http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=%5CSpecialReports%5Carchive%5C200502%5CSPE20050222a.htmlBy Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
February 22, 2005
(CNSNews.com)- A foundation that uses events such as the "Race for the Cure" to raise money to fight breast cancer is jeopardizing women's health by using some of those funds to support local chapters of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, according to a former advisor to the foundation.
Planned Parenthood clinics provide breast cancer screening and education, but the organization is also the nation's top abortion provider.
"You can't affirm life with one hand and support an organization that kills people with the other," said Eve Sanchez Silver, a medical research analyst and two-time breast cancer survivor who severed her ties with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation after learning that its chapters supplied $475,000 in grants to local Planned Parenthood affiliates in 2003. Silver and many others in the medical and scientific community believe that abortion makes a woman more vulnerable to developing breast cancer.
According to its website, the Komen Foundation works "through a network of U.S. and international affiliates and events like the Komen Race for the Cure ... to eradicate breast cancer as a life-threatening disease by funding research grants and supporting education, screening and treatment projects in communities around the world."
The foundation's most recent annual report indicates that, for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2003, Komen and its more than 100 affiliates received over $154 million through private donations, corporate contributions and a number of fund-raising events.
The most successful money-maker for the organization in that 12-month period was the Race for the Cure, the largest series of 5K runs/fitness walks in the world. The events drew more than one million participants who raised nearly $88 million from donors. The 2004 race in Washington, D.C., held in June, drew more than 52,000 runners/walkers. The Komen Foundation expects 1.4 million participants in its series of more than 100 races in 2005.
While holding administrative and fund-raising expenses to about 25 percent of its budget, the foundation spent about 75 percent of its funds in the 2003 fiscal year on mission-related activities, including grants and programs related to breast cancer research, education, screening and treatment.
That year, Komen affiliates awarded $38.4 million to support community outreach programs, including 21 grants to local Planned Parenthood chapters totaling more than $475,000.
Silver told the Cybercast News Service that she doesn't believe the foundation should be involved with Planned Parenthood, since that organization "is in the business of abortions.
"If they stopped doing abortions tomorrow, they'd go broke the next day," Silver said. "As far as I'm concerned, anything they do in the way of drawing women in for any kind of service would simply be to acclimate them to their organization until they're ready to have an abortion."
The fact that Komen is awarding grants to the nation's top abortion provider "proves to me that the foundation's perspective is not for the safety of women. It can't be," she said.
"Everywhere, women who are working to combat breast cancer are begging for money, but they give funds to Planned Parenthood instead," Silver added. "And that organization is using it to make beautiful centers so they can lure women in to kill their babies."
Silver sees a parallel between today's abortion industry and the situation during World War II. "Gas chambers were set up right in the middle of neighborhoods the same way Planned Parenthood centers are," she said. "One day, we're going to look back, and people are going to be ashamed that we allowed this to happen in this country."
'This can't be true'
Silver spent almost four years as a charter member of the foundation's National Hispanic Latina Advisory Council. In that capacity, she helped the Komen organization set national and international policy, particularly regarding Hispanic populations.
That all changed after Silver received an e-mail about Joan Archer, a breast cancer patient who returned a wig to an Iowa chapter of the foundation last May. Archer cited Komen's financial support of Planned Parenthood as one of the reasons for giving back the wig.
"The people who sent that to me said, 'This can't be true because Eve (Silver) is a part of this organization, and there's no way she'd be a part of this,'" Silver said. "I checked it out to see if it was so, and it was."
The following weekend, Silver attended a meeting with Komen's leaders at the foundation headquarters in Dallas. "They were getting ready to revamp their program, and I wanted to know if they would consider not funding Planned Parenthood.
"I said: 'As a Latina adviser, I have to tell you that this is a serious break in the fabric of the reality of the organization. It's not in line with what I believe Komen to be. I don't understand why this is happening.' "
According to Silver, the foundation officers responded that they were helping Planned Parenthood in an effort to support any organization providing breast care services.
However, as the Cybercast News Service previously reported, an examination of Planned Parenthood's recent annual reports shows that while the organization's overall revenue has increased five years in a row and the number of abortion procedures performed at Planned Parenthood clinics has soared during the same period, the number of breast exams conducted at Planned Parenthood facilities in 2003 (the most recent year available) fell by 13.3 percent.
Silver's second objection to Planned Parenthood is that the organization was founded by Margaret Sanger, a leader in the science of selective breeding or eugenics. "[Sanger's] plan was to eliminate people of color," Silver said. "As a woman of color, I have no interest in supporting an organization that is designed to kill the very people I'm supposed to be representing."
When Komen officials refused to back down on their financial support of Planned Parenthood, Silver resigned from the foundation.
Abortion-breast cancer link
Silver also told the Cybercast News Service that as one of the nation's most powerful advocates for finding a breast cancer cure, the Komen Foundation is ironically contributing to the incidence of breast cancer with its support of Planned Parenthood.
Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, agrees with Silver, even referring to the number of breast cancer cases since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court made abortion legal in its Roe v. Wade decision, as "a tsunami."
