The Experience Miracles Podcast

If Parents Don’t Stand for Health Freedom, Who Will? w/ Leah Wilson

Jul 1, 2025

Health Freedom and Parental Rights: Why the Policy Battle Matters for Every Family, with Leah Wilson

Episode 117 (Part 1 of 2), Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: July 1, 2024 | Duration: ~42 min

Guest: Leah Wilson, JD, Attorney, Mom, and Co-Founder of Stand for Health Freedom

Key Takeaways

  • Health freedom is a constitutionally protected, basic human right, at its core, it means the right of parents and individuals to choose what medical interventions their children and bodies participate in, without government coercion.
  • Leah Wilson’s origin story began in 2018 when Indiana’s Department of Child Services denied her foster care relicensure because her healthy, unvaccinated children were classified as a “threat” to foster children, a catalyst that launched her career in full-time health freedom advocacy.
  • Stand for Health Freedom deliberately focuses on the policy and civics battle rather than the science battle, because science, Leah argues, is “a bad governor” that can be bought, corrupted, and changed overnight, while constitutionally protected rights are far more durable ground to defend.
  • The five pillars of health freedom Leah identifies are: access to information, free speech, informed consent, parental rights, religious freedom, and privacy, and losing any one of them puts all the others at risk.
  • Informed consent is broken inside the current medical system because the allopathic “one-size-fits-all” approach presents a single solution per diagnosis and never tells patients: what happens if you do nothing, what your other options are, or what the realistic rates of success and harm look like.

What Is Health Freedom and Why Do Parents Need to Fight for It?

Health freedom is the basic human right, constitutionally protected in the United States, to choose what medical interventions you and your children participate in. At its simplest, it means parents retain the authority to decide what goes into their children’s bodies, which providers they work with, and what treatments they accept or decline. Without health freedom, those decisions belong to institutions, agencies, and mandates rather than families.

Attorney and advocate Leah Wilson, co-founder of Stand for Health Freedom, entered this fight in 2018 after Indiana’s Department of Child Services denied her family a foster care license renewal. Her healthy, unvaccinated children, with active religious exemptions on file, were reclassified as a “threat to the welfare of foster children” under an agency regulation, with no new science and no new law to justify the change. That experience became the catalyst for dedicating her legal career to protecting parental rights and informed consent at the policy level.

What Wilson and Dr. Tony Ebel make clear in this conversation is that health freedom isn’t just about vaccines or any single issue, it’s the umbrella under which every other health choice lives. When that umbrella is eroded through regulatory overreach, school policy, or the slow normalization of coercive medical practices, parents lose the ability to act on their own instincts, research, and values for their children’s care.

Leah’s Origin Story: The Foster Care Crisis That Changed Everything [00:03:00 – 00:09:00]

Leah Wilson: There’s definitely a single impetus for dedicating my entire life, outside of motherhood and being a wife, to health freedom advocacy. When you look back at the timeline, you think this is nothing short of divine.

My passion for law was because of kids, because of children’s health, because of foster care and the inadequacies of that system. My husband is a chiropractor. So natural health and law were my world. I practiced big law, complex litigation, bet-the-company cases.

In 2018, we were prepared to take our next foster care placement and were up for relicensure. The day before we were prepared to take our next placement, I got a letter from the Indiana Department of Child Services saying they needed vaccine records for my biological kids, Isaiah and Samuel, my boys. I said, “You have the letters. You have the religious exemptions. I’ll resend them.”

They came back and said, “No, this doesn’t work anymore.” I asked: what new science since my last placement? What new law? What’s changed?

All they could show me was that they were applying a small agency regulation, a rule the Department of Child Services makes, that says if anyone in the household is a threat to the welfare of the foster children, you’re not qualified. They were defining me and my healthy children as a threat. There’s no current outbreak. There’s no evidence my kids are unhealthy. They’re healthy kids.

Nick and I looked at each other and said, “This is too big to fight, but it’s too big not to fight.” So I dove full time into health freedom advocacy.

