RANT #6
Florida, 2023 vs C. Everett Koop, 1988
So. Florida continues to be awful with
this horrid bill that allows medical providers to
discriminate against basically anybody on religious, "ethical", or "moral" grounds. Scare quotes are required. And it isn't like this bullshit is a hypothetical -
in 1995, Tyra Hunter, a trans woman, died because EMTs were unwilling to treat her. But I'm not going to tell you about all the ways people can be awful. Instead, I'm going to tell you about C. Everett Koop, U.S. Surgeon General from 1982 to 1989.
Dr. Koop is a complicated figure to say the least - if we'd ever met when he was alive, I probably wouldn't have liked him very much. On one hand, he was a passionate expert in pediatric surgery, pioneering tons of procedures that specifically focused on children and infants who were seen as having near-inoperable, fatal conditions, founding the first neonatal surgery intensive care unit in the U.S., becoming the first editor of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery because of his determination to publish as many of his procedures and studies as possible. On the other hand, he was a pretty conservative Christian - he wrote an entire book, The Right to Live, The Right to Die, arguing that both abortion and euthanasia were cold-blooded murder.
C. Everett Koop was Surgeon General under Reagan, and his nomination and appointment were opposed by both liberal politicians and woman's rights groups due to his conservative views in general and opposition to abortion in particular. Reagan had been widely seen as kind of the best option out of the Republican slate that year, a fairly moderate guy who had plenty of friendly ties to the more liberal part of Hollywood. Compared to Reagan, Koop was seen as ultra-right wing.
But, oddly enough, Koop wound up looking far better over the course of the 80s.
In 1982, after an infant with Down Syndrome was allowed to die while doctors debated whether to bother with a procedure Koop himself had done over 400 times, the passage of the Baby Doe Amendment (which set up standards and guidelines for the treatment of disabled newborns and infants) became a major cause for disability activists - and for Koop. As Surgeon General, his numerous statements to media about the need for the law lent a significant weight to the campaign, and the amendment was passed in 1984.
In 1987, when various officials in the Reagan administration pressured Koop to put out a report saying that abortion was psychologically harmful to women, he refused because of lack of evidence. He was morally opposed to abortion, but he was still a doctor and scientific publisher, and putting out a report where the evidence wasn't there wasn't in the cards for him.
As the AIDS epidemic grew worse, Koop was iced out of the various conversations and committees related to HIV - he would only ever say it was "probably for political reasons", but I personally think that the more fire-and-brimstone of Reagan's close administration knew that they wouldn't be able to prevent Koop from actually doing his job as a doctor, scientist, and Surgeon General. They'd wanted a Surgeon General who they could control from the Religious Right. Instead, they'd gotten a guy who actually cared about health, science, and people.
He finally got permission to release a report in 1988, four years after his first request. The report was controversial from just about every direction - gay activists saw the focus on the particular dangers of anal sex as being targeted homophobia and disliked how Koop went with abstinence as a strong recommendation, the Religious Right hated that Koop put more emphasis on the risks of specific sex acts than sexuality, went into detail on condoms and dental dams, and pushed for sex ed in schools from third grade on.
And then Koop went a step further, putting out the largest mass mailing in American history - a pamphlet that laid out, in simple, scientific terms, the risks, myths, and prevention of HIV to every household in the country. It was 1988. Reliable information was scarce in mainstream media, and unless you were in big cities or specific communities you probably weren't going to find gay magazines or leftist newspapers. With Koop's pamphlet, even if you were in bumfuck Minnesota (as my dad was in 1988), you were going to finally get this information, and the pamphlet encouraged parents to share it with their children. My dad only vaguely knew what condoms even were until his mom gave that pamphlet to him because he was 18 and about to go to college.
Both the report and the pamphlet were flawed. There was plenty of evidence of Koop's conservative and sex-negative biases. But, at the end of the day, C. Everett Koop cared
deeply about saving lives - both as a doctor and as a Christian. While plenty of anti-abortion people are assholes who clearly don't care about people, every stance Koop took, from abortion and euthanasia to medical rights for disabled children and AIDS, show, to me at least, the consistent worldview of a guy who truly
believed in the principles he espoused.
Medical providers aren't unbiased. None of us can be unbiased. But if you can't be unbiased, at least be like C. Everett Koop. Live life by what you
believe, not by what you hate.
