Come Clean, Conservatives


Would the anti-abortion rights movement suffer by including honesty in its argument? Apparently it believes so.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure has announced that it will no longer provide grants to affiliates of Planned Parenthood, the nearly $700,000 used to provide manual breast exams and referrals for mammograms and biopsies.        Last April, Komen hired as its senior vice president Karen G. Handel who, as a failed candidate for the Repub nomination for governor, told Georgians "since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood."

Instead of owning up to its motivation, however, the organization first contended that it cut off funding because of   a new policy prohibiting support for any organization under government investigation.    The investigation, led by U.S. Representative Cliff Stearns (R-Fl), is described by The Daily Beast's Michelle Goldberg as "a highly partisan affair based solely on evidence from anti-abortion groups," which are continuing their vendetta against health services for poor women Planned Parenthood.     (Komen later claimed that it was doing a favor for women.)

Susan G. Komen, however, has an opportunity to demonstrate its sincerity.     It has been pledged a minimum of $1,000,000 from February 2012 through May 2015 from Bank of America, currently under investigation by four states for financial fraud or other wrongdoing, and soon by the federal government for its behavior leading to the real estate crisis.       (Sarcasm Alert) No doubt Komen will be severing its agreement with BOA promptly.

The decision by the breast cancer organization has been praised by some conservatives, including Christian right luminaries Janet Parshall and Tony Perkins.      The latter two have trumpeted the junk science claiming a connection between abortion and breast cancer, now thoroughly debunked thanks to the efforts of the this research team, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Cancer Society.

Joining studies which show that women suffer no more depression from abortion than from childbirth is one finding that legal abortions are safer than childbirth for the women undergoing them.        Two researchers discovered that from 1998 and 2005 one woman died during childbirth for approximately 11,000 babies born while one woman of every 167,000 died from a legal abortion.

But finding that abortion is no worse than childbirth for the patient's mental health or mortality is no reason not to discourage, deter, or even ban a procedure many people believe ends a human life.       The state, clearly, should not be in the business of sanctioning the killing of an innocent.       Presumably, that prompted one compassionate, pro-life state legislator in North Carolina, Larry Pittman, to send an e-mail declaring

We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out.     Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner.If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them.     For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.

Unsuccessful presidential candidate and GOP News personality Mike Huckabee also would target abortion providers In December, 2007 he said during an appearance on Meet the Press

I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that's why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor.     I don't know that you'd put him in prison, but there's something to me untoward about a person who has committed himself to healing people and to making people alive who would take money to take an innocent life and to make that life dead.

The sincerity is overwhelming.         Pittman went so far as to stipulate the individuals- abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers- he would have executed but significantly made one major omission.      For his part, Huckabee apparently would impose some criminal sanction, given that he explained "I don't know if prison" is appropriate while he did not preclude penalties short of prison.      But as is apparently the case with Pittman, the former Arkansas governor would exclude from his opprobrium the individual who would decide to murder her child, seek out the executioner, and pay the execution.       No, Huckabee would not penalize the woman because, he rationalizes, "I think you don't punish the woman, first of all, because it's not about.... I consider her a victim, not a criminal."

Of course, the abortion provider never would have known about this "victim" if she did not, as Huckabee would view it, go to him/her and say "Please.    Murder my baby.    And I'll pay you for it."    

Susan G. Komen can eliminate a few hundred thousand dollars for prevention of breast cancer.     But it ought to acknowledge that it has been intimidated- or, if it chooses to put it otherwise, "persuaded"- by anti-women's health activists.   And conservatives can press for elimination of legal abortion, if they choose.    But continuing the charade of being convinced that abortion is killing while maintaining that the instigator of murder is a "victim" is demonstrably insincere when the real opposition is to reproductive freedom for women.






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