Planned Parenthood and the Enemy You Fight

As you undoubtedly know, a crucial component in the fight against breast cancer is early detection. Treatment, therapy, surgery, reconstruction, and long-term lifestyle management considerations are moot when the disease in its invasive form that afflicts one in eight women over the course of their lives goes undetected. Cancer, just like malevolent people and movements, prospers best when unchallenged in its nascency; and just like those malevolent people and movements, its feeding ground of victims is fertile in the ranks of the marginalized, the poor, the weak, the already injured, and the disaffected.

That the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has of its free will and choosing elected to accommodate the wishes of those who would diminish, demean, libel, and finally end Planned Parenthood manifestly demonstrates that your organization does not understand that the disease it fights through its donations is but one face of a larger, voracious, and unfeeling predator that is enabled by people and movements whose strength and success derive from those who appease them.

I ask not that you reconsider your decision to deny financial resources to the breast cancer screening services of Planned Parenthood; instead, I petition you to reconstitute your understanding of the enemy against which you have fought so remarkably for so long. While disease is the inevitable curse of mortality, the awful scope of its enduring destruction is far too often borne of the wrongful belief that illness, harm, and death from it are separate from the societies, their values, and the choices imposed upon real, flesh-and-blood people.

I am hopeful that you will choose one day to fight breast cancer as a disease not merely of a woman's (or man's) body, but of that person in the context of our society, its values, and the choices imposed upon the real, flesh-and-blood people who need us the most.