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Outcry Grows Fiercer After Funding Cut by Cancer Group

Started by spacial, February 03, 2012, 05:41:01 PM

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spacial

QuoteThe nation's leading breast cancer advocacy organization confronted the growing furor Thursday over its decision to largely end its decades-long partnership with Planned Parenthood, with rising dissension in its own ranks and a roiling anger on the Internet showing the power of social media to harness protest

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/us/komen-foundation-urged-to-restore-planned-parenthood-funds.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

QuoteEDITORIAL
A Painful Betrayal

With its roster of corporate sponsors and the pink ribbons that lend a halo to almost any kind of product you can think of, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has a longstanding reputation as a staunch protector of women's health. That reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world's largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission. It threw itself into the middle of one of America's nastiest political battles, on the side of hard-right forces working to demonize Planned Parenthood and undermine women's health and freedom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/a-painful-betrayal.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211

I can't claim to understand the intricacies of US politics, but at first glance, this sounds nasty and sick.
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driven

Stuff like this pisses me off so much. I get my T through Planned Parenthood and there's almost always a little group of protesters holding signs in the parking lot when I go there. "God loves you and your baby". Ugh. That's soooo not why I'm here, folks. ::)

It's too bad people associate PP with only abortions. They offer a lot of inexpensive services and it would be a shame if they had to cut back because of a some uneducated zealots.
"I am not what I ought to be, not what I want to be, not what I am going to be, but thankful that I am not what I used to be." - John Wooden
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spacial

I can't disagree.

But what I find so worrying is that the right wing, (hate that term, it could mean almost anything), has shifted its battleground to health and such an otherwise sensitive area, at that.

Perhaps the question should be asked, why a Breast Cancer Charity would make donations to a family planning charity in the first place?

But stopping them in this way would seem to be a rather dramatic statement.

From what I can gather, controlling the reproductive tendencies of their bodies seems to be of a slightly lower priority than maintaining their breasts, for most American women. So the breast cancer issue was always the dominant partner.

That makes the isolation of the birth control issue even more significant.

But as I said, the intricacies of US politics, especially health politics, are not really part of my area of expertise.
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tekla

At first I was thinking that - like so many of our political people these days - that it was amazingly 'tone-deaf' of them to come out and say it like that, when it would have been much easier just to let the funding expire (as they had no intention of stopping the all-ready agreed to funding, this only had to do with future funding) and not make any more grants.  It's not like they have not been under a bunch of criticism as it is for the head making $5 million a year (that alone keep me from giving them any money) who among other things has spent millions of dollars suing anyone who used 'for the cure' as part of their name or promotion.   And that stuff sit pretty poorly in the charity community.

At some point, when people are being really dumb you have to ask which of the "3 I's" it is.  Is it Ignorance, is it Idiocy, or is it Intentional?

But then I was thinking that was exactly the point, to make a big splash about it.  The head of SGKftc is an ex-Bush appointee, and the person most responsible for inflating it is and unsuccessful candidate for governor in Georgia who had Sara Palin's endorsement.  That all makes it look much more political, and much more intentional - far more like bating then simple policy decisions.   Bottom line is that SGKfthc is going to hurt from this as they become just one more group that is slowly marginalizing itself by letting the most radical political types run the show.  And maybe that was really the real deal all along.

FIGHT APATHY!, or don't...
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Beth Andrea

All this talk about right wing idiocy leaves out the idiocy of the left wing...

Why is supporting abortions the "gold standard" of worthiness? Koman withdrew its support for PP because of the abortions, if I understand it correctly...yet both Koman and PP do good work, outside of the abortion debate.

But, if PP stops getting support from Koman (because of the abortions), suddenly the left says Koman is unworthy of support? "Perhaps mortal wound" is how the original article describes it...

QuoteThat reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world's largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission.

Koman didn't betray the cancer mission, just the abortion one. But, like always, supporters of abortion rights demonstrate that they are just as zealous and fanatic as the anti-choice supporters.
...I think for most of us it is a futile effort to try and put this genie back in the bottle once she has tasted freedom...

--read in a Tessa James post 1/16/2017
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tekla

supporters of abortion rights demonstrate that they are just as zealous and fanatic as the anti-choice supporters.

Well yeah, because supporters of abortion rights are always harassing people going into churches and chaining themselves to the doors so people can't get in regardless of what they were going there for.  And for sure the anti-abortion people need constant police protection because of death threats from Planned Parenthood supporters, and are worried about people bombing their offices, or killing them in church, or putting their names and addresses out on published death-lists.

So yeah, not giving a donation is just as fanatical as the other side.  Perfectly equivalent.

The outrage is because SGK is using money people donated to fight breast cancer to advance an unrelated political agenda.   It's all part of the mentality that: a) diseases like cancer (and AIDS), and indeed the entire range of issues around health care, are political and should be treated as such, and b) life begins at conception and ends at birth.  To wit, unnoticed in all this was that SGKftc also cut funding to any and all institutions that are also involved in stem cell research, but no worries, no important health research was being done at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, The University of Kansas Medical Center, The US National Cancer Institute, and The Society for Women's Health Research at Yale University. 

Let's see, medical research eh, well sure I'd trust a failed candidate for governor in Georgia before I'd look to Johns Hopkins.  Who wouldn't?

At any rate, it doesn't even matter if it's true or not because politics (like charity fund-raising) is about perception (you would think that with the overt political appointments that someone there would have known that, but perhaps that's why they were not elected in the first place, hence free to join SGK) and now this organization has been politicized.  That politicization was intentional and now they are going to have to deal with the fallout.  There are people who will now think twice about giving, not only individuals but the far bigger corporate sponsors.   Do you think New Balance and Ford signed on for a public fight over Planned Parenthood? When Yoplait put a pink lid on its yogurt, did they do it to make it easier to boycott their products?  Because that's what's going to happen. Unlike most boycotts, it's easy to figure out which products you shouldn't buy: anything that displays a pink ribbon with the Komen name.

Planned Parenthood has been - not just at the forefront - but pretty much the only organization providing health care for poor women.  Actual care, not just raising money.  In many states they are the only place that provides for abortions, so eliminating them is de facto banning abortions for people not rich enough to travel to other states to find it.

Though no one really likes it, it's not - as you would have it - some big extreme left wing position, but rather, a very mainstream one.  The extreme position is the one advocated by some of the Presidential contenders that no abortions should be allowed, not even in the cases of rape and incest.  Rick Santorum is quoted as saying:  "I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created - in the sense of rape - but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you."  He added that rape victims ought to "make the best of a bad situation."  That's an extreme position.
FIGHT APATHY!, or don't...
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Stephe

Quote from: tekla on February 06, 2012, 10:09:45 AM
supporters of abortion rights demonstrate that they are just as zealous and fanatic as the anti-choice supporters.

Well yeah, because supporters of abortion rights are always harassing people going into churches and chaining themselves to the doors so people can't get in regardless of what they were going there for.  And for sure the anti-abortion people need constant police protection because of death threats from Planned Parenthood supporters, and are worried about people bombing their offices, or killing them in church, or putting their names and addresses out on published death-lists.

So yeah, not giving a donation is just as fanatical as the other side.  Perfectly equivalent.


+1 for stating this.
My mother was almost KILLED by an abortion clinic bombing because her dentist just happens to be in the same shopping center. They didn't do the abortions there, they screened women for all sorts of problems at this place. Yet some zealot decided it was OK to put a bomb, set there to go off during business hours when they knew people would die, which they did. So until we hear of abortion-rights people KILLING innocent people and other terrorist actions to force their -opinions-, lets back off the "The other side is just as bad" stuff OK?
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