The Widdershins

A symbol of hate?

We live in dangerous times, Widdershins. If you aren’t a woman of childbearing age, then you know one well – you may even be related to one or several. And if you aren’t a woman “of an uncertain age” (i.e., over forty), then you know more than one. And both groups of women face increasingly serious threats to their health care every day.

The latest attack comes from a disgraceful source: well-known anti-breast cancer group The Susan G. Komen Foundation, creator of the pink ribbon. I had heard that this group was not all it should be, from a feminist perspective; but what it did this week went beyond unsatisfactory and into truly heinous territory.

John D. Raffaelli, a Komen board member and Washington lobbyist, said Wednesday that the decision to cut off money to 17 of the 19 Planned Parenthood affiliates it had supported was made because of the fear that an investigation of Planned Parenthood by Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, would damage Komen’s credibility with donors.

(snip)

…[T]he Komen board voted that all of its vendors and grantees must certify that they are not under investigation by federal, state or local authorities. But for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, being the target of partisan investigations is part of doing business. So Komen’s new rule effectively ended their long partnership and seemed to the health services provider an unacceptable betrayal of their common mission to save women’s lives.

Dawn Laguens, an executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said that Komen’s money had over the years underwritten breast cancer screenings for 170,000 women, some of whose lives were saved as a result. She said she had no sympathy for Komen’s attempt to mollify donors by ending its relationship with a controversial provider of women’s health services. Only a small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s expenditures go toward abortion services.

It seems that SGK may have mixed up the order of the events just a tad bit. You see, it wasn’t the rules that gave rise to the decision to cut off Planned Parenthood – it was the decision to cut off Planned Parenthood that gave rise to the rules.

…[N]ew reporting from the Atlantic reveals that Komen adopted the new guidelines to cut off Planned Parenthood. That effort was led by Komen President Elizabeth Thompson, who knew that Planned Parenthood was the only group that would be affected by the rule, and Karen Handel, Komen’s new senior vice president for public policy.

Handel, who came on board in April, is a former secretary of state in Georgia and a Republican activist who describes herself as a “pro-life Christian.” Handel ran for governor of Georgia on an anti-abortion platform, and was endorsed by Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. She wrote during her failed gubernatorial campaign that “since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”

Disgusting, ain’t it? Why the f*ck are women like this allowed to run women’s health services organizations?!

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