Last week the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced that it was ending funding to Planned Parenthood after the remainder of its current grants had been paid out. After an explosion of outrage from the left, Komen days later announced it would continue to fund Planned Parenthood in an effort to appease the powerful pro-abortion lobby. Many credited the initial decision to their new Senior Vice President for Policy Karen Handel, a pro-life Republican who had just been defeated in her bid for Governor of Georgia. With Handel’s resignation today, it has become clear that the cancer organization will continue to provide funding to the largest abortion provider in the United States.
With this controversy Planned Parenthood has sent a clear signal: Reevaluate our funding at your peril. It doesn’t matter why you put a stop to your support, we have millions of pro-abortion supporters in the public and media ready to unleash a campaign of vitriol against your organization if you cross us.
While this strategy may scare current donors into sticking around, other potential donors should rightfully be wary of entering the shark tank with an organization with a lobbying arm equipped with $1.7 million in its coffers. The media has been quick to point out the jump in fundraising Planned Parenthood garnered after the Komen spat, notably from celebrities like New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, but there has been very little discussion about how detrimental the Planned Parenthood connection had been for Komen’s fundraising in years past.
After the split with Planned Parenthood, Komen saw a shocking 100% jump in its fundraising in just the few days before it reinstated its support of the abortion provider. Many of these new donors are now demanding a refund of their donations, which were placed with the understanding that they would not make their way into Planned Parenthood’s bank accounts. While only a fraction of pro-life Americans were aware of the connection before, in the future it will be no secret that Komen grants funds to an organization that provided over 320,000 abortions last year alone. If the Planned Parenthood connection hurt Komen before, it will hurt even more going forward.
Pro-life Americans (a recent Gallup survey indicates almost half of Americans self-identify as such) are now on the look-out for other organizations that funnel their donations to the abortion provider. Planned Parenthood’s affiliates have learned valuable lessons from the Komen debacle and the end result could deter would-be donors from ever involving themselves with Planned Parenthood.
It's a sad day when an organization central to infanticide is so transparently the bully and the response is an inundation of donations. A sad statement of our collective character.
In the mid '90's in Baltimore, the Archdiocese offered counseling to women who had received abortions. Planned Parenthood was up in arms. Because a woman getting an abortion is not supposed to feel guilt (it's a choice not a child) Planned Parenthood objected that there was no reason to counsel women who had had abortions. It struck me that the archdiocese was attempting to be humane and Planned Parenthood was being cruel for no other reason than to back up its agenda.
How about being straight about it, linguistically, and call it "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion" then, Doc? Mind you the "pro-life" moniker is more accurate than the "pro-choice" one, given Planned Parenthood's well-known refusal to assist women in making a genuine, informed choice and its blatant pushing for abortion, its prime money-maker. Not everyone is neessarily anti-abortion, but many want to see reasonable restrictions in place, true options and choices for women, and would rather not be involved in funding abortion and the radical organizations leaching off that industry, saying, "it may be your body. but it's my dime." Fair enough, yes?