Before the interview, he was asked about the one change  if no other that he would bring to his troubled community, if he were “king” of the city.

Answer: He’d  make long-acting contraceptives easily available.

“A baby born in our city has a better chance of dying before the age of 1 than a baby born in Mexico. The single best way to make sure that babies don’t die in a city like Detroit, where our median age at birth is less than 20, is to make sure that women who don’t want to have babies don’t have them.”

Dr. El Sayed said that Detroit’s health system now runs as a nonprofit with a “shell” department overseeing its funding, after the city went bankrupt in 2013.