COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

C. Everett Koop, M.D., Sc.D.
Surgeon-in-Chief
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Professor of Pediatric Surgery and Pediatrics

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131
Sunday, June 3, 1979

Academy of Music
I consider it a privilege,--more than that,--an almost
supernatural gift to be able to address the Class of 1999.

So often in life we wish we had said the right thing at the right
time but how seldom one has a second chance! So, you see, having
given that rather prosaic commencement address to the Class of 1979 at
the Philadelphia College of Osteophathic Medicine just twenty years
ago this month when they honored me with a degree honoris causa, it is
extraordinary that your president, knowing nothing of how much I
wanted to speak to PCOM, invited me back. And a considerable risk he
took, too, at my age of eighty-two! It is too bad that our scientists
who keep our bodies looking twenty-five years younger than our
ancestors looked at the same age could not have kept the mind young,
too.

How little did your president know how close the timing would be!

I don't have much time so without great choice of words and
immortal rhetoric, I will say what I should have said by way of
warning twenty years ago.

Yet, I cannot resist a short digression in remarking on the
changes here in twenty years. Driving in from the airport last night
on the automat highway, I could not get used to the driver of the van
reading his newspaper while the magnetic tightline guided us along the
road. I noticed that gas on Penrose Avenue was $16 a gallon. I guess
you will all be pleased when the solar energy from the satellite is

available for private cars.
Last night I misplaced my electronic Social Security card which
really is an internal passport such as we denounced the Russians for
having in the 1970s. So there was a long delay in getting out of the
detention center. That detention center used to be the Hahnemann
Hospital twenty years ago. It gave me a lot of time to read the rules
of the new American Way program. That is a euphemism for what I would
call Teen Age Snoopers. I can't imagine that you have to let a
teenage squad check the inflation of your tires and the level of water
in the toilet tank? I feel sorry for you who are diagnosed as
“incorrigible wasters”. Apparently, the punishments are stiff. This
nonsense could never have come about if the AMA, the John Birch
Society, the Episcopal Church and the Sierra Club had not joined
forces with the government. Mao Tse Tung would have been very happy
here. You see, I ramble. Forgive me.

You know why I did not have the courage twenty years ago to say
what I wanted to say? I must teil you. I gave a commencement address
at Wheaton College in 1973 and I shocked the administration because I
talked about abortion. They were so shocked that they broke a time
honored custom and did not print what I said in their alumni magazine.
I guess I was overly sensitive and that is why I pulled my punches
here with the Class of 1979. You see, Wheaton missed a chance,--I
made ten prophesies in my talk and they all came to pass within two
years. They could have made a scoop; it went to the Human Life Review

instead. I don't think I was responsible for the police smashing
their presses in 1982, but who knows? Wheaton only lasted five years
longer. PCOM almost went down the drain at the same time. So many
schools failed that year. It was the merger of the Medical College of
Pennsylvania, Hahnemann Medical School, and PCOM which saved all three
institutions. I was really tickled when yours was the school that
kept its name in the merger. Let me digress again for a moment: my
professional life has been an extraordinarily satisfying one. Not
only did I grow up with my specialty, being the sixth surgeon in this
country to totally confine his surgical practice to children, but I
assumed the duties, if not the title, of surgeon-in-chief at the
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia at the age of 29 so that my first
job was my last one. I retired in 1981.

Pediatric surgery in the late forties and early fifties was so
poorly understood and so poorly represented that the few pediatric
surgeons in the land were in great demand as teachers and as speakers
at medical convocations. I found myself speaking at osteopathic
meetings and teaching at the College out on Spruce Street several
times a year. When a large organization of M.D.s suggested that it
was inappropriate for me to be teaching osteopaths, I said I was quite
willing to resign from the society, but resign or not, I would
continue my osteopathic teaching connections. I won that skirmish
and I was right. I began rotating surgical residents from osteopathic.
programs through my training program in pediatric surgery in 1976.

They proved to be among the best. My successor in 1983 graduated the
first osteopath trained in pediatric surgery.

