Susan G. Komen’s priceless gift
By Rebecca Traister and Joan Walsh Published on Salon A radical decision woke the country up to an alarming rightward drift, and gave new life to women’s health advocacy The startling intensity that we saw this week in response to Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s decision to pull its grants from Planned Parenthood — an intensity that prompted the Komen foundation to reverse its decision today — may be the best thing that’s happened to the conversation about reproductive rights in this country for decades. It certainly should be. Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat. But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency — armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long. That this week’s blow against Planned Parenthood came not directly from John Boehner’s House of Representatives – which, ever since taking power a year ago promising to focus on jobs, has manfully focused on the single task of attacking women’s reproductive rights – but instead from a popular, officially nonpartisan organization dedicated wholly to women’s healthcare somehow brought this argument into the open.
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