Screw 'Run for the Cure'

I was struggling to express my disgust at the cowardice of the Komen Foundation in caving to the pressure of the Fetus Lobby, which is taking credit and celebrating.

“The continued, collective efforts of the pro-life movement have paid off,” said Bradley Mattes, Executive Director of the Life Issues Institute. “Our work to educate Komen donors to the reality that the organization has financially supported the nation’s largest chain of abortion mills has caused Komen to halt the financial hemorrhaging. Evidently, Komen had to choose between political ideology and financial viability. They made a good choice.”

I was going to write about how Planned Parenthood serves mostly poor people, how much a mammogram costs, how utterly despicable this is. . .

Then I found Amanda Marcotte's latest and she nails it. It's a witch hunt.

That's when I realized that anti-choicers do this so well because the war on reproductive health care is basically a witchhunt, and the religious fundamentalists behind it are the modern day version of medieval paranoids of old who believed that women who didn't conform to their exacting standards were consorting with Satan.

. . .

Anyone who thinks breast cancer can be neatly cordoned off from this growing circle of hate for all things women's health care is fooling themselves. That's not how witch hunts work. The fear here is not about fetuses or babies per se, but a deep-set fear of female sexuality. Already anti-choicers have scooped breast cancer under the umbrella "abortion", claiming that abortion causes breast cancer. (It doesn't.) Komen would rather side with people who see breast cancer as god's judgment on you for having an abortion rather than side with people support comprehensive health care for women. That tells you all you need to know about their organization. I'm all for picking up your sneakers and taking up running as a hobby, but recommend now you do it for you, and not for the ever-elusive cure for cancer.

Oh, and by the way, Komen doesn't play nice. It wastes a million dollars a year of donors' money chasing down little fundraisers who have the temerity to use the colour pink or use the phrase 'for the cure' in their names.

"I think it's a shame," [target Sue Prom] said. "It's not okay. People don't give their money to the Komen Foundation and they don't do their races and events so that Komen can squash any other fundraising efforts by individuals. That's not what it's about."

Image source.