Well, to get back to 1979. I. really wanted to speak on the
celebration of life and I apologize to any member of the Class of '79
who might be present. I could not have changed the world, but I might
have made you more aware of the dangers.

Let me put it in capsule form. Your grandparents knew something
about the sanctity of human life. By the '70s that kind of talk was
almost passe. Life began to be cheapened when several states in the
late '60s and early '70s liberalized the abortion laws. Then the
first of several dominoes fell in 1973 when the Supreme Court gave
women the right to have an abortion-on-demand. The medical profession
then made it obvious they supported the abortion industry.

I was teaching pediatric surgery at the University of Pennsylvania
at the time and I,--as alert as I thought I was,--missed the fact
until it was too late. We lost the fight in the medical schools.
There was no voice defending the right of the unborn. There was no
medical voice saying that life was precious to God. Secular humanism
became the state anti-religion in 1989. I will be punished for
speaking of the Lord, I know. The continual plebiscite predicted by
Tofler in my day made it illegal to mention God seriously after 1984.
But, I really do not care about the punishment; you will see why in a
few minutes. I only hope I can finish before the Doctrine Squad hears
of my misbehavior.

The poor medical student of the late seventies did not know that
the very word “abortionist” was loathsome just a few years before.
You see, the most active abortionist the medical student knew was the
chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology in the medical
school.

Well, after abortion-on-demand had been here for ten years and we
fell far below population zero growth and your grandparents’ Social
Security checks could not be funded because there were not enough
young people to pay the bill, infanticide was finally made legal.
Innocent newborns with defects easily correctable were sacrificed
because it was in vogue to worship the perfect.

Not that it mattered! Infanticide had been practiced for years
without the law even looking in that direction. Pediatricians who
were once the advocates for children thought the quality of life to be
preferable to the ethic of life itself. Pediatric surgeons,-—and I
say this to their great shame,--who knew more than anyone what could
be accomplished in the rehabilitation of youngsters with congenital
defects jumped on the band wagon of perfectionism. It is ironic that
the program gathered steam in what was called the Year of the Child.

You will remember it was 1985 when it became illegal for an
obstetrician to deliver a defective baby that could have been
diagnosed before birth. Then in 1987, the Nobel Prize winner, Watson,
famous for discovering the double helix of DNA, had his way. No child
was declared alive wtil seventy-two hours after birth in order to let

its parents decide whether they wanted the baby or not. So
progressively fewer babies grew up. You were among the more
fortunate. It is amazing to look out there and see only perfect
specimens--no defects, no eyeglasses, no balding young men! I cannot
get used to seeing such a preponderance of boys. But now that sex
determination is possible, people get what they want but I am sure we
had more fun when it was more like 50-50,--boys and girls. You know I
predicted back in 1977 that prostaglandin tampons would be sold over
the counter and that a woman would never know whether she was having a
Menstrual period or an abortion. They came on the market in 1984 and
a year later, we had the artificial insemination-sex determination
kits also available over the counter.

There used to be a number of graduate schools in Greater
Philadelphia. PCOM is one of the few that is left. I could not
believe the signs outside Franklin Field when I drove by it last
night. Bullfights on weekends and Kung Fu to the death on Wednesdays.
People used to go to the movies and plays in my day but they priced
themselves out of existence about 1982. It was 1986 when the
government made two-way television mandatory in every home. I guess
PCOM has no resident basic science faculty since the video faculty
exchange program in 1990. You see, I am rambling again, and I am
sorry.

Well, you see, the second domino that fell was infanticide and the
third was euthanasia. It began with the living will. The

organization called Concerned for Dying, which was called the
Euthanasia Council in my day, knew that if they repeated the term
“Death with Dignity” often enough, you would buy it and you did. Then
the living will was by their own later acknowledgement, the thin edge
of the wedge that brought in the Supreme Court decision on voluntary
euthanasia which, of course, led to the compulsory euthanasia decision
of the Supreme Court in 1995 for the infirm, the senile, and finally
for those over eighty who failed the compehensive test for longevity.
I am eighty-two and a little more efficient this year than I was at
eighty-one a year ago, but they don't think so.

