What I see in the way that we reacted to the Komen debacle is perhaps the perfection of our coming together to say,

NO MORE!  We have had enough!

For me, the Komen story has been deja vu.  Many of the issues that have been highlighted by the many wonderful people who have documented this story are things I have written about before and I am so glad they have finally been aired in a way that has reached critical mass.

Without hesitation, I can say that of all the many topics I have ever written about, the Komen story is one of my least favorites.  But yet I have felt compelled to write about it again  last week and I am gratified by the attention the two pieces that I wrote on this blog received.  Today The Washington Post ran a piece that linked to my work and last week, the Institute for Public Accuracy included a link to one of them in a press release, the result of which was requests for numerous interviews with radio stations and print media from all corners of the country.  Here are links to two of them:

Sonali Kolhatkar interview with FPN’s Lucinda Marshall on KPFK’s Uprising

FPN’s Lucinda Marshall interviewed on WORT’s Her Turn

Let’s take what we’ve learned from the Komen incident about raising our voices together and keep this rolling because enough is enough, women’s rights are human rights and our lives and our health can no longer be used as political footballs!

As angry women have said repeatedly the last few days, it is not acceptable to advocate for breast health at the expense of our overall health.  The reason we have stood by Planned Parenthood is because it is absolutely essential to fund them because they provide essential healthcare for women that, for many, is simply not available elsewhere.  And yes, 3% of that care is providing abortions.  But as we insist on funding Planned Parenthood, what we really need to be asking is why it is that we are in a situation where we must depend on Planned Parenthood for these services that are frequently unavailable or unaffordable elsewhere.  The answer or course is the unrelenting attack on women’s health in Congress and state legislatures and a lack of single payer healthcare in this country (which Komen has reportedly lobbied against).

Over the years, Komen has accepted massive support from corporations that make all manner of products that have been linked to cancer and hawked all manner of pink stuff with cancer-related ingredients.  They have hammered about the need to be aware and get annual mammograms even while study after study has questioned this recommendation (and oh yeah, they have accepted contributions from the companies that make mammography equipment).

Komen has told us that being aware and early detection are the key, even though in many cases, this simply makes no difference in outcome.  They have hawked (and even trademarked) ” for the cure” (a trademark they have spent millions of  the dollars we have raced to raise defending), the shockingly expensive drugs that treat this awful disease, while taking large contributions from drug makers.

Komen has told us that we have to take personal responsibility while focusing on treatment, rather than looking for the cause while they take contributions from chemical companies, car companies and others who pollute the planet with  cancerous toxins.

To state the obvious, this is not healthy.  What is needed in this country is, first and foremost, single payer healthcare that provides full reproductive health services to everyone.  Secondly, as organizations like Breast Cancer Action and people like Dr. Susan Love have repeatedly said, we need to figure out what causes breast cancer and work to stop it, not just throw expensive treatments at it.  It also should be pointed out that breast cancer isn’t even the leading cause of death in women.  Heart disease is.  Interestingly, while more women get breast cancer than lung cancer, more women die of lung cancer which is far more likely to be deadly.  But breast cancer gets the attention and the money because diseased or not, we find boobs titilating.  But indulging in that fascination rather than prioritizing our efforts to address the diseases with higher mortality rates is literally killing women.

So enough with Komen and their pink guns and buckets of chicken and toxic signature fragrances.  It is time to demand full universal healthcare, (including reproductive health services) and a responsible medical funding policy, and to refuse to be complicit with the damaging ethos of pink ribbons.

–Lucinda Marshall

While this story has taken many by surprise, the reality is that Komen has a long history of ties to corporations and the political right.  I have written about Komen numerous times.  In Seeing Red About Thinking Pink, I reported that,

…companies such as General Electric and DuPont, which manufacture mammography equipment, and make generous donations to organizations such as Komen and ACS, also make products that have been linked to cancer. DuPont’s Teflon coating–which is used on many products, including non-stick cookware–is made with perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a chemical linked to cancer by the Environmental Protection Agency. General Electric is a builder of nuclear power plants that produce radiation, a known carcinogen. Both DuPont and GE have been sued for injuries and illnesses caused by the deliberate release of radiation at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation…

…AstraZeneca, maker of the estrogen-blocking drug Tamoxifen, is the primary corporate sponsor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Like other pharmaceutical companies, the company supports the American Cancer Society and the Komen Foundation. The financial interest of such companies clearly lies more in finding a drug “cure” than in addressing the environmental causes of the disease or promoting the benefits of lifestyle choices. Exercise, for example, has in numerous studies been shown to lower hormone levels and thus reduce the chance of getting or dying from breast cancer by as much as 60 percent.

and in 2005, in Does Breast Cancer Awareness Save Lives I pointed out that,

Yet organizations like the American Cancer Society and the Susan G. Komen Foundation routinely fail to address these issues. As it turns out, both groups have connections with numerous corporations in the chemical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries, many of which have an enormous financial stake in breast cancer. Good intentions aside, it is far more profitable for these companies to detect and treat breast cancer than to prevent it, leading to an enormous conflict of interest between their corporate well being and their charitable public persona.

