Nashville Doctor Is Nominated as Surgeon General : Health: Clinton chooses Henry Foster Jr. to replace the controversial Joycelyn Elders. Teen-age pregnancy problem is high on agenda.

President Clinton on Thursday nominated Dr. Henry Foster Jr., a Nashville educator, obstetrician and gynecologist, as surgeon general to replace the controversial Joycelyn Elders, who was fired last December.

Foster, 61, who founded a program that distributes condoms to youths and supported an organization that provides abortion counseling, appears to share many of Elders’ views, particularly about combatting teen-age pregnancy. But if his nomination is approved by the Senate, he is likely to operate in a much less inflammatory style than his predecessor.

“In the communities he served, Dr. Foster has won hearts and minds for his innovation and his dedication to saving the lives of young people and vulnerable people,” Clinton said in making the announcement. “He’s received numerous honors for his work in obstetrics, in dealing with sickle cell anemia, and very notably in the prevention of teen pregnancy. He has shown us how one person can make a difference.”

Foster is a former dean and acting president of Meharry Medical College, a black medical school in Tennessee and the same institution where Clinton found Dr. David Satcher, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About half of Meharry’s graduates choose primary-care medicine as their specialty and practice in medically needy areas, such as rural regions and inner cities.

Clinton said he expects Foster to lead the Administration’s recently announced national campaign to reduce teen-age pregnancy.

Foster founded the “I Have a Future Program,” based in two Nashville housing projects. It is aimed at delaying sexual activity and raising self-respect among teen-agers.

The program “has been an unqualified success,” Clinton said. “Working with young people that others might think beyond help, he built up their self-esteem. He taught them job skills. He encouraged them to stay in school. Most important, he told them to be responsible for themselves.”

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In accepting the nomination, Foster said: “You can judge the character of a nation by the manner in which it deals with its children and the elderly.”

He said his highest priorities as surgeon general would include assuring “healthier starts for our children”; AIDS prevention; and discouraging tobacco use, particularly among young people.

He also said he would vigorously attack the epidemic of adolescent pregnancies.

Nevertheless, conservatives and others criticized Foster on Thursday, indicating that his road to confirmation could be bumpy.

Foster “appears to be Elders Lite,” said Gary Bauer, president of the conservative Family Research Council, who was a White House aide during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

“We will count on the new U.S. Congress that was elected with the votes of millions of pro-family Americans not to repeat the mistake that was made when Dr. Joycelyn Elders was inflicted on our children,” Bauer said.

Elders was abruptly ousted after responding to a question during a public AIDS forum by saying that she thought masturbation should be discussed as part of school sex-education programs.

Foster was born and educated in Arkansas, but has spent the last 21 years at Meharry. He was graduated from Morehouse College in 1954 and received his medical degree from the University of Arkansas in 1958.

He is married, and has two grown children: Myrna, a middle school science teacher in McLean, Va., and Wendell, a research director at a Walt Disney Co. television unit in Burbank.