It was a factual statement. I offered no opinion, so you need to not “take it” any way. If you would like my opinion, you can ask, but please don’t attribute one to me that I didn’t offer.</p>
<p>
I meant to say exactly what I said. Which is that cost of the portion of the annual exam specific to the breast exam can’t be separated. It can’t. Again, I didn’t offer an opinion.</p>
<p>But here it is anyway. For all the things that Planned Parenthood does, the only one for which I would support the use of my own funds is an annual exam, which includes a breast exam.</p>
<p>"… by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political."</p>
<p>Yes, yes, of course it is. But most people on both sides of the issue didn’t know about any abortion issue at Komen. Some did, to be sure, but most didn’t. Most people had vaguely warm and fuzzy feelings about their walks and their pink ribbon junk. Now they’ve injected themselves into the debate, and alienated about half of their potential contributors. And <em>most</em> of their potential corporate sponsors.</p>
<p>And then Ms. Mask of Plastic trotted out several implausible reasons why they were to defund Planned Parenthood. Nobody believed her, not the people who approved of the action, not the people who opposed it. Everyone on both sides saw the move as political. Gone are the warm and fuzzy feelings, replaced by flashpoint-in-the-abortion-wars feelings. There’s probably a place in our country for an anti-abortion breast cancer charity, but not one as big as Komen. They foolishly and pointless destroyed their brand, replacing it with a polarizing one.</p>
<p>Now they’re saying they’ll restore funding. This is flailing. Now they’ll infuriate the anti-abortion people, but the Planned Parenthood partisans will still have lost their positive feelings. You can’t unring that bell.</p>
<p>So they caved and then caved again. Good thing their cause isn’t spinal research. Personally, I’m glad I have never been a contributor to either organization. Maybe this October we won’t be swamped with pink again. </p>
<p>I agree with the sentiment that BC is getting too much attention/$$$ relative to other cancers.</p>
<p>“I meant to say exactly what I said. Which is that cost of the portion of the annual exam specific to the breast exam can’t be separated. It can’t. Again, I didn’t offer an opinion.”</p>
<p>I’m not so sure that is true. I ran a program funded by a grant and I had to keep meticulous records as to how the funds where used and supply them to the organization every year in the renewal application. I could not use any of my grant funds for that program for any other work I did, nor could the agency I worked for.</p>
<p>Sylvan as a BC survivor who has an aunt that has been recently diagnosed with BC and an office mate that just finished treatment for BC I think it is much more rampant than you think.</p>
<p>'If you actually dig into the guts of those numbers, this is not accurate, but the truth actually makes Planned Parenhood’s case very, very well."</p>
<p>Do you have a link which gives the numbers that support your claim?</p>
<p>I was in DC a couple of years ago, and a Komen race ran by me. I thought it was Code Pink (as did those with me, who really had no idea), until we got to the Mall, where the huge advertising was occurring and the race ended.</p>
<p>The great irony now is that thousands of anti-abortion supporters of Komen now know (which they likely didn’t before) that Komen provides funding for Planned Parenthood with their money.</p>
<p>Of course they can be disetangled and they are.</p>
<p>There is no such thing as an “annual exam” as one expense. Every thing our practitioners do is paid for out of the appropriate funds, which means that different aspects of one visit by one patient are often paid for by different funds. Sound complicated? It is. </p>
<p>If we dared do it the way you are suggesting, we’d lose our state and federal funding in a New York minute. The anti-choice faction has the upper hand right now and they are making it as difficult as possible for everyone involved in women’s health, even those facilities like ours that do not provide abortions yet will provide a referral to a local doctor who does. </p>
<p>And there are local folks here who will go to their graves swearing we do provide abortions, we just “hide” it in our financial reports. Oy vey. And to think that’s who the Komen foundation gave in too!</p>
I am talking about donations to non-profits, not coding in terms of the IRS.</p>
<p>I did this type of paperwork for years, just as you have done your job, and I suspect we are talking about two different things. The donor can’t breakdown the donation into separate components legally after the fact. It doesn’t work that way. But, again, I think we are coming at this from two different directions.</p>
<p>Look at that statement again. As some of my online friends point out, are they actually restoring funding for Planned Parenthood going forward? They don’t say it. Remember, they trotted out various reasons for defunding PP. One was the Congressional witch hunt, but the other was what Zoosermom keeps saying, that PP doesn’t offer mammograms in its offices. </p>
<p>Planned Parenthood still isn’t offering mammograms in its offices. (And probably shouldn’t-- their clientele is primarily younger women, and thus few of their clients would need mammograms.) So will Komen cling to that excuse and axe the grants next year as planned?</p>