The Komen Debacle

A Matter of Perspective

By Linda Whitlock

Moral courage is a rare commodity these days. The Catholic bishops have it. The Susan G. Komen Foundation – not so much.

When the Catholic bishops learned of the new HHS guidelines that would force Catholic institutions to offer health insurance coverage in conflict with their religious beliefs, the bishops took to their keyboards and pulpits and faced down the Obama administration. In the ironic tradition of Martin Luther, they made their stand. They could do no other.

Faced with the predictable Planned Parenthood assault, the Komen Foundation, on the other hand, took barely three days to recant its decision to remove Planned Parenthood from its list of eligible grant recipients. Why? Maybe because the Komen Foundation – despite its commitment to saving lives – has, in contrast to the bishops, no moral clarity regarding the value of human life to draw upon for moral courage.

There’s no denying the good the Komen Foundation does. According to its web site, in the three decades since its inception, the foundation has spent $1.9 billion in its efforts to save women’s lives by ending the curse of breast cancer. Due, no doubt, in substantial part to its efforts, the 5-year survival rate for breast cancer victims has risen dramatically.

Given all the money spent by the Komen Foundation in its quest for a breast-cancer-free world, the $680,000 grant to Planned Parenthood might seem like a paltry sum – surely not worth the pro-life folks getting so upset over.

But the good the Komen Foundation does is dwarfed by the evil that Planned Parenthood does. A single dollar is too much to give to an organization that’s directly responsible every year for 3.5 times as many female deaths as breast cancer.

In 2007, for example, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 40,598 women died from breast cancer. Planned Parenthood’s 2007-2008 annual report shows that in that same year, Planned Parenthood clinics performed 305,310 abortions. Somewhere near half of those aborted babies were most certainly female.

And of the other million or so abortions performed in the United States every year, many of those might not occur except for the advocacy, lobbying, and suing that Planned Parenthood does to ensure that abortion remains legal and common in the U.S. Somewhere near half of those babies are girls, too.

For Komen, an organization devoted to saving women’s lives, Planned Parenthood makes an odd bedfellow, indeed.

Yet the Komen Foundation – even before its cowardly capitulation – made it clear that abortion had nothing to do with the foundation’s decision to pull Planned Parenthood’s grant eligibility. It was the investigations – not the abortions – that caused the problem, Komen assured critics. Nothing better reveals Komen’s lack of moral clarity or better explains the foundation’s failure of moral courage.

To the Catholic bishops, human life is precious because life is a gift from God. Human beings are created in God’s image and endowed by Him with an immortal soul. As God’s agents, the bishops are responsible to do what they can to protect human life, whether born or unborn. They know they’ll be held accountable – in this world or the next. Moral clarity – and the courage that flows from it – comes more easily to those who have an eternal perspective.

To the Komen Foundation, human life is precious because when you’re dead – well – you’re dead. And dead people can’t do things. Dead women can’t laugh or love. They can’t write a poem or run a company. They can’t hold their newborn babies – or even exercise their Roe vs. Wade-given right to abort their unborn ones. Moral clarity – and the courage it could bring – comes much harder to those whose perspective is a temporal one.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone, then, that the Komen Foundation would retreat in humiliated defeat when Planned Parenthood brandished its big guns or even that it partnered with Planned Parenthood in the first place. To the temporally minded, the ends often justify the means. To the eternally minded, both ends and means require equal justification.

The Catholic bishops may soon have to answer to the civil authorities for their stand. The decision-makers at the Komen Foundation will someday have to answer to a much higher authority for theirs.