Former Surgeon General C Everett Koop was a tireless opponent of abortion. In his book, he describes why he became involved in the abortion debate:
“It all crystallizes for me one Saturday in 1976. My residents and I had spent the day operating on three newborn babies with defects that were incompatible with life, but were nevertheless amenable to surgical correction. Surgery on the newborns is time-consuming, and although we started at 8:00 AM, we did not get the third youngster safely in his incubator with his immediate future assured until early evening… I said to my two colleagues: “You know, we have given over 200 years of life to three individuals who together barely weighed 10 pounds.”
One of my residents answered, “And while we were doing that, right next door in the University Hospital they were cutting up perfectly formed babies of the same size just because their mother didn’t want them.” I knew then that is a surgeon of the newborn, I had to do something about the slaughter of the unborn.”
Charles Everett Koop, Koop: the Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor (New York: Random House, 1991), 263
Quoted in:
James F Bohan. The House of Atreus: Abortion Is a Human Rights Issue (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1999) 166
