Right to Life

A book with this title by a distinguished pediatric surgeon promises insight into a physician's own struggle with some of the dramatic new problems imposed by modern medical practice. But the promise is never fulfilled. This book is largely a broadside for the anti-abortion, right-to-life sentiments of its author, with only a brief appended discussion of mercy-killing and the right to die.

Dr. Koop's view of the "right to live" is very clear: human life, or what the author believes is the same thing, the moral right to life, begins at conception; abortion is murder; and Roe v.Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion, may eventually be regarded as the fatal "last turning point" for a doomed materialistic society. In defense of these claims Koop marshalls many of the familiar arguments of the right-to-life movement.

None of this would be objectionable if Koop's lengthy treatment of the abortion issue were somehow rooted in his own medical experience. But apart from one or two references to his own work with defective children, he prefers to leave the terrain of his own experience and to range far and wide in the remote disciplines of ethics, Biblical studies, theology, and law. Several reviews would be needed simply to document his mishandling of Western religious teachings on this matter. One wonders whether Koop would be willing to let an interested lawyer-friend or priest operate on one of his own tiny patients. Why, then, does he feel no reluctance to venture so boldly into the tangled domains of constitutional law or theology?

The closing discussion of the right to die is closer to the author's expertise, and cases dealing with dying youngsters stir the reader's interest. Unfortunately, Koop seems to move between flexibility and moral absolutism in the handling of such cases, and he spends far too little time elaborating his views. More discussion here, perhaps, and less on abortion would have served the reader better.

THE RIGHT TO LIVE;THE RIGHT TO DIEBy C. Everett Koop '37 M.D.Tindale House, 1976. 124 pp. $2.95

Professor Green of the Dartmouth Departmentof Religion teaches, among other courses,"Religion and Society in America" and"Decisive Cases in Religious Ethics."