How Komen Became a Political Tool

Title:  How Komen Became a Tool

Author:   William Saletan

Publication: Slate.com

Original publication date: February 7, 2012

Karen Handel has resigned from the Komen foundation. Handel, a pro-lifer who was blamed by insiders for the foundation’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, says the decision was driven by Komen’s need to avoid controversy, not by politics. But you can’t have one without the other. If you refuse to fund organizations embroiled in controversy, you invite their enemies to make them controversial. In so doing, you make yourself political.

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Nancy Brinker: The steely force in the Komen controversy

Title: The steely force in the Komen controversy

Author: Monica Hesse

Publication:  The Washington Post

Date: February 15, 2012

…For three decades, the relentless force of Nancy Brinker’s personality has been inextricably tied to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the behemoth she created in memory of her elder sister, who died of cancer at age 36. She has dedicated her life to it. She has pinned her ambitions on it…

Monday, amid the Planned Parenthood funding controversy that arose this month, the editor of industry publication the NonProfit Times called for Brinker’s resignation. Last week, a former board member of a Komen New York affiliate requested the same, illustrating the symbiosis between woman and mission. It’s not clear what role Brinker played in the initial choice to defund Planned Parenthood and the reversal of that decision. Komen board members, including Brinker’s son, have not returned calls for comment…

Brinker, 65, declined, through a publicist, to comment for this article. “Decline” is an odd verb to follow “Nancy Brinker.” In the past, the woman who turned her philanthropy into a household brand hasn’t seemed inclined to decline much of anything…

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Moving beyond pink ribbons

Title: Moving beyond pink ribbons

Author: Peggy Orenstein

Publication:  Los Angeles Times

Date: February 15, 2012

Over the last two weeks, as Susan G. Komen for the Cure revoked funding for Planned Parenthood, then reversed itself, I watched through the scrim of something that, while less newsworthy, was, to me, no less significant: the death of Rachel Cheetham Moro, the 42-year-old writer of the blog Cancer Culture Chronicles…

Rachel had metastatic cancer — the kind that spreads beyond the breast. And guess what? It turns out that despite the money flowing to breast cancer charities — particularly Komen — the death rate among those with metastatic disease has not budged in 25 years. What’s more, the actual number of women (and men) who die of breast cancer today — about 40,000 annually — is greater than it was in the 1980s. That’s right: More people die now than did three decades ago. True, the overall breast cancer death rates — as a percentage of those diagnosed — have dropped, but that’s in part because mammography is really, really good at finding and diagnosing, for instance, DCIS, which means ductal carcinoma in situ. DCIS is Stage 0 cancer, which will probably never become invasive…

And so, even as pink ribbons have proliferated, even as breast cancer has become polite dinner table conversation, the actual lived experience of women with advanced disease — women like Rachel Cheetham Moro — has been pushed to the margins…

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Abortion and birth control mobilize the masses

Title: Abortion and birth control mobilize the masses

Author: Sonia Verma

Publication:  The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Date: February 15, 2012

First, there was the uproar that followed a decision by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Then, U.S. President Barack Obama found himself fending off a fresh outcry over a new rule that would require religiously affiliated hospitals to provide free contraceptives…

The decision by the cancer charity to reverse an earlier decision to sever its funding to Planned Parenthood signals to some that the American people have had enough of the debate. Politico.com predicts the backlash will become the “textbook case on the political power of social media.” Far from settling the abortion debate, however, tools such as Twitter and Facebook appear poised to amplify it in other ways

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Nancy Brinker’s Lavish Spending, Off-Putting Brittleness Puts Komen’s Future in Jeopardy

Title: Nancy Brinker’s Lavish Spending, Off-Putting Brittleness Puts Komen’s Future in Jeopardy

Author: Erin Gloria Ryan

Publication:  Jezebel

Date: February 13, 2012

In the last three weeks, the reputation of Susan G. Komen for the Cure has been threatened by a scandal that has uncovered some uncomfortable truths about the behind the scenes in the world of Professional Breast Cancer Awareness. Although the organization has given the media the “move along, nothing to see here” speech, it appears that Komen CEO Nancy Brinker’s lavish spending is worthy of scrutiny. Plus, apparently she’s really weird to work for.

According to The Daily Beast‘s Abigail Pesta, between June 2007 and January 2009, when Brinker was employed full-time with the US State Department during the Bush administration, she billed Komen for $133,507 in expenses…

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Komen for the Cure’s Biggest Mistake Is About Science, Not Politics

Title: Komen for the Cure’s Biggest Mistake Is About Science, Not Politics

Author: Christie Aschwanden

Publication:  Discover Magazine (This post originally ran on the blog Last Word on Nothing.)

