Coming Home

For those women who go to Planned Parenthood, this is a sight that you have not seen to date. It’s a mammogram machine. It’s what Planned Parenthood led people to believe they had and used.

They lied.

Foundations don’t like it when they give an organization millions of dollars for services that are not rendered. They’re just funny about stuff like that, and Susan G. Komen is to be applauded for finally putting their foot down and pulling Planned Parenthood’s funding.

SGK Chairwoman Nancy Brinker is Susan Komen’s sister and has been making good on a deathbed promise to Susan to find a cure for this disease. Brinker could simply put all of her eggs in the research basket and go full throttle on research.

She doesn’t. She has taken a humane and balanced approach by also funding breast cancer screenings for middle-aged women, and preventive education for younger women.

The problem is that she gave millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, who said they performed mammograms, but only performed manual breast exams (feeling for lumps). That’s a problem. In the spectrum of clinical services, a manual exam is orders of magnitude less effective at detection than a mammogram.

The narrative against Komen is that needy women will now suffer because Komen is going to…

…wait for it…

…Fund organizations that will do actual mammograms for needy women.

So vexed is the Planned Parenthood crowd that New York’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg has offered Planned Parenthood a $250,000 matching grant for fundraising. This means that PP will have $500,000 within a week to continue their manual breast exams on women.

Too bad New York’s billionaire mayor didn’t seize on the opportunity to purchase an actual mammogram machine for New York’s hundreds of thousands of low-income women. Instead, he continues to fund the building of PP’s Potemkin villages.

Though it seems longer, it was only last year that Lila Rose released undercover videos of PP nurses advising a “pimp” and his bottom girl to take their teenage prostitutes to the county health department for free services if they lacked health insurance or cash.

Is that not the reason why city, state, federal, and foundation money (such as Komen’s) was given to PP in the first place?

Hear the lie directly from Cecile Richards’ own mouth, and the truth from PP employees regarding the mammograms:

The response of PP is to claim that they provide referrals for mammograms, which is pretty weak, at best. PP may also have reimbursed some centers for mammograms, but why the middle-man?

Not detecting a lump by manual exam does not mean that there are no lumps. If palpation were as good as a mammogram, we wouldn’t perform the mammograms at all. That’s pretty basic stuff. So why does PP need Komen’s money? Because PP needs money. Period.

For the best chance at catching cancer in its earliest stages, women will need a mammogram referral anyway, regardless of lump detection. So why can’t PP just give the referral over the phone when women call, or hand it to them when they walk in off the street?

Because mediocrity never concerns itself with excellence in patient care. Mediocrity is all about the money. Komen has made a wise and ethical business decision by cutting out the middle-man and funding actual mammograms. Mediocrity’s reply?

Women are going to suffer and die because Komen prefers to fund actual mammograms over squeezing breasts.

What PP has not said is that they are so committed to women’s health that their staff are all donating five hours per week to perform their manual breast screenings and give referrals for mammograms.

They haven’t said it because that’s not part of the business model.

This is PP’s most dire hour. If Komen is allowed to pull up stakes without being savaged, plenty of big corporations will pull up stakes as well. Plan to see corporations abandoning Komen, not out of anger at Komen, but for fear of Planned Parenthood. There is a simple strategy to blunt PP’s attack.

Komen, TODAY, needs to announce a new inner-city initiative where they will purchase mammogram machines for the neediest urban centers, where local governments will provide low-cost, and medicaid-subsidized mammograms as the answer to PP’s cheap squeeze. They should then issue a call to all major corporations to join in this effort.

And what better month to do it in than Black History Month where we turn our attention to racism’s residue, which has left us with enduring inequities? Given the frightful incidence of breast cancer in the Black community, it’s an initiative whose time has come.

Komen can seize this opportunity and lead the way with excellence as the antidote to Planned Parenthood’s mediocrity.