Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist.
This particular graduation marked an end of the medical education of someone I am happily related to. The tent holding hundreds was vast. My personal suspicion is that the same enormous tent is toted back and forth across the country, erected for every ceremony, deconstructed, and then, on weekends, toted from galaxy to galaxy for graduations there.
Strolling around the perimeter afterward in search of my lost family member (it’s not a successful event unless you’ve lost sight of the person you’ve come to see), it was impossible to avoid all the joyful photography. I passed two families posing while a stranger pointed his cellphone at them. The med school graduates were hugging each other, and each father had an arm over the shoulder of the other.
Naturally one thinks of oneself. I’m certain that my graduation almost 40 years ago was held in the exact same tent, but things were different then. For one thing, the speaker wasn’t a billionaire or media luminary. Our commencement speaker was the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop. I knew little about him, except that he was strongly conservative. His stiff uniform with double-breasted brass buttons and gold stripes had a pompous and self-important sheen, though it was no more pompous or self-important than my tassel and hood.
Few phrases or thoughts from graduation speeches survive the years. It’s hard to concentrate when the future is waiting. I remember once listening to Oprah Winfrey advise a college class to make their beds every morning, but almost nothing the surgeon general said lingered in my mind.
Among other prominent career accomplishments, he had insisted that cigarette packets contain printed warnings about the addictive dangers of nicotine, and I believe he told my graduating class not to smoke. Then he disappeared in a cloud of protection. Oprah had left that way, too.
After locating my relative, bearing her home, and plying her with pizza and champagne, I looked up the surgeon general and read about his tenure in office. The nomination had been strongly opposed by liberal groups; they feared his antiabortion stand. Nonetheless he was confirmed and stepped into that brass-breasted uniform.
Presumably the Reagan administration expected compliance when they tasked him with condemning abortion as medically and psychologically harmful to women. President Ronald Reagan had lobbied hard for a constitutional Human Life Amendment banning abortion nationwide, condemned Roe v. Wade, and published an antiabortion essay while still in office.
After conducting his own research, and despite the crush of political pressure, this surgeon general refused to comply. Abortion, he said, was not a medical decision but a moral one. He himself was personally opposed, but as a physician, he disagreed with those who had put him in office and stood squarely in the light of science.
The graduation tent may be the same, but here is the difference between then and now. The president who had appointed his surgeon general, and who had expected fealty, accepted this studiously opposed decision.
Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist and a contributing Globe Opinion writer.