The financial backlash begins for Komen Foundation after politically motivated removal of funds from Planned Parenthood.

Courtesy of the Courier Press:

The University of Evansville Lady Aces' annual "Hoops for the Cure" game, which supports the local Susan G. Komen for the Cure affiliate, has had an announced attendance of at least 1,100 the past five years — including a record 3,485 in 2008. 

At the 10th annual game Sunday, its first year at the Ford Center, it drew 676 people, according to university statistics. 

"There has never been a year like this," said Martha Fischer, 64, who's been a Lady Aces season ticket holder for the past 20 years. "And the only reasonable explanation is that the public is just not supporting the Komen." 

Fischer was referring to the national Komen office's announcement to cut breast-cancer screening grants from Planned Parenthood two weeks ago and its subsequent withdrawal of that decision, two moves that could affect the Evansville branch even though its money is never directed to Planned Parenthood. 

"I think it could have something to do with all of the negative things that have been going on in the news lately," said Sheila Seiler, director of the Greater Evansville Komen affiliate, speaking about game attendance.

What is it that they say about Karma again?

I doubt that too many people will shed a tear for the demise of the Komen Foundation, now that they are clearly being run with a conservative political agenda.

And the lesson, which the GOP would be smart to finally learn, is that you NEVER attack a woman's right to health care, or ability to control when and if she has children.

Score one for the good guys! Karen Handel resigns from Komen Foundation amidst controversy over cutting of funds to Planned Parenthood.

Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Karen Handel, the embattled Georgian lauded and criticized for the split between the Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, resigned today from her post at the breast cancer organization. 

Handel has called a press conference this afternoon to discuss the decision. 

Handel's resignation a week after the breast cancer organization announced and then reversed a decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood, citing a policy change that prohibited giving grants to organizations under local, state or federal investigation. The move sparked an outcry from both foes and supporters of abortion rights, with many praising Komen for the initial decision, while others vilified the organization for denying funds that largely help low-income women. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has obtained Handel's resignation letter to Komen founder and CEO Nancy Brinker, in which Handel states: "I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. 

However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants." 

Brinker denied Handel's involvement in a televised interview with MSNBC , but that did little to quell the growing movement calling for Handel's resignation. Handel remained mum about her role in the funding decision last week; today's press conference will mark her first public statements about what quickly became a public relations debacle.

What can I say? You simply DO NOT screw with women's ability to get affordable health care and contraception in this country.  And if you do.......

Personally I hope that this is just the beginning, and that this new energy to protect reproductive rights extends to the political arena. I would love to see women's groups start really organizing to kick some of these Republican Neanderthals out of office before they succeed in making it a crime for a doctor to end an unwanted pregnancy, or make it impossible for Americans to access birth control.

Because I think that now more than ever we realize that has been the goal all along.

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.

The darkness hidden behind the pretty pink ribbons of the Komen Foundation.

Courtesy of the Globe and Mail:

Near the end of the polemical new National Film Board documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc., activist Judy Brady is asked what she thinks of when she sees the pink ribbon symbolizing breast-cancer awareness: “I see evil,” says Brady. 

Who could possibly see anything wrong in a symbol that has mobilized people to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for breast-cancer research since the 1980s? The answer is provided in this documentary by Quebec’s Léa Pool (Emporte-Moi, Lost and Delirious). 

The film is based on a 2007 book by Queen’s University professor Samantha King (Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, one of a handful of studies in the past dozen years on the contentious social history of breast cancer and the gulf between the reality of the disease and the high-profile public perception of it. 

In spite of the optimistic messages, breast cancer is not being beaten. According to the film, in 1940, a woman had a one-in-22 chance of developing the disease, while today that figure is one in eight (based on the assumption that, if all women lived to be 85, one in eight would develop it during her lifetime). And, in any case, the high profile of breast-cancer fundraising has less to do with its risk (cardiac disease and lung cancer kill more women) than its marketability.

I have to admit I am shocked by what I am learning about Cancer research, the Komen Foundation, and women's health today.  I thought I was fairly well informed, but essentially I knew NOTHING.

It almost feels like some of these organizations are picking the pockets of people who want to stop this dreadful disease, and feeding them the kind of BS one would expect from faith healers.

I remember how a few times in the past I put my testosterone in neutral and purchased one of those bright pink marketing items because I believed it was for this wonderful cause. Now I feel like a schmuck.

Like I said before,  I will be making my donations in the future DIRECTLY to Planned Parenthood. And clearly I am not alone in that choice as so far PP has raised 3 million dollars in reaction to the Komen decision.

Komen apologizes for taking funding away from Planned Parenthood, and promises that funding will resume uninterrrupted. Update.

Courtesy of The Scoop Blog:

Komen for the Cure just released the following statement from Nancy Brinker and the Susan G. Komen Board of Directors: 

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. 

It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics - anyone's politics. 

Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public's understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve. 

We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

I also just heard this on MSNBC so it is official.

Wow!  Way to go ladies!

I am very impressed with how aggressively people spoke out concerning this outrage. I have not seen a response this fast since the SOPA outrage last month.

I still have no idea how Komen rationalized making this controversial decision in the first place, but I think this will serve as a lesson to EVERYBODY in the future to not bend to the anti-women political agendas of the Right Wing fringe, Especially when it comes to something as important as fighting cancer and supporting women's health issues.

Update:  While I still believe that this is a victory for those who are fighting to improve women's health in this country, I also realize that the "cancer," if you will, that still exists in the form of Karen Handel within the Komen foundation, is still a lingering malignancy that should be removed.

However I think the only way THAT will happen is if keeping her as VP negatively impacts their funding.  If you click here you can see a list of their "corporate partners" who provide the majority of their donations.  Perhaps a couple thousand e-mails sent to those on this list might kick start the countdown to the end of Karen Handel, and her right wing supporters, influence on this organization.

Couldn't hurt.

Update 2: According to the Plum Line, the Komen Foundation has NO plans to change their leadership or promise to provide donations to Planned Parenthood in the future:  

I just got off the phone with a Komen board member, and he confirmed that the announcement does not mean that Planned Parenthood is guaranteed future grants — a demand he said would be “unfair” to impose on Komen. He also said the job of the group’s controversial director, Nancy Brinker, is safe, as far as the board is concerned. 

I asked Komen board member John Raffaelli to respond to those who are now saying that the announcement doesn’t necessarily constitute a reversal until Planned Parenthood actually sees more funding. 

He insisted it would be unfair to expect the group to commit to future grants. “It would be highly unfair to ask us to commit to any organization that doesn’t go through a grant process that shows that the money we raise is used to carry out our mission,” Raffaelli told me. “We’re a humaniatrian organization. We have a mission. Tell me you can help carry out our mission and we will sit down at the table.” 

Pushed on whether this means the new announcement wasn’t really a reversal, Raffaelli pushed back, arguing that Komen, in response to all the criticism, had removed politics from the grant-making process. “Is it really unclear that we’re changing the policy to address criticism?” he said.

So Nancy Brinker is safe, as I assume Karen Handel is as well, and there is no definitive promise to continue the foundation's relationship with PP.

I think it is the appropriate time to say fuck the Komen Foundation, and, as so many have already suggested, to send out money directly to Planned Parenthood.

Here is their link to donate.