Dear Dr. Koop,

You and I first met in 1980 when you were Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Philadelphia Children's Hospital and I was a young state legislator seeking your counsel as I drafted what was later to become the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act. As you may recall that law went on to be litigated in the United States Supreme Court case of Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. I remain grateful for your invaluable assistance during that meeting and the subsequent telephonic consultations you generously granted during the early days of your tenure as Surgeon General of the United States. I fondly recall the heady optimism with which many pro-life elected officials looked forward to a public health chief as willing as we to imperil his incumbency in defense of unborn life. I intend no disrespect but would be remiss were I not to note the extremity of the gulf between our hopes and your priorities. It now appears, however, that Mrs. Clinton may have granted you an extraordinary opportunity to reverse the widely held impression that your opposition to abortion is more personal than political. I pray you will not squander it.

My purpose in writing is to express my confusion regarding what seems to have been your decision to unqualifiedly associate yourself with the Clinton health care plan and by implication its avowed intent to provide abortion coverage. In a recent call to your office I was informed by a member of your staff that your role would be advisory in nature with your primary function as that of moderator between the administration and the medical profession.

I am dismayed that you would not have conditioned your willingness to facilitate development of this plan on President Clinton's willingness to abandon abortion coverage. I am even more disturbed that in no public statement of which I am aware have you condemned the abortion coverage provision or expressed any intention to seek its removal.

Whatever misgivings you may intend to express behind closed doors will be far less effective than your public expression of principled opposition. This is not an administration that responds as well to being shown the light as they do to being made to feel the heat.

Over the last several years, as I have debated the abortion issue across the nation, it has been my painful experience to have been repeatedly assaulted by abortion advocates who gleefully beat me over the head with your now infamous report to President Reagan discrediting clinical studies purporting to link abortion with adverse psychological reactions.

No matter how well intentioned your analysis may have been I remain convinced that that report could have been drafted in a way that would have preserved your admirable commitment to intellectual honesty without doing such irreparable damage to our ability to establish an abortion-psychological complications connection--a nexus which you yourself later embraced at least at an anecdotal level.

You now seem determined to create a sequel to that debacle.

You may fancy yourself above the fray in the role of honest broker but your presence at Mrs. Clinton's side as her husband addressed a joint session of Congress on national television is being used powerfully by this administration to suggest your support for this plan's central features or, at worst, only tepid opposition. America needs advocates more than arbiters.

Your vain attempt to find the safety of a fictional middle ground will provide aid and comfort to enemies of life and immeasurably increase the burden which must be borne by those who labor to detach baby killing from health care. The office of surgeon general has been described as a "bully pulpit" which I wish you would have used more forcefully in defense of life. Having now returned to a position of influence on the national health care scene, I implore you to disregard the disfavor of the media and the disapproval of your professional colleagues and provide the leadership for which so many of us had hoped during the Reagan years.

Get out there and give 'em heaven!