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Victory!

Jill

Nice work, everyone:

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation reversed its decision to cut funds for breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood affiliates and apologized to the American people for what it said was casting doubt on its “commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.”

33 thoughts on Victory!

  1. I work with my conservative father. This morning he got a phone call, and he said to the person on the other line, “oh, I was just in the middle of donating to the Susan G. Komen foundation”, and explained that he was rewarding them for their decision to defund Planned Parenthood.

    He just left to go up north for a function. Maybe I should send him a text with the good news.

  5. The statement asked 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.”

    please, please forget that we wanted to defund planned parenthood (if you are pro-choice) or that we are now appearing to “re-fund” planned parenthood (if you are anti-choice) and keep buying our pink shit. mama needs a new jet.

  6. Anyone want to lay odds that they realized their new “no grants to donors under investigation” rule ended up applying to organizations other than PP and didn’t want to have to choose between a PR disaster for having to be consistent and a PR disaster for being hypocrites?

    Saw this happen at my old job – incompetent manager cooked up a rule to try and slough off a complaining volunteer, immediately waived application of the rule for other volunteers once I informed them of the policy as it applied to them, eventually dropped the whole subject. As horrible as that environment became, I received an invaluable education about mismanagement and how it manifests in organizations of all forms and scales.

  7. I still don’t think I’ll ever give them any of my money ever again.

    Being on a stupidly strict budget, I never did.. but this was enough to keep me from donating were I in the position.

    There’s still Relay for Life.

  8. I think this decision applies only to this year. Next year, PP would have to reapply for funding, and who knows?

  9. It is extremely important that we retain our focus. I would implore everyone to not take this action by Komen as any sort of victory. Be on your guard. Believe me, the anti-choice movement is in no way sitting back on their laurels, folks…I guarantee that they are regrouping and will be redoubling their efforts — everywhere. One small win is not going to shake their resolve.

  10. Well, auditorydamage, they certainly didn’t cut off funds to Penn State, which is currently dealing with a criminal investigation.

  11. The victory doesn’t come from the infinitesimal amount of the Komen slush fund doled out to PP, but learning that Komen is a nest of reactionary vipers.

  12. “Well, auditorydamage, they certainly didn’t cut off funds to Penn State, which is currently dealing with a criminal investigation.”

    or Bank of America

  13. I work with my conservative father. This morning he got a phone call, and he said to the person on the other line, “oh, I was just in the middle of donating to the Susan G. Komen foundation”, and explained that he was rewarding them for their decision to defund Planned Parenthood.

    Please tell your father that, without Planned Parenthood, this stranger on the internet would have missed at least two well-woman checkups. And tell them that another stranger she knows would be suffering from disabling cystitis, because that stranger wouldn’t have access to the Pill.

  14. I’d suggest reading the entire statement from Komen’s CEO & BoD, which the linked NYT piece in the OP only quotes selectively. The whole thing reads like a passive-aggressive nonpology and strongly suggests that they are only annoyed at being caught out. They get pissy about “politics” and use a lot of weasel words, including the following (emphasis mine):

    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.

    Plus which, according to this piece up at MSNBC, an anonymous source “with direct knowledge of decision-making” inside the foundation’s HQ alleges that:

    …the grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood.

    That source goes on to say that this is all the handiwork of the foundation’s public policy veep Karen Handel, who was hired last year after she lost her campaign for governor in Georgia. She was a real anti-choice asshole during that campaign, though, and for bonus points, also an anti-queer asshole.

    Handel needs to be rudely handed a pink slip.

  16. They can say whatever they want, they’ve revealed their true agenda and I will never support them again. I will also go through with my protest of their “Drink for Pink” event in Pittsburgh at the end of this month. We cannot let this distract us–there are many reasons SGK needs to be put in its place and this is just the beginning of the fight.

  18. Ditto to Angus. “Preserve their ability to apply” is quite the bullshit sentence. In theory, my dog can apply if I can teach him how to write and give him a pen, that doesn’t mean the application gets approved.

    This was just a really good PR move by Komen. Everyone’s running with headlines like “funding has been restored”, when it hasn’t and probrably won’t be at least for this year. The line about continuing to fund existing grants only refers to the ones granted before the policy change, that’s nothing new, they always said they’d honor those (don’t think they had a choice) It says nothing to the grants that were not approved due to the policy change.

    Also, Brinker claimed yesterday that PP was now ineligible because they didn’t directly provide mammograms. So they could still deny them future funding on those grounds without getting as much heat for it.

    I’d put the champagne back on ice for a bit here.

