CANCER DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR POLITICS

This is fact: cancer doesn’t care about politics. It doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether you think Newt Gingrich is a hero or a creep, and it doesn’t pay attention to the charged conservative-religious agenda that always seems to make comprehensive health care for women an intense and never-ending struggle. Cancer doesn’t care about your personal beliefs or your back-room power deals or your agendas, whether you are rich or poor, black or white…no, cancer is a really excellent example of a non-discriminating entity.

So, what does cancer care about? This: the ability to continue to spread and grow unchecked, and to eventually choke its host to death. It does so with incredible efficiency and accuracy, unfettered by guilt, doubt, or a conscience of any kind. Cancer and its army of merciless, multiplying, mutating cells strikes fear into the hearts of all who hear its name, whether whispered inside the mind with hope it never arrives, or in a doctor’s office, said aloud, shattering a world in a surreal, heartbreaking moment on the day it does.

With these things known, it is an act of deep and unconscionable betrayal that today Susan G. Komen For The Cure, America's best-known and most-powerful breast cancer charity, has chosen to remove its funding to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings. What this action means is that Planned Parenthood, the sole source for ANY kind of healthcare for thousands of women across America, will be unable to provide 170,000 women with the breast cancer screenings they otherwise will not likely receive elsewhere.

Roll that around in your mind for a minute and try to see the faces, a few of those 170,000 women. There are those over 40 who are trying to do the responsible thing for themselves and their families by going in each year for a breast exam as recommended, those who have already experienced cancer and want to catch it quick if it returns, the young and old alike who feel a lump and have no other way to know what they are facing. Screenings save lives and because of them more women are beating breast cancer than ever before. I bet you know some of them, too, and you may even be one of them. Each one of those 170,000 women are just trying to stay healthy and stay alive.

What have all these women done to be denied like this? More facts: they all suffer from the crime of being poor, or have either no or limited healthcare insurance, or live in areas of the country that simply offer no other places to go for breast cancer screenings. Once again, their lives are put at risk, pawns in a political game of hardball over – horror of horrors! – the independent health decisions made by women.

Or, if you’d like the real bottom line: women will die because some very powerful folks (primarily men) in this country believe that contraception and abortion services should made available to no woman, even though both are legal in the United States. Some – not all – of the almost-800 Planned Parenthood locations offer those services, but it’s hardly all they do. The mission of Planned Parenthood is very, very simple: to offer women of any monetary means the ability to responsibly take control of their bodies, their health, and their lives through education and preventative, wellness-oriented care. But that doesn’t matter to those who burn with righteous fever, who will continue to do everything possible to force abortion providers to quit…including removing funding for any organization that has anything to do with full reproductive health services. This is what has happened in this sad situation, despite a pathetic claim that Komen withdrew support because of “ongoing government examination of Planned Parenthood.” The hyper-focused mental cases in Congress like Cliff Stearns (R-FL) that spend all their time trying to ban abortion and dismantle clinics rather than create job plans or a construct a workable budget will poke and poke and poke. They won’t get any dirt and know it – it’s just sheer intimidation.

I am livid that Susan G. Komen For The Cure, named for a woman who died of breast cancer and whose name has become synonymous with hope for millions of breast cancer survivors, has caved to reprehensible, intellectually-backwards thinking, and extremely dangerous religious political pressure. Those within the organization should be ashamed to have signed off on this, and the resultant death warrants of possibly thousands of women. Those who best know and understand the cost of the suffering and still choose to resign the powerless to it earn a very special place in Hell, whether in the imaginary fire locale or simply minds that will forever remind them of what they have done.

And to you miserable, fear-and-shame based theocrats who are determined to use your personal religious beliefs to force women to forever live as lesser human beings, bound by biology to submit to your false God’s will by refusing sex or live with bearing unwanted children? Grow up, deal with your own screwed-up psyches, and stay out of others’ lives. I cannot even imagine the festering ugliness that lives within you, and how afraid you must be, in those moments when your brain forces you into reason, to feel the horrific chill in the little nagging voice telling you that you got it all wrong, and there won’t be any salvation waiting for you at your final breath.

While we are here, we best serve the world by directing our charity towards the living, to those whom without our help will suffer. Susan G. Komen For The Cure has abandoned this ideal, so we must do what we can to alleviate the damage done. Please choose to keep ALL the women in this country safe and healthy by clicking HERE to sign a petition asking Komen to refund Planned Parenthood, and by clicking HERE to donate to Planned Parenthood's Breast Health Emergency Fund, as I have done this evening. By doing so, you give someone’s dear mom, aunt, sister, or friend a better chance to find and fight cancer, and to live a longer, better life. If we are talking about “choice,” that is always the right one.