Did the Komen Foundation's politically motivated attempt to punish Planned Parenthood for providing contraception and abortions, actually do advocates for women's reproductive rights a favor?

Courtesy of Salon:

Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat. 

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency — armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long. 

That this week’s blow against Planned Parenthood came not directly from John Boehner’s House of Representatives – which, ever since taking power a year ago promising to focus on jobs, has manfully focused on the single task of attacking women’s reproductive rights – but instead from a popular, officially nonpartisan organization dedicated wholly to women’s healthcare somehow brought this argument into the open. 

The response to Komen was surely so tinderbox explosive because it had been building with every politically theatrical investigation launched by Cliff Stearns and every grisly abortion scene enacted on the House floor by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith. But it was not just Washington wonkery, and was not ginned up or amplified by professional political cranks. It was the reflexive kick of a shin hit just below the knee, and the visceral anger spilled everywhere, from a Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr and onto Facebook, where people posted images of Komen’s pink ribbon cut in half. It poured from bank accounts, including that of New York Mayor and former Republican Michael Bloomberg. 

More than that, though: The starkly observable attack against something as crucial and basic as breast exams for poor women, as well as the fact that so many divergent voices were pulled into it, meant that the conversation was not about partisan politics; it was about women. For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns.

Now I have to admit that I was completely unaware of how politicized fundraising for women's health issues had become, and I was surprised at how devious the Right Wing had been in essentially covertly taking over an organization and then implementing an anti-reproductive rights agenda.

So this bumbling attempt by the Komen Foundation, turned out to be for myself, and of course the readers of this blog, a teachable moment.

Actually everywhere you looked people were disgusted with the actions taken by Komen, and suddenly we realized that many of us had been "blinded by the pink" and were being tricked into funding an organization that was top heavy with administrators while only a portion of their donations were going to fight breast cancer. In fact some of the money was put aside to file lawsuits against other charities with the audacity to claim they were also fighting for a "cure."

The lesson that I took away from all of this is that the Right Wing was absolutely determined to make damn sure women had no control over their own reproductive rights by any means possible, even if that meant putting women's health in jeopardy.

I also learned that it is always better to give your donations DIRECTLY to the organizations that are on the front lines, whether it be the American Cancer Society to help fight this terrible disease, or Planned Parenthood to help millions of women get access to affordable health care and contraception.

And finally I learned that there is nothing "pink" or pretty about breast cancer, as this video put together by a brave cancer survivor graphically explains. (Warning NSFW.)

So in the end this incident, as painful and unsettling as it was, may just turn out to be the wake up call that those fighting for the heath and safety of women everywhere needed to get them motivated to fight back against the conservative machine that is using guilt and out dated religious traditions to destroy a woman's right to choose what she does with her body.