  19. I’m seconding Norbizness here. The real story is that they’re shot through with reactionaries. They can’t be trusted with charity money because they want to politicize it, and no press release is going to change that. They’re not actually an organization that is for healthcare.

  20. Hate to be a Debbie Downer here but no, actually, all SKG do was double-down on the spin. They’re “continuing with existing grants” — something they were already doing, anyway — and have changed their grant eligibility to make Planned Parenthood once again eligible to apply. But an application is not a grant. Who wants to bet some other bogus reason will be cooked up in a few months, after the uproar has died down?

  21. @Jen in Ohio
    #14

    Handel needs to be rudely handed a pink slip.

    I guess it would be appropriate for Susan G. Komen to hand out pink slips.

  22. @Jen in Ohio
    #14

    Handel needs to be rudely handed a pink slip.

    I guess it would be appropriate for Susan G. Komen to hand out pink slips.

    Would a percentage from the wages she’d no longer be earning go to research?

  23. “Who wants to bet some other bogus reason will be cooked up in a few months, after the uproar has died down?”

    Well, we’ll just have to double up on the uproar in a few months.

  24. Would a percentage from the wages she’d no longer be earning go to research?

    Oh, I’m sure they could put something like 20% of it to research (assuming they didn’t just hire another VP). I wouldn’t expect much more than that, since that’s the fraction of their budget that goes to research.

  25. I’m seconding Norbizness here. The real story is that they’re shot through with reactionaries. They can’t be trusted with charity money because they want to politicize it, and no press release is going to change that. They’re not actually an organization that is for healthcare.

    Yep yep.

    Social conservatives by definition work against women. That’s the whole point of being a social-con: fear and hatred of women who do anything besides be a virgin until marriage and then stay in the kitchen. Donating to a women’s advocacy group that is shot through with right-wing religious reactionaries would be like donating to a Holocaust memorial fund with KKK members on the board.

    I have no doubt Komen will dump PP in the future. But they will dump other unrelated organizations at the same time in a bullshit attempt to “dilute” what they’re doing.

  26. As a side note, I would like to apologize on behalf of all of us in the state of Georgia who are not reactionary misogynistic wingnuts, for the fact that Karen Handel is being inflicted on the rest of the country. She must be crazy, because she couldn’t even get elected here. That’s sayin’ something.

  27. Erm, let me amend my prior remark to describe her as over-the-top hateful, instead of crazy. Sorry. Word choice FAIL.

  28. Credo has a petition stating that we will go after anyone who threatens Planned Parenthood, every time they threaten them. Might want to mosey on over to their website and sign it.
    Karen Handel and Newt Gingrich make me want to hide from honest people just from the embarrassment of being Georgian

  29. please, please forget that we wanted to defund planned parenthood (if you are pro-choice) or that we are now appearing to “re-fund” planned parenthood (if you are anti-choice) and keep buying our pink shit.

    You know, pro-choice, anti-choice – there was a time when I hated abortion, but at least I still recognized that Planned Parenthood was doing a fuck of a lot more to prevent the need for abortion than a lot of the loudmouths screaming “babykiller!”

    You (generic “you”) either believe in protecting people, or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re an asshole. And I don’t care if your religious beliefs tell you that people having sex outside of marriage are sinners; if you don’t believe in protecting people, you are *still* an asshole.

  30. I think honestly nothing will satisfy me in this case other than the out right firing of VP I Hate All Women and a statement saying that it was motivated by politics.

    I will never ever ever purchase another pink ribbon product or give them money.

    They are still playing politics. And the Chief Aunt should resign — I don’t care if she did it for her sister – I just don’t give a care.

  31. Susan G. Komen is trying to politize breast cancer. In other words, it’s the good girl disease. It’s the disease that robs women of their pious, motherly, breasts. It’s robs us of sisters, mothers, wives—but not slutty whores.

    Unfortunately for them cancer strikes ALL women. Even the whores. Even the liberals. I do not see how this is a win-win for them, but if that’s what they want to do, they can go do it and go start funding abstinence-only education with breast cancer funds.

  33. Actually, this Susan B. Komen thing has been great for Planned Parenthood. According to Bloomberg, The Planned Parenthood Federation of America raised $3 million in the week after the story broke that Komen was pulling its grants. Which is like more than three times the value of the grants themselves. So go fuck yourself Susan B. Komen.

    I work for a company that does fundraising for progressive nonprofits. We just started a campaign yesterday for the Action Fund, which is Planned Parenthood’s lobbying arm. It’s already going way above goals. So apparently Planned Parenthood’s bump will last a while longer.

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