The announcement this week by the Susan G. Komen Foundation that it would cut off funding to Planned Parenthood unleashed a popular backlash, with hundreds of thousands expressing their outrage via social networking sites. Komen abruptly reversed its decision on Friday, but not before the move had exposed the advocacy group’s capitulation to extreme-right, religious forces.
Komen has provided grants to Planned Parenthood for many years, giving $700,000 in 2011. The cut-off would have denied breast cancer screenings for thousands of Planned Parenthood’s mostly low-income and poor patients. The organization provides screenings and reproductive health services for one in five women in the US. Ending the Komen Foundation grants would have inevitably led to missed diagnoses, suffering and death.
This made all the more transparent the fact that the foundation’s decision to cut funding was politically motivated. Notwithstanding its reversal as a result of popular outrage and internal opposition, the organization’s bowing to neo-fascistic crackpots and anti-abortion fanatics illustrates the grotesquely outsized influence these numerically small forces wield within American social and political life.