Malec pointed to a 2001 report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, which indicates that among women in the generation following Roe v. Wade, there was a 40 percent increase in cases of breast cancer. "In 1970, the average American woman's lifetime risk for the disease was 1 in 12," she noted. "Today, 1 in 7.5 women develop breast cancer.
"Only a third-trimester process matures breast cells into cancer-resistant tissue and protects a pregnant woman from the overexposure to estrogen -- a recognized carcinogen -- experienced early in a normal pregnancy," Malec said. "On the other hand, a woman who has an abortion is left with more cancer-vulnerable cells," she added.
"The link between abortion and breast cancer is further supported by research showing that a woman who has a premature birth before 32 weeks of pregnancy more than doubles her risk for breast cancer," Malec said. "A premature birth is biologically the same event as an abortion," she added. "Only the mother's intentions differ."
Five medical groups and a bioethics center recognize that abortion raises a woman's risk for breast cancer, Malec said. A seventh medical organization, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, has called on doctors to warn women of a "highly plausible relationship" between abortion and the disease.
While the Komen Foundation acknowledges that several studies "have suggested that abortion may moderately increase the risk of breast cancer," it questions the accuracy of those studies, arguing that the reporting of past behavior on a sensitive topic like abortion "can have a significant impact on the precision of the information gathered."
Instead, the Komen Foundation's website cites a number of studies that contradict the assertions of an existing link, and the group states flatly that "the evidence clearly shows that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer."
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) takes a slightly different approach to the topic on its website, conceding that there is a "possible link between induced abortion and breast cancer," but in the same sentence slamming the "theory whose principal promoters oppose abortion regardless of its safety.
"The theory awaits conclusive confirmation by medical researchers," the PPFA website states. "While Planned Parenthood believes that women should have access to information about all factors that influence the risk of disease, PPFA also believes that women deserve information that is medically substantiated and untainted by a political agenda."
Silver has a different view of the link between abortion and breast cancer.
"Physiologically, this is a fact. For people to say this is not a fact is outrageous and ridiculous," she said. "In Great Britain, they use abortion incidence as an indicator of breast cancer risk."
'Two for the price of one'
Rebecca Gibson, a spokesperson for the Komen Foundation, told the Cybercast News Service that the foundation and its affiliates "do not provide any funding for abortions or for any activities outside the scope of our mission.
"We know that early detection is the key to surviving breast cancer; thus, we support breast cancer screening programs," Gibson said. "In many urban and rural areas, Planned Parenthood may be the only source of free or low-cost women's health screening services (e.g., pap smears, mammograms, clinical breast exams, etc.)."
In addition, "some Komen affiliates provide restricted grants to local Planned Parenthood clinics to provide vital breast health services for underserved women in their communities," she stated. "In order to monitor their progress, grantees are required to provide detailed reports to the funding affiliate at least twice per year."
Nevertheless, Silver said this arrangement makes abortion more accessible because "the money is fungible.
"If you relieve pressure on one side, that means they can use more money on the other side for abortions," Silver said. "It's not separate, and people need to know that. You cannot kill people in one room and do breast services in another and somehow think that's a balance."
Silver added that Planned Parenthood's current strategy enables that organization to "get two for the price of one" since "they kill the baby, and then they let the mother go because eventually she will develop breast cancer, and then they'll get her, too."
Contributors and corporations should "stop funding the Komen Foundation" and other organizations that provide money to Planned Parenthood, Silver said. But until that takes place, she is hopeful that a legal trend which began in Australia will spread to the U.S.
"Medical malpractice, insurance companies and all of society are going to pay a price because women who are denied their right to abortion-breast cancer information are beginning to sue, and they're beginning to win," she said.
Silver referred to a recent lawsuit against a clinic in Portland, Ore., that performed an abortion on a 15-year-old girl without informing her of the procedure's psychological and breast cancer risks. This was the second abortion-cancer case to be prosecuted in the U.S. and the first in which a judgment, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed, was returned against an abortion provider.
"If they're not going to listen to us one way, they may have to listen to us through litigation," she said. "The next voice you hear may be the sound of another woman saying, 'I didn't get my information, and I want to sue.'
"I think women everywhere should check out the rules of their state and see what's going on because they may well have been injured and may not know" the options available to them, Silver added.
'I'm a survivor'
In addition to running Cinta Latina Research, the firm she founded in 1999 to provide cancer control education and research consultation, Silver is "speaking out on the abortion-breast cancer link all over the country" and has found receptive audiences in unexpected places.
"I spoke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about abortion and breast cancer the night before the Boston Red Sox won the World Series" last October, she said. "Most of the people who attended were men who would rather come to hear what I had to say than stay home and watch the game. That was rather inspiring to me."
Silver acknowledges that surviving cancer herself has made her "race" against abortion and Planned Parenthood a personal matter. "I don't want any woman to go through the horror of breast cancer the way I did," she said. "I'm a survivor, and I have a responsibility to make sure that information gets out."
Planned Parenthood did not respond to numerous calls seeking comment on this article.
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