I admit, I don't have a dog in this race...so to speak. For the purposes of full disclosure, I've never really cared much for Planned Parenthood. I'm sure they've done a lot to help poor women out. That was never really the point for me. I don't support abortion on demand for perfectly healthy fetuses and Planned Parenthood, by their own admission, perform 300,000 of these per year, on average. That's about 1/4 of all abortions performed per year in the United States, give or take. As for Susan G. Komen, I always found them to be a pretty non-offensive charity that found pragmatic and positive ways to raise money. I never directly supported them though, not because of their support for Planned Parenthood (I didn't even know they sent them any money) but just because I've already chosen where my charitable giving goes.
So, all that said, when I saw this, my first response was...that's probably a good thing. After all, as a charitable organization, SGK is answerable only to their donors. Planned Parenthood receives 46 percent of their budget from the federal government, so they are also answerable to taxpayers, but this isn't true for SGK, as far as I know. Nonetheless, I really didn't think this to be a big deal when I saw it. Organizations donate and don't donate to different groups all the time. In politics, it is common to donate to both sides, just to cover your bases. So, withdrawing funds didn't seem like such a big deal. The idea that it might have been motivated by political reasons even less of a big deal because most things at that level are motivated by political considerations (anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or has never worked in administration).
Therefore, I was shocked by the circling of the wagons that occurred. Okay, so a lot of people support Planned Parenthood. This isn't particularly shocking or surprising, but it was disappointing. Nonetheless, it seemed Planned Parenthood had generated an obvious political response to the political action taken by Susan G. Komen. That also seemed fine. Then the attacks from PP continued for three days. It is one thing to express your displeasure and ask for additional supporters to make up for the shortfall, it is something else entirely to go on a full blown political attack of someone, which is what I think PP was orchestrating. You had Senators signing support statements, a Congresswoman from California saying it would hurt women's health and a variety of other statements. The media also wouldn't let it go. Once they grabbed it, it was like they couldn't fathom that there would be any opposition to PP, so every article came across as being shocked at SGK. After three days of the political attacks from the supporters of Planned Parenthood, I decided to actually look into the numbers. This is what I found.
According to PP, they have an annual budget of 1.04 BILLION dollars. They state that they spend 16 percent of that budget on cancer screening which means they spend 166 MILLION dollars a year on cancer screening and prevention. Now, SG Komen provided an annual donation of 700,000 dollars. That's .07% of the total budget of PP. Even assuming PP actually spent it only on what it was earmarked for (that's a big if, imo), then it was only .4% of the total cancer screening budget. That's it! This is a statistically insignificant number. In fact, it is such a small number that it wouldn't likely hurt the health of any women, at all. Therefore, the Congresswoman from California was either knowingly lying or just emotionally responding based on the fact that 700,000 dollars is a really big amount. Most people can't think about numbers this large and make since of them. So, let's try to do just that. In fact, PP can't lie about simple math...therefore, I submit that the MATH clearly supports my assertion that SGK's action had no statistical impact on the budget of PP and therefore on the health of women. So, who's being political?
Is it SGK, an organization that fights to cure a horrible disease who's political action had little if any real impact on PP? Or, is it PP, one of the largest political activist lobbying groups in the country who seemed intent on making SGK look bad even though the amount of money involved was minimally significant? I submit that SGK's motives were irrelevant and it was PP who was playing politics. After all, their actions made them seem like they were crying because someone took a penny out of their piggy bank. Actually, that's generous, if you say that the 1.04 billion is equivalent to 1 dollar in the piggy bank, than this equates to crying over taking .002 cents from the piggy bank. How's that for number we CAN relate to?
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