Faith: February 2013 Archives

Former U. S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop died Monday at the age of 96. Many of the headlines about his death have focused on his time as a member of President Reagan's cabinet and his breaks with conservative allies on government policies regarding tobacco and AIDS.

Evangelicals of a certain age will remember their first encounter with Koop, in the 1979 film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race?. Koop, then a leading pediatric surgeon, appeared in the series with Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer reviewing threats to the sanctity of human life -- abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia -- and calling their fellow Christians to take action to resist these threats.

David Bayly, who knew Koop personally, writes:

The Roman Catholic pro-life movement had its legion of stalwarts in the seventies and early eighties: Joe Scheidler, Mother Theresa, Father Paul Quay, Archbishop O'Connor; the list is impressive. And Evangelicalism? Who were her pro-life leaders? There literally weren't any, at least initially. But then God brought Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer together and the battle was joined from the Protestant side. It's not an exaggeration to say that Dr. Koop and Francis Schaeffer were the twin fathers of the modern Evangelical pro-life movement.

So we praise God for the life and witness of Dr. Koop. He was there when almost no one else was. Some in the Christian Medical Society may lionize Dr. Koop at his death, but they will perhaps have forgotten Dr. Koop's disgusted resignation from an organization he helped found for its refusal to take an officially pro-life position--a stance he maintained even after Tim's and my father assumed its presidency for a few years in the early 80s. Despite their friendship, Dr. Koop refused Dad's request that he rejoin. Even after passage of a clear and forceful pro-life stance, he initially refused to rejoin an organization that, as he saw it, had been cowardly on the central moral issue of the day.

Read the whole thing. Bayly tells of Koop's correction and encouragement to him as an amateur boy scientist, an anecdote that highlights Koop's devotion to science.

Before he became a public figure, Koop was a pioneering pediatric and neonatal surgeon. From the Philadelphia Inquirer's obituary:

After interning at Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Koop joined Children's in 1948, the staff's first pediatric surgeon. For a time, he was the hospital's entire surgery department. When he retired at 66, he presided over 26 full-time surgeons in eight specialties.

Dr. Koop was a pioneer in surgery on newborns, developing techniques for birth defects that, before him, had meant certain death.

The parents of ailing children saw him as heroic. He achieved national prominence in 1974, when he headed a team of 20 surgeons that separated conjoined twin girls who had been born in the Dominican Republic....

To save a life, he did not always follow the rules. In a 1968 interview in Philadelphia Magazine, he told how, on an icy night in 1953, he had received a call from Pennsylvania Hospital about a newborn who had been delivered with abdominal organs in the chest.

Within minutes, Dr. Koop drove to the hospital, parked his car on the sidewalk, and raced to the delivery room. He wrapped the baby in a blanket, placed it on the floor of the car near the heater, and drove back to Children's.

He took no X-rays. He carried the baby to the operating room, opened the chest, put the organs in their proper place, repaired a hole in the diaphragm, and closed it back up.

He had broken all the rules, he said, and would not have followed that procedure at the time of the interview. "On the other hand," he said, "we had a living baby."

He rejected abortion and abhorred amniocentesis, a test to see if a fetus has genetic defects. He labeled it "a search-and-destroy mission." Most women who have amniocentesis did not keep their babies if a defect was found, he noted. "Many of the congenital defects are things that I have spent my entire life correcting," he said.

MORE:

Whatever Happened to the Human Race, as a YouTube playlist:

C. Everett Koop papers at the National Institutes of Health

The C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth

P. S.: The Inquirer obit mentions that the Senate held up his nomination for 10 months. I suspect (can't find the details) that Senate Democrats were responsible for that hold. He wasn't the only Republican appointee to be blocked by Democrats, and present-day Senate Republicans should remember that even as a minority party they have leverage and ought to use it for the good of the country.

From the official C. S. Lewis Facebook page:

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods'--could set up on their own as if they had created themselves...invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

-- Mere Christianity

I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I've been at a blogger retreat held by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, an organization that is working to bolster news coverage of state and local government, an area of journalism that has been declining in parallel with shrinking mainstream press budgets. The Franklin Center has Watchdog State Capitol reporters in about 20 states, including Pat McGuigan in Oklahoma City. The weekend was informative, filled with ideas for improving the way we cover stories and communicate with our readers. It was also encouraging to be around bloggers from all over the country who face the same sorts of challenges and opportunities. We "get" each other. Most of the event was in a conference room, but we had time for fun, too, including a jeep tour of a desert wilderness area.

To come across that C. S. Lewis quote as the retreat ends is a bracing reminder that, for all that we do to serve our communities through blogging, the ultimate problem behind all the world's miseries is not one that we can solve with reporting or persuasion. Our work as watchdog bloggers can ameliorate the results of mankind's rebellion against God as that rebellion manifests itself in government corruption, oppression, and self-dealing. To blog about government is a way in which those of us gifted to dig and research and write can love our neighbors, but it doesn't solve the root problem that Lewis describes.

I must not lose sight of the real struggle in human history and in my own heart, and I must not neglect the means -- the Word, the sacraments, prayer, and fellowship -- that God has appointed to strengthen and transform my mind and heart. I also must not neglect to spur myself, my wife and children, my family and friends to sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts, to be outposts of His kingdom in a fallen world.

Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was the featured speaker at this morning's National Prayer Breakfast, and he delivered a powerful, inspiring, and wide-ranging 25-minute message which touched on the self-discipline and education necessary for self-government, the urgent need to avoid the moral decay and fiscal irresponsibility that led to the fall of ancient Rome, the dangers of political correctness, and the need to give as much honor to academic achievement as we do to athletic achievement.

Regarding that last point, Carson spoke of his Carson Scholars Fund, which is designed to treat academic high achievers as the stars that they are, with trophies and recognition and college scholarships. The fund also sponsors reading rooms in elementary schools, where children have access to a wide range of books to help them develop their reading skills in a welcoming environment.

Carson spoke about how reading transformed his own life. He and his brother would not apply themselves to their school work, but his mother prayed that God would give her wisdom to help her sons learn. She then restricted their TV viewing to a minimal amount and required them to read two books each week from the library and to write a book report about each. She dealt with complaints from her sons and resistance from other mothers, who told her that keeping her boys inside and reading would make them hate her, but she stuck to her plan. Eventually, he came to love reading, and his reading taught him that he could control his own destiny, and that the poverty he hated need be only temporary.

In the course of the speech, Carson compared Alexis de Tocqueville's account of education and literacy in 19th century America to the state of education today; he cited the Biblical tithe, with its standard percentage for all, as a model of the fairest and simplest approach to taxation; and he commended individual Health Savings Accounts as a means to provide access to care for all while controlling costs and encouraging people to take responsibility for their own health. Carson suggested that the government could fund HSAs for those who cannot afford to fund their own.

Carson presented all of his thoughts as mere common sense informed by history, without wading into the usual terminology of ideological or partisan debate.

Hat tip to fellow blogger Nice Deb, who has video of Dr. Ben Carson's speech and links to reporting and commentary on the speech.

Photo of Dr. Ben Carson courtesy carsonscholars.org.