Komen Giving to Planned Parenthood?
We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.
The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.
Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.
Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.
The bottom line is that Komen needs to do what is best for the organization’s mission and not cave to politically correct pressures. Given that abortion has scientifically been proven to greatly increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer the decision should be unquestionable. Learn about the scientifically proven fact of how abortion causes breast cancer from the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute.
Immediately after Komen made the original announcement to defund Planned Parenthood an all out war began. Planned Parenthood immediately started to attack Komen’s reputation and funding. Many people are calling what Planned Parenthood did a “Mafia shakedown”. I empathize with Komen for caving to Planned Parenthood’s effort to destroy the Komen foundation.
The big question now is: Are they going to continue funding Planned Parenthood or not? The announcement is rather unclear given Planned Parenthood is under multiple criminal investigations; therefore, Komen cannot fund Planned Parenthood at this time. However, Komen could fund individual Planned Parenthood’s affiliates that are not underst criminal investigation. Needless to say, there are loopholes.
While whether or not Komen will continue to fund Planned Parenthood is unclear, pro-lifers are encouraged to not support Komen until funding decisions are clear. However, I ask you to please email news@komen.org and tell them you support them in defunding Planned Parenthood and not to give in to Planned Parenthood’s bullying.
Planned Parenthood provides other breast cancer screenings for low-income women who would not otherwise be able to afford the procedure. Choosing to take funds away from Planned Parenthood because it also helps provide abortion services upon request does little more than divide people on what was previously a non-political issue (since fighting breast cancer should be universally approved by everyone) This decision has cast doubt on the SGK foundation and their commitment to women's health. They could have chosen to do nothing about this issue, and thus avoid offending everyone. Instead, they divided donors across party affiliation and forced people to dramatically reevaluate the efficacy of giving money to the SGK (note that this group spends more on advertising, the exercise of legal influence to suppress competing charities, and executive compensation than it does on actually fighting breast cancer) All these changes occured when the VP of public policy was replaced by a hyper-partisan Republican operative.
Anonymous, the underlying assumption you're making is that the grant money disappeared. That's not the case. SGK still funds grants for the specific purpose of making breast exams affordable to low-income women. The only difference is that those grants would have been to community clinics other than Planned Parenthood. PP is under investigation for overbilling Medicaid in numerous states. Furthermore, they don't provide mammograms on site, only referrals. Whatever you think of abortion, giving to PP for breast health is not efficient. It's PP that turned this into a political issue.
That is a disingenuous argument. the justification to suspend PP's SGK grant was fabricated specifically to target PP, even when Penn State was under investigation for criminal charges. If you're willing to accept uncritically the partisan excuses of ouvertly republican political operatives, then you can't be convinced otherwise through any rational means.