Different Day, Same Shit.

Update: The Komen Foundation reversed their decision to withhold funding from Planned Parenthood. Too bad it won't reverse the damage this debacle's done to their organization.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation's seemingly sudden decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood garnered a great deal of attention these past few days and remains a popular topic in most corners of the Internet. Personally speaking, there's been so many perspectives already written on the topic that I've been vexed about whether it'd be worth offering one of my own, as opposed to just sending readers off to other sites with more detailed info, but I digress.

Seeing first-hand what breast cancer can do to a family member, I didn't mind giving my support to the Komen Foundation and I found their overall mission to be an admirable one. Detecting breast cancer (or any other type of cancer, for that matter) early on is one of the best ways to ensure that those who have it won't lose their lives over it. Improper screening of another form of cancer allowed it to metastasize into a more serious and deadly condition in another family member. I didn't know about the corporate goings-on behind the scenes, nor about how the foundation spent most of its donations on suing smaller foundations for petty copyright infringements.

So hearing about the Komen Foundation unceremoniously pulling its funding from Planned Parenthood took me by surprise, given how I didn't expect an organization such as this one to jeopardize itself over what appeared to be a case of ideological weight-slinging. The Komen Foundation gave $680,000 to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening and other related services. Not a single dime went to abortion services, something that Planned Parenthood is assumed to be big on. On the contrary, the organization's is largely devoted to testing and treating sexually transmitted diseases, as well as providing contraception and other reproductive health services, especially to those in areas where access to such services are hard to come by. Despite what many people think, Planned Parenthood is not an abortion mill that has fetuses hauled off by the truckload to be reformulated into tofu or stem cell soup or Mitt Romney's toothpaste.