While they decide the fate of affordable breast cancer prevention services, all the CEO’s rush to condemn each other for turning things political…

“Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer,” Nancy G. Brinker, founder and CEO of the [Komen] foundation, said in a statement. “Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grants.”

“The public stood up for the protection of women’s health to be free from political involvement and destruction,”  [Planned Parenthood of the Heartland President and CEO Jill June] said. “There is enough quarreling in politics. Can’t we at least allow people to have breast cancer screenings without being drug into the muck?”

Women’s healthcare is, by definition, political.  Denying as much clouds the bad politics pervasive in the debate.

Low-income women are being forced to rely on a private foundation and a non-profit corporation for their health care — one, complicit in obscuring the role of environmental toxins in the prevalence of breast cancer, the other, complicit in problematic racialized population control efforts.  This is a politics of value; that is, whose bodies, ideas, and well-being will be valued, considered, and prioritized, and whose won’t?

Low income women are apparently forced to rely on the whims of a private foundation that is not accountable to them to ensure that someone is paying for affordable breast cancer prevention services, since public funding for poor people’s health care is scarce and constantly denigrated.  This is a politics of resource distribution — how will healthcare resources be allocated, to whom, and why?

And we all have to watch as CEO’s self-consciously pretend in the press that the attacks on Planned Parenthood aren’t part of a powerful strategy by conservative politicians and activists to eliminate access to abortion, that Komen is very much integrated into that strategy, and that Planned Parenthood isn’t leveraging that affront to ultimately raise three million dollars in a few days.  This is a politics of information — how are these dynamics and issues framed, whose voices have the most authority, who isn’t heard at all, and who is being played?

When people who are chief executives of a corporatized industry that is profoundly politically charged argue that they’re really not political, that is a clue that their politics are deeply suspect.  At best, they are not thoughtful about where they stand on the questions raised above; at worst, they are manipulating and exploiting a discourse to ensure their organizational survival at any cost.  But always they are making choices with serious political consequences.

I should note that I don’t criticize Planned Parenthood lightly because I know people rely on their services, I know that employees risk their lives working there, and I realize that conservative forces are hysterically rallying against them.  But I do think it’s important to have a space for robust (black and post-colonial) feminist critique of an organization with fraught historical roots and a record of dangerous birth control practices on primarily women of color.

I also think it’s important to avoid conflating a commitment to defending access to abortion services with uncritically supporting Planned Parenthood.  I find that this is a particularly hard position to maintain when the debate is framed as if it’s the being political that is somehow bad and as if the debate itself isn’t fundamentally political.  People who become pregnant ought to be entitled to access safe abortion services.  Planned Parenthood, as an organization, is not entitled to funding, public or private.  From my perspective, whether or not they should receive funding depends, in part, on their politics, which informs their work.  In the high stakes political battle that is people’s access to and experience of reproductive health care resources, I don’t think feminists should take anything for granted.