You see, I knew in 1979 that these things would happen and I
should have told the class about them then. It might have made a
difference. Who knows what gifted fighter might have heard what I
said and mounted his white charger and have gone out to do battle?

Francis Schaeffer and I got so mad in 1977 that we went to work on
five documentary films and a book entitled: "Whatever Happened to the
Human Race?". They had their premier here in this very auditorium on
September 7-8, in 1979, They made a stir but the time had gone too
far. Francis succumbed to his lymphosarcoma before he realized how we
had failed. I am glad for that. Even the thousands of lives he
changed were not aware of what was going on.

Perhaps your parents were not aware either. You see, when I was
your age, a democracy such as this country made laws by representative
government. Then gradually, sociologic law crept in. A small elite

group working through the courts was able to bring about
abortion-on-demand, infanticide, the illegality of being delivered
imperfect, voluntary euthanasia, and finally that which I face soon,
compulsory euthanasia.

Ladies and gentlemen,--I think of you as boys and girls,--what I
should have said in 1979 was that the most important event in American
history since the Civil War was the Supreme Court decision about
abortion-on-demand in 1973. 1 apologize for not screaming from this
podium twenty years ago. Why? Because that decision and all that
followed it has made your way of life what it is today and will
determine how you will die and perhaps when.

After the relative failure of the films I did with Francis
Schaeffer, some of you may remember that I brashly sued Planned
Parenthood because they had not planned a single parenthood in years.
Converted adolescent innocence into sexually active (their term)
teenagers is more like it. How could I have won? The American Civil
Liberties Union, fresh from guaranteeing the right of the Neonazi
Party to heckle the Jews short of violence defended Planned
Parenthood. I spent all the money I made on the Schaeffer films to
fight Planned Parenthood while they were supported by almost half a
billion dollars,--tax dollars of your parents.

I lost that lawsuit as you must know. The only satisfaction I
have is that I believed then in the worth of every creature and still
do. God (oh, I said it again, and you must know church and state are

forever separate) God created man in His image and still does.
Speaking of Planned Parenthood, they really might not look so good
by 2020. They almost single handedly got our population down. But
then the Legionnaire's disease epidemic of 1986 killed 17,000,000
Americans and the group called Ecology Forever claimed credit in 1987
for adding chemicals to the water supply of New York City,
Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. which rendered 11,000,000
sterile ,—-—-permanently,. I have always thought this over-concern with
population was a national suicide, a death wish. Malcolm Muggeridge
was right.

I understand two of you graduates are test tube babies. I fought
that experimentation in 1979. I am glad you are here but I cannot say
I look with any pleasure on the Rockhead Foundation support of 100,000
homosexual and lesbian test tube babies to give the gay movement more
political clout in the future.

If I can be forgiven one more digression, I have to add that
under-population has finally united Russia, Europe, Canada and the
United States to stand against the territorial need of overpopulated
Asia and Africa.

I cannot tell whether the nuclear holocaust on the horizon will be
initiated by China, Russia, or us,--but those of you who survive and I
hope it is all of you,--begin again with a Biblical view of the
sanctity of human life, with a concept that every life is precious.
Inasmuch as I am going to be punished for what I have said here today,

I might as well be punished for something worthwhile as well as for
something trivial.

Our Judeo-Christian heritage was responsible for more than
religion. It was the consensus upon which our culture, our law, and
our government were based. It certainly taught that life is precious.

Well, I see that my time is up. Forgive an old man for rambling
on. Forgive me for not being more honest with your predecessors.

I see that a member of the Doctrine Squad is at each exit and
there are two in the wings so I guess I will spend the night in a
detention center. But I do have the last laugh. You see, I got my
notice to report to the Suicide Center before June 30th. If I don't,
you know the consequences. I will be taken to Byberry,--that was a
hospital for the insane when I was your age. There I will undergo the
demise provided by the compulsory euthanasia rule. I hope it is quick
and that I am not experimented upon. However, if my Christian faith
is what I think it is, I will be in heaven soon.

God bless you in your careers to the extent that you realize that
your patients like you were created in His image. Thank you and

goodby.