C. Everett Koop and the religious right

It requires only modest exaggeration to say that C. Everett Koop, the distinguished surgeon general (and Dartmouth alumnus) who died on February 25, was responsible for the emergence of the religious right. As much as anyone else, Koop persuaded American evangelicals in the late 1970s that opposition to abortion was a matter worthy of their votes.

Although televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell frequently asserted that it was the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 that galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into a voting bloc, that claim collapses in the face of historical scrutiny:

• The Southern Baptist Convention called for the legalization of abortion at its gathering in St. Louis in 1971. It reaffirmed the resolution in 1974 and again in 1976.