Susan G. Komen Arizona to close five years after Planned Parenthood controversy

Since 2012, when Susan G. Komen for the Cure (helmed by Karen Handel, the newly-elected winner of the Georgia U.S. House runoff race) attempted to end its grants to Planned Parenthood, the organization has suffered financial setbacks. Planned Parenthood performs zero mammograms and less than two percent of breast cancer screenings for women in the United States, but for the supporters of the nation’s largest abortion chain, facts don’t particularly seem to matter.

Now, Susan G. Komen Arizona has plans to shut down. According to The Arizona Republic, “dwindling donations and event participation” is the reason. However, Komen’s flip-flop — defunding Planned Parenthood, then quickly re-funding Planned Parenthood — not only incensed Planned Parenthood supporters, but pro-lifers who would have otherwise supported the organization. Since that time, the organization has struggled:

… [T]he controversy caused contributions to Susan G. Komen to drop by 22 percent in the following year, USA TODAY reported in 2014.

An organization spokeswoman said donations dropped from about $164 million in the fiscal year ending in March 2012 to $128 million in the year ending March 2013, according to the USA TODAY report.

The controversy also prompted several executives to leave the organization and caused fewer people to participate in its events nationwide.

The organization canceled half of its three-day charity walks in 2014, including in Phoenix, because of the drop in participation.

In other words, buried in the article is the fact that the root cause for Komen’s “dwindling donations and event participation” is the past controversy surrounding Komen’s association with Planned Parenthood.

At the time of Komen’s famous flip-flop, the organization released a statement saying:

We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors 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.

Criminal or not, controversy is nothing new for Planned Parenthood. Its corruption goes deep — from its eugenic beginnings to its Medicaid fraud scandals, to its high level employees caught bartering over aborted fetal body parts on hidden camera, to its bought and paid-for friends in high political positions — and it seems that everything Planned Parenthood touches becomes a part of the decay of all that is good and decent in the world.

Why is Planned Parenthood so controversial? Because despite the organization’s efforts to paint itself as primarily a provider of “women’s healthcare,” it is the largest single abortion provider in the United States, committing more than 320,000 abortions annually (that’s around 900 daily), even though it falsely presents abortion as only “three percent” of its total annual services.

Debunking Planned Parenthood's "3%" Abortion Myth

And while the abortion business’s legitimate healthcare services (like the tiny fraction of U.S. breast exams and Pap smears it performs) continue to decrease, it’s abortion numbers increase along with its taxpayer funding.

The Komen/Planned Parenthood controversy just drives home the fact that while Planned Parenthood is supposed to help women, one Komen branch — a group designed to raise money to save lives — has suffered greatly because of Planned Parenthood’s life-extinguishing, dirty business.

Editor’s Note: All op-eds are the opinion of the writer, and not necessarily the official position of Live Action.