Komen’s Choice 'In American politics, women’s bodies are not bodies, but parts.'

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/two-sisters-komen-and-planned-parenthood.html

In 1731, Benjamin Franklin’s nineteen-year-old sister, Jane, wrote to her brother that their sister Mary, a mother of three, was dying of breast cancer. Franklin was in Philadelphia; his sisters were in Boston. “I know a cancer in the breast is often thought incurable,” Franklin wrote Jane, “yet we have here in town a kind of shell made of some wood, cut at a proper time, by some man of great skill (as they say,) which has done wonders in that disease among us, being worn for some time on the breast.” Mary died later that year. There was no cure. There is still no cure.

On Tuesday, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the breast-cancer fund-raiser and sponsor of an annual pink-ribbon Race for the Cure, announced that it would no longer support Planned Parenthood. In 2011, Planned Parenthood received six hundred and eighty thousand dollars from Komen to administer breast-cancer screenings at its clinics.

Komen has been pressured to cut ties with Planned Parenthood for years. This week, it named as the catalyst for its action a congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood launched in September by Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican. But Stearns’s inquiry, as I reported in the magazine in November, is only one feature of a much broader effort to defund Planned Parenthood. A year ago, that campaign nearly led to a shutdown of the federal government.

The people who have urged Komen to stop supporting Planned Parenthood aren’t opposed to breast-cancer screenings; they’re opposed to other services Planned Parenthood provides, which include contraception and abortion. But a campaign to sever the ties between a foundation that’s raising money to find a cure for breast cancer and a health-care provider that advocates for reproductive rights exposes more than a division over contraception and abortion. It exposes a gruesome truth about politics in this country.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/two-sisters-komen-and-planned-parenthood.html#ixzz1lJfFPTQ2