Cooing over Koop.

ONE OF THE telltale signs that a member of a Republican Administration has wonthe approval of the formally neutral media is the phrase, "X has surprised friend and foe alike." This formula has replaced the threadbare signal, "X has grown." Variants include, "X has come to appreciate the full complexity of the issues," and "X has abandoned the blackand-white view he espoused at the time of his appointment." The real message, of course, is that X has moved discreetly leftward. To say that he has "surprised friend and foe alike" is the delighted foe's way of saying he has turned his back on his old friends.

Thus The New Republic apprises its readers that "Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has confounded friends and foes." The occasion was Koop's apparently imminent report that abortions leave no medical or psychological scars on women who have had them.

Actually, Koop didn't issue a report. Instead, he wrote the President a four-page letter saying the data he was able to gather were inconclusive. He hedged carefully, though he did note that "50 per cent of women who have had an abortion apparently deny having had one when questioned."

That fact is suggestive-people don't deny having undergone appendectomies-but Koop can't be faulted for refraining from making rash generalizations. Abortion is wrong because of what it does to the child, not because of its effects on the mother's health. It would be convenient for the anti-abortion cause if women had a selfish motive for avoiding abortion, but the question has to be determined by evidence.

All the same, Koop's tentative tone on this topic contrasts sharply with his own strong statements of yore that abortion does harm women. Nor is he averse to making stern moral, as opposed to merely medical, statements against smoking. On abortion, as on AIDS, he has learned to assume properly enlightened attitudes.

As a result, the applause of the liberals rings in his ears. As The New Republic puts it, he has shown "a remarkable ability to separate his professional conduct from his moral and political beliefs." If he had been a civil-rights leader who had accepted a Reagan appointment, of course, he'd have been expected to use his office to enact his beliefs, and any failure to do so, however surprising to friend and foe alike, would have been treated as a betrayal.

Koop has been one of the major disappointments of the Reagan Administration. Two days after his letter to the President became public, the New York Times hailed him with the inevitable headline: "Koop's Stand on Abortion's Effect Surprises Friends and Foes Alike."