Planned Parenthood: The Date that Never Ends

I have to admit that there’s something that I just don’t get about the whole Planned Parenthood/ Susan G. Komen debacle.  It’s something that I thought of a while back, when I was looking up businesses that donate to PP to add to our own personal family boycott list, and I found a pro-death website that was advocating not shopping at companies that don’t donate to PP. 

It was a little bit funny at first.  The author of the blog had misread the pro-life article condemning the businesses for donating to PP.  The article showcased rather limited powers of reasoning (evil warps the mind and this author was in love with abortion), and was based on the reading comprehension of a first grader. (I may be a little snippy while writing this because I just spent two hours wrestling with my sewing machine, and apparently I used up all my patience before beginning this post).  The author called for abortion supporters to boycott the businesses on the list because of the mistaken belief that they didn’t donate to PP.  Someone caught the mistake though, and informed everyone in the comments section, and then everyone started writing about sending thank you emails and congratulating themselves on being for the murder of the unborn, and condemning the handful of businesses that had actually been taken off of the list. 

And that’s the line of reasoning that I find baffling.  So… they aren’t going to shop at businesses that don’t donate to PP?  I guess that cuts out the whole “shop locally” thing the majority of the time, since most small businesses are just trying to survive without even think about wading into the quagmire of pro-death politics.  I mean, did I miss the bus on this, and we’re suddenly supposed to expect everyone to donate to the things that we like?

I do boycott companies.  However, I boycott companies for the things that they do.  Support grave evil? I’ll withhold my money from a company, if I think they’re going to use it to contribute to the destruction of human life.  But I don’t boycott companies for not giving to my favorite charity.  I don’t go around asking if a business has written a check to the local soup kitchen or crisis pregnancy center. 

Mary Katharine Ham summed it up nicely on twitter when she said:  “Giving to Planned Parenthood is like going on a date THAT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE, EVER.” 

And the reaction of Planned Parenthood, and their legion of supporters in the past few days, show that that particular tweet isn’t much of an exaggeration.   

Still, I can’t help but think that PP has showed a bit more of their hand than they should have in the past four days.  They’ve acted like a cross between the schoolyard bully and a mafia don, ready to send the Komen foundation to sleep with the fishies for… thinking about not giving them money in the future… if they’re still under investigation (since we’ve all heard that they were still going to fulfill the present grants and those extended for quite a while). 

This has shown anyone who’s listening another side of Planned Parenthood.  And people are bound to wonder about a company that professes to care so much about women, while trying to smash the kneecaps of a “non-profit” who’s best known for fighting breast cancer. 

Sadly, Komen handed over their lunch money to the schoolyard bully, rather than testing the theory that most bullies back down if you stand up to them.  In reality we all know PP wasn’t about to back down (they’re a little bit more syndicated crime family and a little less schoolyard bully)… but with over half the country identifying themselves as pro-life, I think that Komen could have ridden out the storm. 

I guess we’ll never know. 

I do hope that Komen feels the sting of the choice that they’ve made.  Giving to Planned Parenthood doesn’t help women.  It hurts all of us.  It hurts our entire society as it perpetuates the cycle of murder and destruction.  And if Komen wants to keep up the façade of attempting to do good works, they need to choose their bed partners a bit more scrupulously.  Or the majority of the country ,who do identify themselves as pro-life, and who have now watched the drama unfold in the news, are likely to catch on and realize that the little pink ribbon on their yogurt means that their money is going to much, much more than just cancer research.