Planned Parenthood would appear to have won this latest skirmish in the abortion wars. The Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure, having first decided to withdraw future grants to the world’s largest abortion provider, quickly retreated under a barrage of accusations, complaints, and threats.
No fewer than 26 Democratic senators signed a letter to Komen saying, in part, that “it would be tragic if any woman — let alone thousands of women — lost access to these potentially lifesaving screenings because of a politically motivated attack. We earnestly hope that you will put women’s health before partisan politics and reconsider this decision.”
Intoning that “politics has no place in health care,” New York mayor Michael Bloomberg made a $250,000 matching grant to Planned Parenthood. Ever alert to the politically correct posture on everything, Bloomberg added that “breast-cancer screening saves lives and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care.”
Advertisement
But the real firepower came from the press and the Internet. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell bore down on Nancy Brinker, the Komen Foundation’s founder, pressing her to admit that women’s health would suffer as a result of the Komen board’s decision. The decision was “all about politics,” reported the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times editorialized that “for a long time Komen’s name will be connected more with ugly politics than with pink ribbons.”
The Komen Foundation caved under the pressure with all of the groveling its opponents could have wished for. “We want to apologize to the American public,” said the group’s press release, “for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.”
So, all together now, Planned Parenthood is all about saving women’s lives, and any criticism of PP is “ugly politics.”
Except that observers of events over the past week may draw other conclusions. They may notice that any criticism, even implied criticism, of PP leads to a full-dress onslaught by the Left and its media allies. And they may detect a certain over-eagerness on the part of PP to downplay their abortion work.
The Susan G. Komen decision elicited such a heated response because it threatened to remove the “women’s health” fig leaf from PP. By now, everyone has learned that Planned Parenthood, its own claims notwithstanding, does not provide mammograms. It provides referrals for mammograms. Considering that 80 percent of PP clients are under the age of 35, and only five percent of breast cancers are found in women under the age of 40, it is unlikely that very many of PP’s manual breast exams and referrals for further screening are medically significant. Mayor Bloomberg could surely find better recipients for breast-cancer-screening contributions.
In the ever on-going tiff between pro-life and pro-abortion, one way for conservatives to get liberals’ attention on the Planned Parenthood abortion “services” is to point out that all these “under-privileged” fetuses being aborted would have grown up to be sure Democratic Party constituents.
What's more disgusting than PP's bullying of Komen is the amount of federal money that PP receives. I believe it's hundreds of millions. Komen's annual grant in the neighborhood of half a million probably doesn't cover the salary of PP's CEO. Keeping the federal dollars flowing is where PP is focused. I'd like to see the Republican presidential candidate pledge to veto any bill providing federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Conservatives should expect and demand nothing less. Our tax dollars shouldn't be paying for abortions.
To believe that money from the government that goes to PP doesn't pay for abortions is to believe dishonest accounting. It is to believe that paying for the building, the doctor, and the equipment is somehow different than paying for the abortion itself. PP has continued to increase the abortions they provide year after year while referring fewer and fewer women to adoption. The reason for that is simple. There is more money in abortion. Every year they get more from the federal government yet only one "service" that they provide has any real increase, abortion. Completely unrelated I am sure.
The Catholic Church to my knowledge doesn't receive any money from the government. What are you talking about?
Even if it did your point wouldn't make any sense whatsoever in connection with the issue. Just for starters relocating priests is not a principle activity of the Catholic Church.
Actually they do. There's a program called the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (External Link), that gives grants to many religious institutions, including the Catholic Church. But since they use some other, totally unrelated, funding streams to pay legal fees for serial pedophiles I guess we should shut it down no matter how much good work they do?
1) That money does not go to "The Catholic Church." It goes to several individual local parishes.
2) "The Catholic Church" budget is not controlled by "The Catholic Church" but by several local dioceses the world over.
3) The Cahtolic Church stopped relocating these priests decades ago.
4) So, if you have evidence that those individual local parishes (see point 1) are still relocating these priests, you might have a point. Otherwise, stop blowing smoke.
5) Planned Parenthood, as its name states, exists primarily for providing birth control and abortions. Like it or don't, but that's the fact. If they were primarily a women's health clinic, they would have called themselves, oh I don't know, Women's Health Clinics of America. A big percentage of their budget goes to provide abortions, compared to the miniscule precentage of the Cath budget that might have gone to priest relocation. And once a donation is made to PP, it is completely fungible. So if you're giving to PP, you're funding abortion. You probably like that. Fine. But at least be honest about it.
The Catholic Church to my knowledge doesn't receive any money from the government. What are you talking about?
