When the nation’s pre-eminent breast cancer advocacy group, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, decided to stop most of its financing of Planned Parenthood in December, Komen’s leaders hoped to quietly distance the foundation from a politically controversial organization that they feared was costing them support and donations, a board member said.
But when the move became public on Tuesday, Nancy G. Brinker, the polished Republican donor who founded Komen after her sister died of breast cancer, and other leaders of the organization were completely caught off guard by the deluge of outrage online, within the foundation’s own ranks and in Congress. On Friday, Ms. Brinker reversed course and restored Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood, which has used the Komen money to provide breast cancer screening and education to thousands of low-income women.
“We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives,” Ms. Brinker said in a statement.
The group’s leaders first sought to hold their ground. On Thursday, they tried to communicate their message directly to supporters with a video from Ms. Brinker on YouTube, with posts on Facebook and with Twitter messages and interviews with reporters.
But longtime supporters, corporate sponsors and scientific and medical professionals with ties to Komen were growing increasingly concerned. The online drumbeat became impossible to ignore. And it wasn’t just abortion rights activists denouncing Komen but also some of the foundation’s longtime supporters, who were furious that the fight against breast cancer had been drawn into partisan battles.
By the end of the week, Twitter users had sent more than 1.3 million posts mentioning Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation and related terms and hashtags. On Thursday alone, there were more than 460,000 Tweets.
“They listened carefully to many people, including many of the scientists and clinicians,” a senior cancer researcher with close ties to Komen said. “They recognized that the only thing that could be done was to reverse the decision.”
As late as Thursday night, Ms. Brinker had been scrambling to defuse a crisis that gravely threatened the reputation of an organization she has spent three decades building into a fund-raising juggernaut that finances breast cancer research and screening. Efforts to negotiate a resolution culminated Friday morning when Ms. Brinker called Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat and the principal author of a letter from 26 senators calling on Komen to change its decision. Ms. Brinker assured Mr. Lautenberg that Komen would again make Planned Parenthood eligible for grants, and he told her that was just what he and his colleagues had been seeking.
The controversy that burst into harsh public light this week had been brewing for years as anti-abortion advocates dogged the Komen foundation, protesting alongside its fund-raising events and complaining loudly about the grants to Planned Parenthood, which performs abortions as well as providing a broad range of other health services to women.
“We are really afraid, because these people who are opposed to Planned Parenthood were threatening to disrupt our races or sponsors to our races,” said John Hammarley, a Komen senior communications adviser until late last summer. He said that part of his role was to help the foundation’s affiliates across the country to manage these complaints. He advised affiliates to be prepared for the worst, but most threats had yielded only a handful of placard-carrying protesters.
The discussion within Komen about addressing the objections of anti-abortion advocates intensified last year after Karen Handel was hired as senior vice president for public policy, several former Komen employees said. Ms. Handel, a Republican, had been secretary of state in Georgia and had run unsuccessfully for governor in 2010. During that campaign, she had spoken about ending financing for Planned Parenthood and said, “Since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”
Mr. Hammarley said the discussion included questions about the number of grants awarded to Planned Parenthood and about the regions that might be affected if grants were halted.
“There was a significant increase of questions on the part of senior leadership about the involvement of Planned Parenthood last year,” Mr. Hammarley said.
Komen leaders, discussing the issue at a board meeting in October, decided to try solving the problem by adopting a new rule that would disqualify any applicant facing a federal, state or local investigation. The only current grantee affected by the rule would be Planned Parenthood, which is the subject not of a criminal or civil investigation but of an inquiry by a Republican congressman, Cliff Stearns of Florida, who is questioning whether Planned Parenthood has spent public money on abortions, which would be illegal. He was lobbied by anti-abortion advocates to begin the investigation, which is continuing, and is requesting more than a decade’s worth of records from Planned Parenthood.
When the decision was finalized in December, the thinking was that not announcing it publicly would help avoid controversy, said John D. Raffaelli, a Komen board member.
“We didn’t tell anyone except Planned Parenthood,” Mr. Raffaelli said. “We wanted to keep it quiet. We didn’t intend for this to be perceived as a victory for anybody. The whole approach was to not issue press releases to do anything to hurt Planned Parenthood.”
The first sign of trouble came when the Komen official who supervised these grants, Mollie Williams, resigned because of the Planned Parenthood decision. Ms. Williams, Komen’s managing director of community health programs, had been at the organization since 2006 and oversaw the distribution of $93 million to more than 2,000 community health organizations, including the Planned Parenthood centers.
Ms. Williams signed a confidentiality agreement with Komen, but said in an e-mail statement, “I believe it would be a mistake for any organization to bow to political pressure and compromise its mission.”
Despite Komen’s about-face on Friday, the conflict over its financing of Planned Parenthood is far from over. Anti-abortion advocates fired off angry statements. Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, called the reversal “deeply disappointing.” Carrie Gordon Earll, with Focus on the Family, said, “Komen would do well to remember who is it partnering with — a group that will stop at nothing to keep its funding.”
But Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, which raised nearly $3 million for its breast cancer programs this week — four times as much as it normally receives from Komen each year — hailed the reversal.
“I think there’s really been a chord struck over this issue, this issue of political organizations who are trying to politicize women’s reproductive health,” she said. “This kind of political bullying — I think folks are just saying, ‘Enough.’ ”
The Komen foundation itself now finds itself even more caught between these two poles.
“Is it possible for a woman’s health organization to stay out of the abortion issue and help all women?” asked Mr. Raffaelli, the Komen board member. “I don’t know the answer to that yet. What we were doing before was angering the right-to-life crowd. Then, with our decision in December, we upset the pro-choice crowd. And now we’re going to make the right-to-life crowd mad all over again. How do we stop doing that?”
This article, "" first appeared in The New York Times
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