A friend of mine who lives overseas sent out a public request on facebook for help explaining what happened recently with Planned Parenthood and The Susan B. Komen Foundation. This was my explanation, it was fairly lengthy so I thought it would make a good post here. The bulk of it, that is, the large factual explanation portion as opposed to my response is what I sent him. I did not want to give opinion when he wanted facts. Here, however, I have added in a bit of opinion....
The Susan B Komen foundation
is the group behind stuff like "Race for the cure" and is monetarily
GIGANTIC, or was, prior to last week. Other groups would apply for
grants from Komen for various cancer projects, in this case, Planned
Parenthood would provide cancer screening services to low income women
on a sliding scale based on how much they made. This was supported
through, either partially or fully, I am not sure, via the previously
mentioned Komen funding. Swapping views a bit here...Komen recently
hired a new vice president of some department, I can't remember exactly
what it was, but the woman they hired had is a known pro-life crusader
and had recently ran for governor of Georgia and lost, making her
pro-life stance a big part of her campaign. When she arrived at Komen
she gathered a few other like minded people and they attempted to figure
out a way to prevent this money from going to planned
parenthood...Swapping views again....After the influx of tea party
congressmen in 2010 there was a massive push against women's choice that
spilled over into women's health care. As the law is written now, no
federal funding can go to fund abortions. One of the more visible
organizations that provides abortions in the country is Planned
Parenthood, but they also do many many other things besides abortions.
One senator actually claimed that well over 90% of what PP does is
abortions. Even a cursory look at PP reveals this is a horrific lie as
only about 3% of what PP does is abortions and in actuality a huge focus
of the organization is preventing the situations in which abortion
would even come up. The relevant part of this push though is that a
congressman with a chip on his shoulder over PP has made an accusation
that because they perform abortions that PP cannot receive any federal
funding for other services it performs because he thinks there is no way
to monetarily seperate the money PP takes in from what it is spent
on...Switching views back to Komen...The Pro-life vice president along
with a few others maneuvered the charity's policy so that all grants in
the process of being awarded as well as new applications would
automatically be denied if the organization applying was being
investigated by congress/fbi/police etc. Via this policy, Komen came
out with a press release stating they would no longer provide money to
PP for the cancer screenings. This news got out to the world and the
world was REALLY pissed off that Komen, a previously highly respected
charity, would put women's health at risk in such a manner. In 3 days
donations came into PP totally over $3 million directly related to this
incident. That is 4.4 times the total amount PP received from Komen for
ALL of 2011. Needless to say, Komen spent every waking minute trying
to repair its image. For awhile Komen defended the decision but it was
shown that there are other grant receivers with serious investigations
as opposed to accusations who were still receiving grant money.
Eventually they gave in and reversed their decision. The end result is
their untarnished name is now mud to the people who didn't like the
original defunding and since they gave in and are again funding it,
their name is now also mud to the people who hate planned parenthood.
Komen isn't destroyed but if it survives, I don't see it being the
organization it once was.
Following all of this, and the
research put into outing the previously mentioned pro-life vp, the VP
was forced to "resign" though it is one of those resignations where it
is pretty clear she was no longer welcome. She went on various
conservative shows today to talk about how it was a wrong decision to go
back to funding PP etc etc.
So, that is what happened between
Komen and PP. A whole lot of bull crap that accomplished nothing except
for destroying a charity that did good things like cancer research and
prevention.
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