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Pink No More

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It started like the disease it hopes to cure. Quiet. Innocuous. Just another news clip in the Associated Press. No one paying attention. No one really noticing — much like the whole issue of women’s heath care in this country. Within hours the disease was ravaging the internet, the media, the corridors of public opinion, spreading like cells of breast cancer that maim, disfigure, kill.

The fabled protector of women’s health across the country and around the world, one of the largest charities devoted to the mission of saving women’s lives, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, was, in one fatal diagnosis, fabled no more. Supporters of women’s health rights and proponents of Planned Parenthood everywhere were giving the Komen foundation pink slips of their own with Facebook protests, donations to Planned Parenthood, tweets of outrage and in true revolutionary fashion, good old reliable hacking into Komen’s website around midnight Thursday, with hackers writing, “Help us run over poor women on our way to the bank.” It would have made Susan B. Antony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton proud.

Three short days after the furor started, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced today it was abandoning plans to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. The dramatic retreat was stunning in the speed of its reversal. If only the passing of legislation were so swift. The New York Times in an editorial published yesterday labeled it “A Painful Betrayal,” saying that the Komen for the Cure foundation “had suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week.”

The following is from Wikipedia:

“Critics point out that Komen’s new rules were created after the hiring of its new senior vice president for public policy Karen Handel, who stated during her unsuccessful 2010 Georgia gubernatorial campaign that “I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood” and who pledged to eliminate funding for breast and cervical cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood.[55][56] Komen founder Nancy Brinker is a longtime GOP donor with strong Republican ties and served as ambassador to Hungary under George W. Bush, and the decision came shortly after Komen unveiled a new partnership with the policy-making arm of George W. Bush’s presidential library.[57] Following the decision, Komen’s director of community health programs resigned in protest over the grant cutoff.[58] On February 1, 2012 Komen board member John D. Raffaelli confirmed to the New York Times that the new rules were created specifically to defund Planned Parenthood.[59]”

It is disappointing that, after 30 years of honoring her sister’s memory with an effective, if inflexible, education campaign, Mrs. Brinker has chosen to lead it into bitter partisan politics. In one fell swoop she has performed a double mastectomy, that may or may not save the victim’s life.

The backlash, like the ubiquitous pink ribbons signifying the Komen logo, have been sweet:

Yesterday, I wrote a check for $1000.00 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. And then in pink glitter pen, I wrote the word VOID across it, slipped it into a pink envelope, addressed it, and dropped it in the mailbox…

Talk about empowerment.

 

ADDED 2/4/12: “This is a watershed moment in the contemporary conversation about reproductive rights. This is a story in which we see the possibility of a turned tide, a new way to gauge how the public actually feels about women’s rights and health, and a new way to talk about it, as well. Because what we saw this week was big. … It was powerful. It was mass. It was direct. It was emotional. And it restores women as the moral center of this conversation — which is where they belong.”

Susan G. Komen’s priceless gift

 

 


Filed under: New & Notable, Political Theatre, Uncategorized Tagged: Planned Parenthood, politics, Susan G. Komen for the Cure

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