C. Everett Koop Quotes

Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my 36 years of pediatric surgery, I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother's life. If toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother's health, the doctor will induce labor or perform a Caesarean section. His intention is to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby's life is never willfully destroyed because the mother's life is in danger.

Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time

Drugs don't work in patients who don't take them.

The American ideal is not that we all agree with each other, or even like each other, every minute of the day. It is rather that we will respect each other's rights, especially the right to be different, and that, at the end of the day, we will understand that we are one people, one country, and one community, and that our well-being is inextricably bound up with the well-being of each and every one of our fellow citizens.

Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation

The best prescription is knowledge.

In thirty-five years of medicine I have never seen one case where abortion was necessary to save a mother's life.

A thousand people will stop smoking today. Their funerals will be held sometime in the next three or four days.

Your choice of diet can influence your long term health prospects more than any other action you might take.

By the year 2025, 500 million people will die of smoking. Now, that's a Vietnam War every day for 27 years. That's the Titanic sinking every 27 minutes for 27 years.

Cigarette smoking is clearly identified as the chief, preventable cause of death in our society.

When a faith-healer commands God to perform a miracle, in the absence of a prayer that says, 'Thy will be done,' it is, as far as I am concerned, the most rank form of arrogance . . . The faith-healer Bosworth once said that faith makes God act. If you follow that line of reasoning God is in His heaven, but Bosworth rules the world!

You can't talk of the dangers of snake poisoning and not mention snakes.

The right of smokers to smoke ends where their behavior affects the health and well-being of others.

Risks I think are the thing that make life important and everything that you and I do is risk vs. benefit. Is there a risk to sending your kid out? Absolutely. Is there a benefit? It exceeds the risk.

At a time when we are pleading with foreign governments to stop the export of cocaine, it is the height of hypocrisy for the United States to export tobacco.

All of the western world raises its children uncircumcised and it seems logical that, with the extent of health knowledge in those countries, such a practice must be safe.

The Carnegie Foundation is well aware of the fact that their reports frequently find their way to dusty archives in academic institutions, but occasionally people pick up a segment of a report and act upon it.

I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes.

There are all kinds of things you can do to marry literacy with health.

Make your kids go out and play. Kids ought to grow up the way you and I grew up and we grew up fifty years apart or maybe more. But we did the same things. Now who's out playing in the afternoon? Nobody.

If you have a kid who goes to kindergarten and doesn't know what a circle is, doesn't know what red and green are, and doesn't know what right and left are, by the time he learns those things, the rest of the class is far ahead of him.

When a child shows up for school, and is not physically and mentally ready to learn, he or she never catches up.

If you want to say how can we step into childhood and make it better for them, I would start at the activity level. I'd like to say let your kids go out and play.

The baby's life is never willfully destroyed because the mother's life is in danger.