“This is too big to fight, but it’s too big not to fight.”

Dr. Tony Ebel: Those are two very valid questions, what new science, what new law? Most of the time when they make these new interpretations and alter reality even further, there’s none on either.

Taking the First Steps: Who Do You Call? [00:08:00 – 00:11:00]

Leah Wilson: The big question is, “What difference can I possibly make?” And the second question is, “Where do we go from here to even make a dent in these nonsense policies?”

Knowing what we knew, this policy made no sense, and I wasn’t the one being hurt. My husband, my kids, we weren’t the ones being harmed by the bad policy. It was the most vulnerable children in my community that were being harmed, the ones that needed homes that night.

My first inclination was to call Dr. Joel Bohemian, my husband’s mentor. He said, “We ought to call Sayer.” So all three of us are talking, and Sayer Ji connected me to the Alliance for Vaccine Awareness, a repository of every scientist, attorney, virologist, immunologist, mom, journalist, and researcher that had done anything in the space of vaccine awareness. That was my 10,000 hours.

Sayer Ji founded GreenMedInfo.com, the largest natural health database for natural medicine studies, the largest repository of research of its kind for 15 to 20 years.

Dr. Tony Ebel: Most often we’re just frozen by the first step. We just don’t know who to call first. But you called one mentor who knew the next person. Usually it literally is just one or two steps away.

The Four Pillars of the Opposition Narrative [00:11:00 – 00:15:00]

Leah Wilson: At that point, Congress was holding investigative hearings. There were huge amounts of people who cared about the vaccine issue, about medical mandates, but they needed to find their voice in a meaningful way. It’s disorienting to have all these different reasons you care about an issue with all these different data points.

There are really four core messages the dominant narrative hangs on: “Vaccines save lives,” “The science is settled,” “Religious exemptions are being abused,” and “The unvaccinated are a threat.”

That third one, religious exemptions, has morphed a bit. God is still what they want to replace. They want the state to be God, medicine to be God. But they’re not so worried about religion being in the way anymore. They’re more focused on parental rights now. They know they cannot stop the religious parents, so they want to go around them. They’re coming into our schools with messaging for our children.

That battle still exists. West Virginia is still fighting for religious exemption. Massachusetts is still fighting to keep theirs.

“They know they cannot stop the religious parents, so they want to go around them. They’re coming into our schools with messaging for our children.”

Building a Health Freedom Voting Block [00:15:00 – 00:20:00]

Leah Wilson: I was responding to a nonsense policy, public health intruding on our lives. And looking at what was happening, we knew that the people needed a voice. Any meaningful lobby has a voting block. Health freedom didn’t. We were not showing up as stakeholders in public health.

If we aren’t at the table as stakeholders in public health, the people, the moms, the dads, then how can we blame our policymakers for only knowing the industry story?

A real simple analogy: I sit on my kid’s school board and the leader is amazing. He comes to me, I’m a resource. The story he always tells is, “Oh, there’s supposedly this uprising of people upset with a policy the school put forth.” We ask him: has anybody come to talk to you about it? Not one. Not a single parent.

This is just the way of parents. We will chat over here, we’ll gossip over here, we’ll comment over here, but we forget to take the only influential step, to unify our voice, get together, and get a seat at the table.

My kids came home one day, Isaiah was in second grade, and he looked at me with big eyes and said, “Mom, you’re never going to believe what Ms. Dixon said today. She told us that the reason we won’t die from disease like George Washington is because our parents love us enough to get us vaccinated.”

Honestly, it’s not Ms. Dixon’s fault. Somewhere up the line, they sold her that message. She means no harm. But she just taught my kid I don’t love him.

Dr. Tony Ebel: You’ve got to have a huge heart of empathy and compassion for them. At one time, most of us didn’t know either. Somebody was that voice, that catalyst, that guide for us. Now we get the chance to go and be that guide for someone else.

Defining Health Freedom [00:20:00 – 00:24:00]

Leah Wilson: We have a whole course on this at healthfreedominstitute.com. The question is, how do you tell your friend you care about health freedom? That’s what we exist for: to help people carry the message.

