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Planned Parenthood pulls a 'Buffy' on the Right
When "pro-life" means anti-birth control, it increases the number of unwanted pregnancies, writes Paul Rosenberg.
For decades, anti-choice activists have claimed they are "pro-life", despite a demonstrable lack of concern about what happens once children are born. The US' appalling infant and child poverty rates, along with infant and child mortality rates - all more in line with Third World nations than with other developed nations - are stark evidence of how little real substance there is to the "pro-life" claim as a political stance, and how much merit there is to the counter-claim that "pro-life" actually means anti-woman. But it's never been a matter of reason. The shear intensity of the "pro-life" claim is enough to drown out all other thoughts... until it suddenly isn't anymore.
When "pro-life" means anti-birth control, thus substantially increasing the number of unwanted pregnancies, the contradictions begin to show - as they did when Mississsippians soundly defeated the "personhood" initiativelast November, which would have outlawed the most prevalent forms of birth control. But last week, things went even further. When "pro-life" comes out and openly means depriving millions of poor women of life-saving breast cancer exams, we have ourselves a moment of clarity - and the world may never be the same again.
Everywoman - US Abortion Debate
February 2 was the day that Planned Parenthood was supposed to crumble into dust. It says right there in the right-wing playbook: "Former allies turn against them, issuing denouncements in horror, disgust, outrage and dismay." It worked perfectly a couple of years ago with ACORN, the largest low-income advocacy organisation in the United States. Why should Planned Parenthood be any different?
Why indeed? And yet, things turned out as different as night and day: February 2 was the day that the Komen Foundation - which had announced that it was defunding Planned Parenthood -crumbled instead, and it's still not clear how deep the damage to Komen may be. Komen crumbled on tens of thousands of fronts all day long, as women - and men - who had strongly identified with its mission and work recoiled in horror, and pledged their allegiance to Planned Parenthood instead, via email, Facebook, Twitter, any way they could. By week's end, more than $3 million had been pledged to Planned Parenthood - enough to make up for more than four years of Komen's funding.
Komen in the spotlight
While the real damage to Komen was done by countless individual actions taken and/or spurred on via social media, the symbolic climax of Komen's crumbling was acted out by its wealthy CEO, Nancy Brinker, in a disastrous interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell.
"Brinker was completely unprepared for this interview. She was placed in a situation that she seemed not to understand," journalism professor and leading media critic, Jay Rosen wrote. "I mean this literally: Brinker did not know what she was doing there. She thought she was going on air to correct some misbegotten story line that an excitable press, the wounded executives at Planned Parenthood and ideologues in the pro-choice movement had cooked up. In her delusional state, the decision had nothing to do with the politics of abortion. Nothing! The reality was that a board member from her own organisation had told the press that it did."
"She [Nancy Brinker] thought she was going on air to correct some misbegotten story line... the pro-choice movement had cooked up."
Further, Rosen wrote, "The fractured syntax, the thoughts that do not connect, the zombie-like performance, the whole train wreck that this interview became: I think it all originates in a lie the house bought about itself. We don't do politics."
But Komen is actually a very politically connected organisation - even before it took on former Secretary of State of Georgia Karen Handel, a sworn enemy of Planned Parenthood, as VP of Public Policy. (It is Handel, according to recent reports, who had been the prime mover in the latest effort to defund Planned Parenthood. Her resignation was announced Tuesday, February 7.)
Brinker and her ex-husband were deeply embedded in Texas Republican politics, where they had fundraised for George Bush. She had even gone on to serve as an ambassador for the Bush administration, and a 2002 report in Southern Exposure magazine, "Running From the Truth", by Mary Ann Swissler, had examined in detail how Komen had acted to block Democratic, more patient-friendly version of the "Patient's Bill of Rights", how Komen's relationship with the medical industrial complex shaped its policies, and how it resisted making connections between cancer and environmental causes, among other political policy dimensions. In short, Brinker was a highly connected and experienced political actor, which only made her discombobulated performance all the more striking.
And yet, if not for the tidal wave of individual activism interconnected through social media - a rising of the 99 per cent - Brinker's delusion might still have carried the day. Instead, by that evening, Komen's top leadership huddled on a conference call, and decided to call it quits, issuing a call to retreat the following morning - although the exact significance of their action still remains murky at best, as there is still no clear commitment to fund Planned Parenthood in the future.
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Actually, Brinker and Komen were incredibly lucky. Later that following day, a relatively obscure blog, milowent, called attention to her 2010 memoir, Promise Me, in which Brinker described an earlier confrontation when right-wing forces tried to get Komen to sever its ties with Planned Parenthood, and Komen refused.
The year was 2004, and the pressure came from the Curves workout centre chain, which cut off its funding when Komen refused to go along. "The grants in question supplied breast health counselling, screening and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of colour who were underserved - if served at all - in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available," Brinker wrote in 2010. "Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women. Somehow this position translated to the utterly false assertion that SGK funds abortions."
The question of what had changed between then and now would have been an extremely embarrassing question for Brinker on that day of intense crisis for Komen - and it remains so even now, as Komen still hopes to recover a measure of the trust that it has lost. Moreover, this incident's exposure of the long-standing right-wing pressure campaign against Komen to sever its ties with Planned Parenthood would have even more dramatically altered the way the story was perceived at the time.
Organisational destruction
Unlike their liberal counterparts, conservative activists have long prioritised the destruction of what they see as opposing organisations. Their efforts to demonise, isolate and undermine progressive organisations have been a key aspect of right-wing political organising for many decades now. (The ideology guiding them goes all the way back to the French Revolution, which right-wing conspiracy theorists blamed on the non-existent Bavarian Illuminati, a powerless discussion forum that had been disbanded for more than a decade before the French Revolution even began.)
"... and Planned Parenthood has been under repeated attack in the shadows for as long as anyone cares to remember."
The vast majority of right-wing organisation-destroying activities take place in the shadows - and Planned Parenthood has been under repeated attack in the shadows for as long as anyone cares to remember, including efforts to defund it by the Republican House of Representatives as their first order of business in January 2011. Only a small fraction of these sorts of attacks - such as recent overt efforts to undermine public employee unions - take place in daylight out of sheer necessity.
Had more Americans been more aware of the long-term conservative game plan to demonise, isolate and undermine Planned Parenthood - and Komen, too, if it stood in their way - then Komen and those pressuring it from the right would have looked even worse than they already did.
Because I had previously covered the attacks on ACORN, and had been quite familiar with ACORN's work before the attacks ever began, I found it impossible not to think of ACORN as these events quickly unfolded. Both ACORN and Planned Parenthood served a particularly powerless constituency - although ACORN did so much more exclusively.
Both organisations had been turned into bogeymen of the right - the targets of paranoid fact-free attacks over a period of years. Both organisations were subject to abusive, Joe McCarthy-style attacks through Congress. And both organisations had been attacked via fraudulent, secretly-taped videos attempting to portray them as enablers of commercial under-age sex-crimes, when in reality, both organizations contacted law enforcement in response to the bogus criminal activity they were presented with.
Finally, both were pawns in conservative plans to undermine the power of key Democratic constituencies without the Democrats even realising the stakes. Needless to say, I was deeply and pleasantly surprised at how differently things turned out this time around.
Please go to this link for the rest of the piece:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012279726931607.html
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