Politics & Power Quote by C. Everett Koop

The line lands like a dry aside, but it’s doing heavy institutional work. Koop isn’t praising the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists so much as staging legitimacy in real time: you, the reasonable listener, would naturally assume the relevant experts would show up; I’m confirming they did; therefore what follows should be treated as serious, medically grounded, and not merely political noise.

Koop was a public servant in an era when reproductive health was already a cultural battleground, and his authority as Surgeon General often depended on converting controversy into technocratic consensus. The phrasing matters. “You might expect” flatters the audience’s common sense while quietly setting a trap for skeptics: disagreement now looks less like principled dissent and more like willful ignorance of who belongs at the table. “Would be there” frames ACOG’s presence as a baseline requirement for credibility, implying that any forum, report, or policy discussion without them is, at best, amateur hour. “And they are” is almost comically simple - a verbal stamp, like a clerk clicking “approved.”

The subtext is coalition-building under pressure. Koop is signaling that the medical establishment is aligned, or at least participating, which is a way to launder contested social questions through professional expertise. It’s also a subtle rebuke to media and political actors who treat “both sides” as symmetrical. In Koop’s mouth, expertise isn’t an opinion; it’s attendance.