I was sitting in an airport during the mandated vaccines and masks during COVID. A flight attendant talking to her crew said, “You know, some people just care what goes into their body.” That flight attendant can tell her team why medical mandates are unacceptable and unethical and unnecessary. Can we make it that simple?

Health freedom is a basic human right that’s constitutionally protected. Especially as Americans, especially when it comes to the health of our children, that choice is the most foundational right we can have. If you take away choice regarding anything, that is a slippery slope none of us authentically want to go down.

When Benjamin Franklin was leaving the building after writing the Constitution, a woman stopped him and said, “What type of government did you leave us?” He said, “A republic, ma’am, if you can keep it.”

That’s where we as Americans have lost our way, we aren’t educated enough to keep our freedom. Stand for Health Freedom exists because we don’t expect you to be a PhD in civics. We are here to unravel the civics and help you be acclimated again, to help you contact the right person at the right time with a message that they have authority over and that would be compelling to them.

That’s why we’ve built the largest voting block possible for health freedom in the US. One of the recent wins: without the people’s mandate, Secretary Kennedy would not be where he is. Through Stand for Health Freedom together, we sent over 150,000 emails to Congress to affirm his appointment.

“Health freedom is a basic human right that’s constitutionally protected. That choice is the most foundational right we can have.”

Science vs. Policy: Two Critical Battles [00:24:00 – 00:28:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Your organization is doing a different job than what a lot of people in this space think. I’m more the neuroscience side, here’s how God designed our kids to be healthy, here’s where The Perfect Storm and the medical system takes us off track. That’s all science. That’s totally different than civics.

I made this mistake. You become so immersed in the science of what causes our kids to get sick and how vaccines and medical overreach play into that, and you think that everybody in this space is fighting the science battle. That’s not the only battle to be won.

Leah Wilson: Without practitioners like you teaching the science, the freedom wouldn’t matter. It’s the options. This is why this is a perfect marriage, without our health, our freedom doesn’t matter, and without freedom we have no health.

But science is a very bad governor. It can be changed overnight. It can be bought and paid for. It can be corrupted and manipulated, the industry has all the money to write all the science and to eliminate all the science they don’t like. For over a hundred years, since the Rockefellers.

Science is a bad governor. For that reason, we hang our hat with policy influence on constitutionality and on data and common sense, the things policy should be built upon. With limited government staying at home, our health freedom is intact.

The Five Pillars of Health Freedom [00:27:00 – 00:32:00]

Leah Wilson: Action gives us hope as humans. We are not here to allow you to crawl under the covers and hide or go create your bunker. We have kids to help.

The five pillars of health freedom: access to information, free speech, informed consent, the primary medical ethic, parental rights, religious freedom, and privacy.

Some people forget about privacy, but if we lose privacy, the technocracy, the digital passports, then we lose everything.

People want information because information is power. If we win the information war, all else will follow, because there will be an uprising when people know the truth.

Dr. Tony Ebel: You are not only good at disseminating information, you are exceptionally good at instilling action from that information. Information will fuel us up and get us going, but then we’ve got to do something with it.

True Informed Consent and What’s Broken in the Medical System [00:31:00 – 00:40:00]

Leah Wilson: Unfortunately, one of the reasons people enter the health freedom world is because they give a pharmaceutical product or participate in a medical intervention with a known effect, and they don’t know that until afterward when they experience the effect and have massive regret. That’s not okay.

Patients are not told: this is what happens if you take action, here are the actions you can take, this is what happens if you do nothing at all, here are the rates of success, here’s the worst thing that could happen, here are your other options.

The one-size-fits-all medical approach doesn’t come with informed consent because in the allopathic world, you are given a single solution for a diagnosis. It’s staggering that we are forced into a single cattle line with everything we go to the doctor for.

Dr. Tony Ebel: Medical doctors are the fire department. When your house is on fire, you call the fire department, axes and hoses, surgeries and medications, because you are in crisis. There’s no “let’s take our time and figure this out.” It is just blast it and shut it down.

