination over her body, its uses, its past, its present and its future. So please understand: while I am concerned with legal rights, I am passionate about pain and suffering. As a doctor, that is my first concern. That is why I believe in Health Freedom, to stop the suffering. As a woman, that is why I believe in Health Freedom, to stop the suffering of unwilling mothers and unwanted children.
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You believe in Health Freedom.  At least for yourself.
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Do you have enough charity and jsutice in your heart to offer it to other people?  Do you have enough passionate commitment to the basic right of every human being on the planet  to shape their own body’s experience as they see fit, to look past the rhetoric and both the historical and current patriarchy to see that women, like men, are capable people who can do as they want with their own bodies?
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Ah, but what about the fetus?  And what about the new born? Are you aware that the United States has the absolute worst child and infant mortality of any developed nation on the planet?
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Somehow it is fine to let society kill babies by neglect, poverty, maternal malnutrition and idiotic, outdated medical practices once they have reached full term, but it is wrong to allow women to control their own lives?
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We may not like the way those choices are made (certainly preventing conception is better than accepting the risks inherent in ending it), but we must respect a woman for making the choice. No one else has any right to make that choice for her, to prevent that choice or to insist on it for her so long as she is not a minor.

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“The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than any of the other 27 wealthy countries, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control. A baby born in the U.S. is nearly three times as likely to die during her first year of life as one born in Finland or Japan. That same American baby is about twice as likely to die in her first year as a Spanish or Korean one. Despite healthcare spending levels that are significantly higher than any other country in the world, a baby born in the U.S. is less likely to see his first birthday than one born in Hungary, Poland or Slovakia. Or in Belarus. Or in Cuba, for that matter. The  U.S. rate of 6.1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births masks considerable state-level variation. If Alabama were a country, its rate of 8.7 infant deaths per 1,000 would place it slightly behind Lebanon in the world rankings. Mississippi, with its 9.6 deaths, would be somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain.”1
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Our maternal mortality is a similar disgrace.  While most modern industrial countries lose 12 or fewer mothers in delivery, we average 21 per 100,000 live births, right around Brunei, Grenada, Saudi Arabia, Hungary and Iran.2
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Somehow it makes some sort of social “sense” to allow children to come into a world where they are not wanted, resulting, according to a vast number of studies, in disastrous outcomes for those children without providing for them in any meaningful way while women are prevented from life courses that make sense for them?
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It also makes “sense” to the very same people who want to control what happens to every woman’s body in the United States and make massive life decisions for her use of that body (sound like life on the plantation to anyone?) that we should impose sanctions on countries so that their children starve to death by the millions.  It makes “sense” to them that we  should use depleted uranium munitions on their countries so that massive numbers of children are either unviable or so damaged that they can never lead lives even vaguely approaching normal.  It makes “sense” to them to pass laws allowing such massive pollution, and such dangerous drugs and vaccines that there may not be any normal DNA left on the planet, including yours, mine and theirs.
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It makes “sense” to fund programs to destroy the earth, like geoengineering so that ALL of Earth’s children will die, unless they live deep in the happy bunkers below the earth that these mad men have prepared for themselves.
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You are not invited.
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And they tell me, and you, your wife, daughter, sister and mother that our lives are restricted – and our choices are criminalized – because they are protecting babies?
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That is, to me, precisely like telling the assembled slaves in their shacks next to the cotton fields that you are keeping them safe from the problems they would face in the world if they were free.
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Oh, wait.  That is why we are told we are in an eternal and borderless war at the cost of our lives, our economy and our liberties.  We are being, like the women and the fetuses, protected.  I forgot.
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Wrap it in any historical or medical or religious or social or mythic justification you like.  If you believe, to your core, as you should, that you own your own body, then any restriction on what you can do with it is inconsistent with that belief.
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Roe vs Wade was the Supreme Court’s attempt at judicial compromise for a very difficult issue, where deeply-held, sincere beliefs conflict.
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Under that rule, government has no interest in restricting a woman’s right to choose, at least during the first and possibly the second trimester, until viability outside the womb is an issue. We must continue to support Roe v Wade as the least a civil society can do to protect the right to choose Health Freedom for herself as the woman sees fit.
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I support the broadest possible right to choose. That is, IMHO, the essence of Health Freedom: the right to choose to use or not use vaccines; the right to use safe nutrients or dangerous prescription drugs for health; the right to control what happens to your health and your body.
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It also includes the right to breathe uncontaminated air and live in natural weather, eat food that does not impact my DNA in unnatural ways, not have my life shortened by radiation if I do not wish to have it so shortened.
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To me, these are all the same right: Health Freedom — freedom to determine, without any exceptions, what happens to my body.
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We have, at least nominally, in the US, the right to express our opinions, positions and beliefs.  We have, for the most part, surrendered the right to respectful discourse.
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You may disagree with me. Or not. I can only presume that you agree with my right to express my considered views.  I welcome your response.  Please email it to me at releyes3@gmail.com.
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I extend my defense of freedom to you.  How far do you extend that freedom to others?
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Yours in health and freedom,
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Dr. Rima
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1 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/29/our-infant-mortality-rate-is-a-national-embarrassment/

2 http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=2223