While anti-choicers including those on Komen's board have spread lies about links between abortion and breast cancer, Komen's steps will ensure that more women who might have been screened will be now lack access to early detection and treatment and may die from breast cancer. This is in keeping with a general approach of the anti-choice movement: Decry abortion, for example, but limit funding for contraceptive education and supplies which can prevent the unintended pregnancies that lead to abortion. Decry the plight of minority women, but make their access to care increasingly limited. It is a venal and disgusting tactic that I would have thought well beneath the Komen Foundation no matter other issues.
But Komen as an organization now appears so little able to stand the truth that it is deleting comments from its website protesting the policy change. And this is not the first time Komen has come under fire for misinformation or questionable affiliations. Some point to concerns about Komen's influence in a recent Institute of Medicine report playing down environmental factors in breast cancer, and its close affiliation with many companies that manufacture products using cancer-causing agents.
Given these and other links, it may be no surprise that Komen's own memo to its affiliates spreads lies about Planned Parenthood, nor that Komen's actions belie its own claims to care about racial, ethnic and income disparities in access to breast cancer screenings.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control on disparities in access to care noted that women without insurance (38.2 percent) and women without a usual source of health care (36.2 percent) were least likely to be screened for cancer and that such disparities remained stark among Latina, African-American, and Native American women.
In response, Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker, founder and CEO of Komen, said: "This gap in care for uninsured and low-income women is particularly troubling and one we have been working very hard to fill at Susan G. Komen. It's clear that we have far more work to do for women who have no resources, no insurance, and no steady source of healthcare. They need our help the most."
Not sure how she explains the foundation's recent decision to those women who otherwise would have gotten that screening along with other health care at Planned Parenthood clinics.
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