But if they do their job and save the fire, it’s a mess. The walls are destroyed, the carpet’s destroyed. So now you call a restoration company. Carpenters and restoration experts. That is a totally different job, a totally different profession, and a totally different philosophy.

I think we’re asking our pediatricians to be proactive preventative health experts, and they are, this isn’t meant to sound harsh, clueless. They have no idea what to do with colic. They have no idea what to do with chronic ear infections. They have no idea what to do with autism. Other than a broken bone and medical crisis, medical doctors don’t have training for it, and their philosophy doesn’t fit it.

All we need to do is expand our team. We need to have different kinds of doctors, and we should start with the nervous system first. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care first. That’s our first line of defense. The goal would be to never have to call the fire department.

“Without our health, our freedom doesn’t matter, and without freedom we have no health.”

Empowering Parental Instincts and Next Steps [00:38:00 – 00:42:00]

Leah Wilson: My heart burns for mothers to know that they are everything their child needs. First and foremost, do not question your gut, your intuition, your God-given instincts on what your child needs. When you have a pause, you need to take that pause and investigate what your options are, because otherwise you can’t unring the bell.

You can unwind the Perfect Storm. My dream is to not have my job one day. I would love to be just a wellness doctor, just a proactive doctor. The perfect storm job is my favorite slash least favorite job, and it usually comes from a whole long path of lack of informed choice, lack of information, that is 0% the fault of the parent. Zero percent. It is 100% the fault of the system that did not provide information and shoved families down this path.

Dr. Tony Ebel: There’s not a single parent I’ve ever met who doesn’t want to be the one making decisions for their family, who doesn’t want complete information with which to make those decisions. You can’t have informed choice without depth of information.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is health freedom and why does it matter for parents?

Health freedom is the constitutionally protected right of individuals and parents to choose what medical interventions they and their children participate in, without government coercion or mandates. Leah Wilson of Stand for Health Freedom defines it simply: people care what goes into their own bodies and their children’s bodies, and that choice is the most foundational right Americans have. When health freedom is eroded through regulatory overreach or policy, parents lose authority over the most basic decisions about their children’s care.

What is Stand for Health Freedom and what does it do?

Stand for Health Freedom is a health freedom advocacy organization founded by attorney Leah Wilson. Unlike organizations focused on the science of health, Stand for Health Freedom focuses specifically on the policy and civics battle, helping parents understand their constitutional rights, contacting the right policymakers at the right time with compelling messages, and building the largest health freedom voting block in the US. The organization helped generate over 150,000 emails to Congress in support of Secretary Kennedy’s confirmation.

What are the five pillars of health freedom?

According to Leah Wilson, the five pillars of health freedom are: access to information, free speech, informed consent (the primary medical ethic), parental rights, and religious freedom and privacy. Losing any one of these creates a cascade, particularly privacy, which Wilson says is the gateway to technocracy and digital health passports that could make all the others irrelevant.

Why isn’t the science battle enough, why does the policy battle matter?

As Leah Wilson explains, science is “a bad governor”, it can be bought, paid for, manipulated, and changed overnight by industries with resources to fund favorable research and suppress unfavorable findings. Constitutional rights and sound policy principles are far more durable ground. Without winning the policy and civics battle, even the most compelling health science never reaches the people with authority to act on it.

What does true informed consent actually look like in healthcare?

True informed consent means a patient is told: what happens if they take action, what happens if they do nothing, what their other options are, what the realistic rates of success look like, and what the worst possible outcome is. In practice, Leah Wilson argues, the conventional allopathic model gives patients a single solution for a diagnosis, a “one-size-fits-all” cattle line, which makes genuine informed consent structurally impossible within that system.

How can I find a nervous system-focused chiropractor for my child?

Dr. Tony Ebel recommends Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care as the first call for families navigating chronic childhood health challenges, before trying to “fix” problems through a system not trained to address root causes. Find a PX Docs provider trained in this approach using the PX Docs Directory.

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