Friday, February 03, 2012

Blogging for the Cure: An issue surrounding the Susan Komen’s Foundation, an entity geared to the ever-so-laudable goal of finding a cure for breast cancer, is burning up the airwaves and the blogosphere because the Komen’s Foundation made the egregious decision to remove its $2,000,000 grant from the much revered and infinitely helpful Planned Parenthood. The outcry of this unconscionable act is stunning. The reason given for Komen’s pulling its grant is that Planned Parenthood is being “investigated” by a Republican dominated House committee. We all know this is a right wing Republican political subversive tactic against Planned Parenthood with no rationale but to legally impose an ideological right wing extremist agenda on the nation. Local Planned Parenthoods have been inundated by state and local red state officials making impossible demands to serve this end. The red-state agenda has been gunning (sometimes literally) for Planned Parenthood for a very long time.

The Komen’s Foundation surreptitiously infiltrated at its hierarchical top a right wing extremist Republican ideologue who decided if Planned Parenthood could not be taken down in the passage of the Obama Administration’s health care legislation then it would taken down by a CIA-like maneuver insinuating its insanity through power at top.

Abortion and even contraception now has become the cause célèbre that our nation’s albatrosses on the right have heaped upon the rest of us who want those decisions to fall under an implied right to privacy. They have been relentlessly pursuing over decades the overturn of the SCOTUS Roe v. Wade decision by any means necessary even if it means the murder of doctors who provide vital reproductive care in a sterile, clean and safe professional environments where the patient can feel privacy protected and secure.

Planned Parenthood’s total abortion service is a mere 3% of their entire care. Yes, doctors at Planned Parenthood provide safe and legal abortions even IF it is only 3% of what they do. The procedural majority of Planned Parenthood is concerned with cancer screening and many other medical procedures needed by women (and men) for their reproductive health. The money pulled by Komen’s will affect that majority.

The right wingnut religious extremists will stop at nothing to spread their poisonous doctrine. They would return us to glorious yesteryear of back alley illegal unsafe abortions when women were butchered by quack abortionists, bled to death or became infertile from an illegal, unsterilized and unsafe abortion costing thousands. It is time for the pro choice movement take back the issue of women’s reproductive freedom as the religious Republican extremist right whittles away a woman’s right to control own her own body.

Since when have fetuses in the measure of a few weeks into pregnancy been called an “unborn child?” This term gives personhood to an entity without the mother’s body and out-of-utero would cease to exist BUT I do not care what anyone’s views on abortion are. If you do not like or want to have an abortion DON’T but leave other women’s bodies to themselves.

I am blogging for a cure to narrow minded, stupid, insensitive, idiotic religious fanaticism which cares NOTHING for the life of a full term human being but allegedly cares more about the life of a fetus. I cannot agree and I do not HAVE to agree with wingnuts who will be responsible for the death of women – many poor -- if they cannot affordably get the array of Planned Parenthood services they need.

A personal note: I was born in 1948. I had a sister that was born five years before me. She lived less than ten days because of significant birth defects. My father, at that time, had scheduled one of the premier surgeons at Boston Children’s Hospital to repair the facial and intestinal deformities but her birth weight tumbled and she died.

In pertinent part my mother, emotionally fragile, was devastated. I asked my father where the baby was buried. He did not know because he said the baby was so young that by Jewish law no Jewish funeral was necessary, no Jewish rites for the dead observed and no shiva (a memorial week of visitation) was held. He said that the orthodox rabbi had told him then that the child was not, in Jewish tradition, imbued with a sense of “personhood” until after a 30 day period of life. This he said saved the mother the torment that would come with observing the Jewish extended death ritual by relieving her of the burden which she was not mentally and physically able to endure. Views may differ now but that is what he was told then.

I relate this story to emphasize the difference Jewish law was from Catholic or fundamentalist Christian law. The mother’s life in Jewish law is usually paramount. Is Jewish law any better than Christian law? NO it is simply different as are the myriad of views, religious and non-religious concerning the incendiary issue of when personhood and life begins.

Ironically, Susan G. Komen the namesake of the Komen’s breast cancer foundation was Jewish. Those who are Jewish, as I am, know that most Jews consider the mother’s life to be paramount if the fetus’s life endangers the life of the mother. Not all religions think the same and not all people think the same about this issue. Traditions and beliefs differ.

Do what you want with your own body and if you do not want an abortion do not have one but leave that personal choice and the attendant medical choices women need for reproductive and other health issues to the woman, her physician and, if she has a belief in one, her god.

I advocate the public post haste switch monetary and volunteer support from the Susan Komen’s Foundation to Planned Parenthood. You will not regret your choice!

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