I don’t know who you are or how you came by my blog, and I don’t know whether you’re a smart guy or not, but your suggestion that my “concern” is “phony” suggests you’re either not very smart or not very curious. If you were smart or curious you would know that I despise Planned Parenthood because it hypocritically spouts rhetoric about choice while paternalistically and criminally withholding from women considering abortion information about the evidence linking induced abortion with significantly increased breast cancer risk. If your response to that is that the link has been disproven, because so-and-so says so, again, you’re not very smart or curious, and you’re saying that to the wrong person.

You’re obviously a smart guy, and this is obviously something you feel passionate about. So you must know that none of the funding provided by Komen to PP was used to provide abortions. Rather, it was used to provide breast cancer screening and related services.

Indeed, you probably know that abortions are a relatively small – albeit symbolically important – part of the services PP provides. The vast majority of PP’s work is in women’s health, including things like cancer screening. In some areas, PP is the only provider of such services. Komen’s ‘defunding’ of PP would have done little to reduce the number of abortions, but far more to reduce the availability of valuable women’s health services. It would have resulted in fewer women being screened for cancer.

It’s hard to see the hysterics over the Komen decision as anything other than a desire to cause harm to the single most prominent provider of abortions in the US. If you want to see PP defunded because you’re opposed to abortion, for whatever reason, that’s fair enough. But don’t wrap it up in some phony concern for women’s health. The defunding of PP would have had precisely the opposite effect.