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Feb. 6th, 2012 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupThe story: The Susan G. Komen foundation decided to not give any more money to Planned Parenthood, for a reason that officially has nothing to do with abortion in reality almost certainly does. The pro-choice community goes on the warpath and gets the decision the reversed.
My biases: I'm extremely pro-choice, and without very much research on the subject, think Planned Parenthood's work as a low cost health care provider is pretty neat.
I'm also pretty anti-Komen, to the point that I go out of my way to not purchase pink ribbon products.* I think breast cancer gets a disproportionate share of the oxygen, that their attempts to control ribbon logos demonstrates that they're in it for themselves, not to save lives, I don't like conglomeration charities in general, and the "buy this product to support women" type partnerships really bother me..
That said... PP doesn't do a lot of anti-breast-cancer work. They do manual breast exams and teach people self exams, whose efficacy is controversial. It seems like PP's big value add here is just educating women, especially younger women, and possibly providing a low cost referral to a mammogram. These are excellent things to do, but the only incremental cost is the provider's time. So fungibility of money aside, giving PP money means you're at the very least paying for the building infrastructure (assuming you're not displacing higher-revenue activities).
As someone who likes most of PP's work, this strikes me as an excellent thing to do, but it's not a particularly cost effective way for SGK to advance their core mission. So while the choice to defund them was very clearly motivated by an anti-abortion stance, it strikes me as completely plausible that the original decision to fund them was equally political, that it was wrong based on SGK's priorities, and it took an equally motivated opponent to get the (wrong) decision revoked.
*Possibly the only opinion I will ever have in common with Barbara Ehrenrich
My biases: I'm extremely pro-choice, and without very much research on the subject, think Planned Parenthood's work as a low cost health care provider is pretty neat.
I'm also pretty anti-Komen, to the point that I go out of my way to not purchase pink ribbon products.* I think breast cancer gets a disproportionate share of the oxygen, that their attempts to control ribbon logos demonstrates that they're in it for themselves, not to save lives, I don't like conglomeration charities in general, and the "buy this product to support women" type partnerships really bother me..
That said... PP doesn't do a lot of anti-breast-cancer work. They do manual breast exams and teach people self exams, whose efficacy is controversial. It seems like PP's big value add here is just educating women, especially younger women, and possibly providing a low cost referral to a mammogram. These are excellent things to do, but the only incremental cost is the provider's time. So fungibility of money aside, giving PP money means you're at the very least paying for the building infrastructure (assuming you're not displacing higher-revenue activities).
As someone who likes most of PP's work, this strikes me as an excellent thing to do, but it's not a particularly cost effective way for SGK to advance their core mission. So while the choice to defund them was very clearly motivated by an anti-abortion stance, it strikes me as completely plausible that the original decision to fund them was equally political, that it was wrong based on SGK's priorities, and it took an equally motivated opponent to get the (wrong) decision revoked.
*Possibly the only opinion I will ever have in common with Barbara Ehrenrich
