Reflections From a Murky Pond

If the long-running, vicious attacks upon Sarah Palin and her daughters weren’t proof enough that, when distilled down to their raison d’etre, Feminism – note the capital “F” – is Abortion and nothing else, their immediate attacks upon Susan G. Komen for the Cure for ceasing funding of Planned Parenthood in the wake of recent Congressional investigations into the nationwide chain of abortion mills should do it.

The Feminists or, at least those who publicly define the movement, will willingly throw any other plank of their platform on trash heap along with scalded and dismembered corpses of their murdered unborn children in order to further their ability to kill those unborn children at any time for any or no reason at all.

If you want a synopsis of the Feminists’ instantaneous hysteria and vitriol, it can be found here. Alternately, you can go to the cited WaPo article, Why Komen defunded Planned Parenthood, and grind your way through the earlier comments (Sort Oldest to Newest).

NOTE: Some of the later negative comments were more rational and thoughtful, touching on other aspects of how Komen For The Cure conducts business. None of my rage is focused on them.

Those earlier comments and the general knee-jerk reaction across all the Feminist websites definitely show that these sorts don’t care about women’s health, only their continued privilege to terminate their pregnancies at will.

Some very basic – and grim – statistics follow. Based upon them you tell me if these Feminists who were so quick to rant at- and call for the destruction of Komen For The Cure are at all interested in women’s health.

Pregnancy & Abortion

22% of American pregnancies end in induced abortions. Only 3% – 12% of those were reported by the women having them to have been due to concerns about their health and we have no statistics on the sources or severity of their concerns. Even this low percentage seems inflated since the US has only an approximate 0.024% maternal mortality rate.

Breast Cancer

12.5% of women in America will be diagnosed with one form or another of invasive breast cancer during their lives. Another 3% will be diagnosed with one form or another of in situ breast cancer. 17% of these women will die from the disease within 5 years.

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It seems to me that, if one really cares about women’s health, one doesn’t immediately call for the end of America’s largest and most successful breast cancer awareness organization just because they’ve shown insufficient ideological purity by moving away from the very politically and socially controversial Planned Parenthood.

To be fair though, I’m both very pro- breast cancer awareness and research and staunchly anti-abortion and am, thus far less likely than these Feminists to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But About Komen…

As I noted near the beginning of this post, while there’s no excuse for the early rants against Komen, some valid questions were raised later, both about Komen’s business model and continuing usefulness.

There’s a huge intellectual and ethical difference between instantly seeking the destruction of an organization over their not adhering to ideology only tangentially – at best – related to their mission and having that ideological divergence be the last straw on a pile of disappointments.

Changes in affiliation and funding aside, is Komen For The Cure a good charity? Some data follows:

Charity Watchdog Ratings

• Charity Navigator gives Komen it’s highest ranking, 4 stars, and gives them an overall numeric score of 66.20 (higher than Planned Parenthood’s 61.03 score)
• Charity Watch lists Komen in their Top-Rated Charities and gives them a B+ rating (same as given Planned Parenthood)
• Give Well doesn’t have a rating for Komen but one of reviewers expressed disappointment with Komen (and the American Cancer Society)  because they spent more on education, awareness and treatment provisioning programs than on medical research, but she implied that this was because public education and provision of existing treatments in the “Developed World” don’t translate well into global improvements, which seems to be Give Well’s focus.

Those seem like pretty strong ratings from the groups devoted to monitoring the behavior and efficiency of charities.

Komen’s Financials

• Total 2011 FY Revenues: $439,451,449.00
• Total 2011 FY Expenditures: $408,977,824.00
• Expenditures – Research: $75,301,537.00 (19%)
• Expenditures – Education: $181,092,283.00 (44%)
• Expenditures – Health Screening: $54,089,036.00 (13%)
• Expenditures – Treatment Services: $23,251,563.00 (6%)
• Expenditures – Operating Costs: $75,243,405.00 (18%)

Data is derived from Komen’s 2010 – 2011 Consolidated Financial Statements prepared by independent auditors (Ernst & Young)

Both Komen’s research and education expenditures are larger than their operating costs and their operating costs, at 18% of total expenditures, are far below the national average of 24%.

Komen also spent over $54 million on breast cancer screening services, of which only the $700 thousand they had previously given to Planned Parenthood has been reassigned.

It is, however, obvious that Komen’s focus is on education and awareness programs, not screening or treatment programs since their education expenditures are more than double the combined screening and treatment expenditures, and are more than research, screening, and treatment expenditures combined.

Some Achievements Komen Has Been Part Of

• Almost 75% of women over 40 years old now receive regular mammograms as compared to less than 30% in 1982.
• the five-year survival rate for breast cancer, when caught before it spreads beyond the breast (60% of diagnosed cases), is now 98%, compared to 74% in 1982
• US Federal government expenditures for breast cancer research, treatment, and prevention now exceed $900 million per year, compared to $30 million in 1982.
• At 2.5 million, breast cancer survivors are now the largest the largest group of cancer survivors in the US.

Those are some substantial achievements. True, Komen was only a part of them but I believe that it can’t be truthfully said that Komen and their pink ribbon weren’t the leaders in these efforts.

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Looking at the data it seems that Komen For The Cure is a lean, highly focused charity that has to-date done a great deal of good and who will do what is necessary to ensure that they can keep doing so. If that means shuffling some small amount of their grants away from a controversial entity that could bring political pressure down upon them by association, they’ll do it in order not to jeopardize their mission.

There is the question though of whether or not Komen’s mission is still worth pursuing in the manner that they’ve chosen to do so. Their focus is on awareness and is there a continued need for such efforts and monies to be spent on such awareness?

“Pink Ribbon Fatigue” is real. Some, such as medical sociologist Gayle A. Sulik, Ph.D even go so far as to claim that the “Pink Ribbon Culture” has reached the point where it has built a “breast cancer industry” which many pharmaceutical companies are profiteering from.

And they have a point. America is very much aware of breast cancer, so continued extensive efforts in that area might be – and could definitely be seen as – more self-serving or inertia-based than truly useful.  It’s also quite true that the sentimentalism of Komen’s “Pink Ribbon Culture” keeps breast cancer at the forefront of what I choose to describe as the “cancer maintenance industry” instead of refocusing medical science on the less profitable curing of the disease.

Personally, I’d like to see them shift some of their money away from education and awareness programs and into more research and/or treatment and screening programs. It’s not, however, enough of an issue to me that they’re not doing so would cause me to stop donating to them, just as whether or not they work with Planned Parenthood never affected my donations to them.

Sadly, the rabid, infanticidal harpies who’ve managed to become the public and political face of the Feminists have dramatically differing priorities.

Related Reading:

Tags: Abortion | Breast Cancer | Cancer | Feminism | Feminists | Infanticide | Komen | Planned Parenthood | Politics | Society | Women

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Politics, Society. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.