Even if it did your point wouldn't make any sense whatsoever in connection with the issue. Just for starters relocating priests is not a principle activity of the Catholic Church.
PP is "now" about saving lives. What is more disturbing is that I didn't hear any congressman or senator supporting Komen and their right to do what they want with their private funds.
It is a simple truth that the institution of abortion corrupts everything it touches. As a provider of abortion, PP cannot do otherwise than to lie, distort and obfuscate. Likewise, PP's defenders tell the public (and themselves) that Planned Parenthood is something other than what it is. It is an abortion mill, a charnel house, whose main business is the slaughter of unborn babies. The outrageous reaction to Komen's decision to stop donations announces the extent of their desperation. Now is the
time to increase efforts to drag them into
the light where they cannot defend their
actions.
Lets not get off the track. Womens health? What about Fetus survival? A Fetus is not a fingernail to be clipped. What percentage of the contributions to cancer screening goes for abortion? Take away my screening obscures the more incidious activites that take away a potential life. Evil disguised as 90% benevolence is malevolence shrouded in hyprocricy. Mussolini made the trains run on time.
One abortion by arbitrary whim is one abortion too much How many women did PP advise not to have an abortion? $468 profit per abortion. The Nazis extracted the gold teeth from their corpses to maximize profit. More efficient.
Premediated Purging is not the only place to get a cancer screening. Any clinic that does not perform abortions is more than sufficient. The Catholic Church needs to sit down hard on this one. No more subdizing behavior worthy of an anti-Christ.
Yea and if you're Bloomberg and one of the main reasons you got elected was this horrific connection with the majority of women voters over their shared love of abortion, then you'll do anything to keep PP in power, like give them a quarter million dollars.
It's so disheartening that not enough pro lifers stood up to give the people who made this decision sufficient support to not coward out like they did.
It's unimaginable that we've made this world for ourselves where the most powerful political force in the land is the baby murdering service.
Many of us did send emails of support to Komen for agreeing not to fund PP any more. Unfortunately, they were assaulted by the media led by Andrea Mitchell who had the gall to say that "support for Planned Parenthood's [fake breast cancer screening] was bipartisan." Obviously, there are people on the board of Komen who are pro abortion and were happy to roll. Bloomberg is an abortion loving monster. He thinks he knows better than everybody else. His job is to clear the streets of snow and he failed miserably at that on December 26, 2010. The man is a political failure as far as I am concerned. I wish he would fly off to Bermuda on his private jet and take Planned Parenthood with him. And leave the rest of us alone.
I had an altogether different reaction to this. I had "earnestly hoped" that Komen would put breast cancer prevention before partisan politics and not fund Planned Parenthood at all, thereby avoiding the "mission creep" that so many charitable organizations tend to gravitate towards.
As a happy coincidence of doing so, they would have also put the health of unborn babies before partisan politics. Had they apologized for casting doubt upon their commitment to their mission of saving women's lives by not forwarding donations offered to Komen for breast cancer prevention to abortion providers in the first place, that also would have been admirable.
Komen chose to make public their decision to discontinue funding PP and basically justified the decision on a technicality, rather than as evidence of straying from their core mission or of misleading their donors, much less upon a principled stand against abortion. I didn't decide to immediately donate to them to support their original decision not to fund PP and since I knew long ago they funded PP I have never donated to them in the past. I wonder how pro-life people feel today if they sent money based on Komen's original announcement, only to see it reversed.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy a box of Girl Scout cookies and be certain the funds went only to support the Girl Scout troop you bought them from?
Thanks Komen for picking a fight with a demon in the name of anti-abortion and then rolling over in surrender at the first sign of adversity. Thanks for deciding for us all that fighting breast cancer and fighting abortion are mutually exclusive and the fight against breast cancer is more important.
Wouldn't it have been better for you to simply act in silence, or even not act at all if you were not fully intent on finishing the fight you started?
I don't think I'll be donating to your org any more. There are other org's fighting cancer that have a bit more spine.
Once again we witness the sociopaths now running the Democrat party remain true to their pathology by accusing their victims of the crimes they themselves are committing in defense of their quest to forge willing victims out of their constituency.
There's a reason that Republican politicians quickly drop all their "fervor" and "energy" about abortion immediately after an Election...only to see it "magically" re-emerge a year or so before the next Election.
The "pro-lifers" haven't figured it out why that is, in nearly 40 years, nor likely ever will.
Poor Mona. Whenever a position she believes loses, the other other side automatically are cheaters who didn't play fair. Is playing the victim card a Conservative principle?
Follow
