| Maxine Berman, writing in Dome Magazine. But here’s the thing. A woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy. Nobody chooses to have breast cancer, and it strikes women of every income level and race. Breast cancer doesn’t care who’s got it. Neither should the Susan G. Komen people care who’s providing quality exams to catch it early, even if those facilities provide other, still-legal medical services.
This is the point, really. The so-called pro-Life set could have both. They could have life-saving breast cancer screenings for poor women, and they could seek to exert pressure on Planned Parenthood to stop performing abortions. But, this isn't about being pro-Life. This is about destroying the stuff of the "other side." I've seen this firsthand since writing a column last week suggesting that we've hit a new low, where the war on cancer is now fought according to the red-blue prism rather than the sense of unity that helped drastically reduce mortality rates in some of the worst cancers since the Nixon administration made it a national priority. The response has largely been, "Screw those poor women looking for a handout, we need to save the fetuses." If that's the sort of thing that passes for pro-Life these days, that movement richly deserves its place in the dustbin of truly awful ideas. Fortunately, it appears that the people at Komen are at least something better than the people they've made to feel empowered. |
