Again and again women are the losers in the ridiculous political and hateful rhetoric behind reproductive rights.
Note that I didn’t say abortion and I almost didn’t say reproductive rights because in this case it is Women’s Health that takes the blow. Of course in this country at this time the three are not mutually exclusive.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation has long been a target of anti-choice advocates who vilify Planned Parenthood as an abortion mega-provider. The indication that breast cancer is anti-choice is so outrageous it is almost hilarious. Even more ridiculous is the statement made by a representative of the Komen foundation who rebuffed the suggestion that the decision was based on years of bullying and even uttered "grant making decisions are not about politics." Yeah, right.
Another stance by the Komen foundation is that an inquiry made by a Republican Rep. from Florida as to whether PP uses federal dollars to provide abortion puts PP out of the running.
Here is an excerpt from an article located on NPR.org
According to the AP, the Komen foundation says it has stopped sending money to Planned Parenthood affiliates — who used the funding to provide breast cancer screening and education programs to women — because of an inquiry initiated by Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., into whether Planned Parenthood has used public money to provide abortions. The Komen foundation's position is that it does not give grants to organizations that are under investigation
What I want to know is what kind of response the Komen foundation will have when PP is cleared of any wrong doing and said investigation is revealed as a wholly political tactic?
Who is hurt is this situation?
One more interesting coincidence; Komen’s foundation has long supported the claim that abortion increases your chance for developing breast cancer. While designing studies to extract empirical data linking the two together has prevented wide spread research, the American Cancer Society concludes: “Linking these 2 topics creates a great deal of emotion and debate. But scientific research studies have not found a cause-and-effect relationship between abortion and breast cancer.”
One would think with that frame of mind, the foundation would never have bestowed grants upon PP to begin with. But it did and now it won’t and yet we’re supposed to believe that politics have nothing to do with it?
By now women have long since figured out that it isn't only the "personal" that's political. In fact at this point there isn't anything about a women's body that isn't political.
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