Date: February 10, 2012

The Planned Parenthood debacle brought renewed attention to other controversies about Komen from recent years—like its “lawsuits for the cure” program that spent nearly $1 million suing groups like “cupcakes for the cure” and “kites for the cure” over their daring attempts to use the now-trademarked phrase “for the cure.” Critics also pointed to Komen’s relentless marketing of pink ribbon-themed products, including a Komen-branded perfume alleged to contain carcinogens, and pink buckets of fried chicken, a campaign that led one rival breast cancer advocacy group to ask, “what the cluck?”…

But these problems are minuscule compared to Komen’s biggest failing—its near outright denial of tumor biology…the notion that breast cancer is a uniformly progressive disease that starts small and only grows and spreads if you don’t stop it in time is flat out wrong. I call it breast cancer’s false narrative, and it’s a fairy tale that Komen has relentlessly perpetuated…

Komen isn’t wrong to encourage women to consider mammography. But they’re dead wrong to imply that “the key to surviving breast cancer” is “you” and the difference between a 98% survival rate and a 23% one is vigilance on the part of the victim. This message flies in the face of basic cancer biology…

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Who had the worst week in Washington? Karen Handel of the Susan G. Komen Foundation

Title: Who had the worst week in Washington? Karen Handel of the Susan G. Komen Foundation

Author: Rachel Weiner

Publication:  The Washington Post

Date: February 10, 2012

A week ago, Karen Handel was the senior vice president for public policy at the Susan G. Komen foundation. It was a great gig for the Washington native and 2010 Georgia gubernatorial candidate. Now she’s unemployed, a casualty of a backlash over Komen’s decision to cut grants to Planned Parenthood.

When Komen announced this month that it would stop giving Planned Parenthood money for breast cancer screening, Handel’s name wasn’t mentioned, but she was quickly pinpointed by Planned Parenthood supporters as a likely culprit. The former Georgia secretary of state is an outspoken opponent of abortion rights; during her campaign for governor, she pledged to defund the family-planning organization…

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Komen charity under microscope for funding, science

Title: Komen charity under microscope for funding, science

Author: Sharon Begley

Publication:  Reuters

Date: February 7, 2012

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity defines its mission as finding a cure for breast cancer. In recent years, however, it has cut by nearly half the proportion of fund-raising dollars it spends on grants to scientists working to understand the causes and develop effective new treatments for the disease…

Critics within the philanthropic and research communities in particular have raised questions over its scientific approach to some issues and how it spends the money it raises…

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How Planned Parenthood won Susan G Komen’s ‘race for the cure’

Title: How Planned Parenthood won Susan G Komen’s ‘race for the cure’

Author: Amanda Marcotte

Publication:  The Guardian

Date: February 03, 2012

…For the past year, anti-choice activists have set their sights on Planned Parenthood, determined to wipe out the behemoth provider of low-cost reproductive healthcare. The strategy? A massive propaganda effort aimed at painting Planned Parenthood as a dirty, criminal organization, instead of the efficient provider of quality care that it is. This strategy involved making false accusations of abetting sex traffickers, opening nuisance congressional investigations and throwing the word “abortion” around a lot to justify attempts to eliminate federal funding for contraceptive service.

As part of this strategy, anti-choicers mounted a pressure campaign on Komen, trying to get them to cut ties with Planned Parenthood in order to create the impression that Planned Parenthood has cooties.

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Susan G Komen in U-turn over Planned Parenthood funding cut

Title: Susan G Komen in U-turn over Planned Parenthood funding cut: Nancy Brinker, cancer charity’s CEO, apologises for ‘recent decisions’ and says Komen will honour existing grants

Author: Ed Pilkington and Saabira Chaudhuri

Publication:  The Guardian

Date: February 3, 2012

America’s largest breast cancer advocacy group has been forced to make a self-abasing retraction of its plan to cut funding for Planned Parenthood following a huge outcry against the decision.

Susan G Komen for the Cure, a Dallas-based organisation, has announced that it will honour existing grants to Planned Parenthood and allow the organisation to continue to apply for future funding – a U-turn from its earlier decision to cut its annual $650,000 provision.

Nancy Brinker, who set up Komen as a pledge to her dying sister to work to end breast cancer in the US, together with the foundation’s board of directors, put out a statement in which they apologised to the American public “for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives”.

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