The primary corporate sponsor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month is AstraZeneca, which makes the popular cancer drug Tamoxifen. Interestingly, Tamoxifen can also cause cancer and until recently, AstraZeneca also made a variety of other cancer-causing chemicals. Apparently the company has a thing about color marketing. Not only do they encourage you to think pink, they are also the maker of a frequent sponsor of the nightly network news, the little purple pill a.k.a. Nexium. Which begs the question of how corporate sponsorship of the news might impact how cancer ‘cures’ and causes are reported by the networks.

AstraZeneca is not the only company playing both sides of the cause/cure game. Dupont makes numerous chemicals that have been linked to cancer (including Teflon) as well as much of the film used in mammography. And General Electric makes nuclear power plants that produce ionizing radiation, a known cause of cancer as well as mammography equipment (which also perversely produces cancer-causing ionizing radiation). GE also owns NBC.

What these corporations understand is that supporting breast cancer awareness and funding is a great public relations gambit. As Barbara Brenner of Breast Cancer Action points out, “If you slap a pink ribbon on a product, people will buy it.” But where does the money raised by the sale of all these products go? Some companies clearly state what portion of the proceeds are donated, but many just say something along the lines of, ‘a generous portion of the proceeds will be donated to finding a cure for cancer’. The definition of ‘generous’ can vary widely and all too often there is no definitive accounting of how much was raised and who benefited from the proceeds. (2)

And what of organizations like the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, which sponsors the annual Race for the Cure? According to the Toxic Links Coalition, the race focuses on finding medical cures while ignoring environmental causes. In “Running From the Truth”, Mary Ann Swissler reports that the Foundation’s stock portfolio has included holdings in several large pharmaceutical companies as well as General Electric, one of the largest makers of mammographic material. (3) Their 2003-2004 Annual Report lists Ford (automobile exhaust has long been linked with cancer) and Johnson and Johnson (makers of numerous cancer drugs and diagnostic equipment) as Partners.

In 1998, Komen was the only national breast cancer group to back Tamoxifen as a preventative treatment for some women, which other advocacy groups objected to strongly. As it turns out, Tamoxifen’s maker, AstraZeneca is a strong backer of the Race for the Cure and in 2003 received the “Friend of the Fight” award from Komen.

The Komen Foundation is also notably silent on environmental issues. Interestingly, Occidental Petroleum, a major environmental polluter (think Love Canal) is a big Komen supporter. While Komen may have the best of intentions, as breast cancer activist Judy Brady points out, the problem is that they simply don’t see that “‘business as usual’ is why we have cancer”. (4)

ACS and Komen are both big supporters of annual mammography for women over the age of 40. Over and over, both organizations tout early detection as a lifesaver. They both also receive substantial funding from makers of mammography equipment such as GE and DuPont.

Komen’s cause branding has turned everything from paperclips to fried chicken emporiums pink, all too often at greater benefit to the pinkifying producers than to the cause.  It is time once and for all to run, not for ‘the cure’ but for the exit and tell Komen that you don’t get to pick and choose which part of women’s health you support and it is unacceptable to cause brand our lives while kissing ass with those whose corporate and political agendas kill women.  If you want to truly support women’s health, please consider making donations to organizations like Breast Cancer Action, SisterSong and Planned Parenthood.

You can let Komen know what you think of their move to defund Planned Parenthood here.

Additional worthy reading on this topic:

The Cancerous Politics and Ideology of the Susan G. Komen Foundation (more on political background to this story)

The Tragic, Craven Undoing of Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s Noble Mission (disproportionate impact of Komen’s decision on poor women)

(a)  The United States recognizes that promoting women’s participation in conflict prevention, management, and resolution, as well as in post conflict relief and recovery, advances peace, national security, economic and social development, and international cooperation.

(b)  The United States recognizes the responsibility of all nations to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, including when implemented by means of sexual violence.  The United States further recognizes that sexual violence, when used or commissioned as a tactic of war or as a part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians, can exacerbate and prolong armed conflict and impede the restoration of peace and security.

(c)  It shall be the policy and practice of the executive branch of the United States to have a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (National Action Plan).

Sec. 2.  National Action Plan.  A National Action Plan shall be created pursuant to the process outlined in Presidential Policy Directive 1 and shall identify and develop activities and initiatives in the following areas:

(a)  National integration and institutionalization.  Through interagency coordination, policy development, enhanced professional training and education, and evaluation, the United States Government will institutionalize a gender responsive approach to its diplomatic, development, and defense-related work in conflict-affected environments.

(b)  Participation in peace processes and decisionmaking.  The United States Government will improve the prospects for inclusive, just, and sustainable peace by promoting and strengthening women’s rights and effective leadership and substantive participation in peace processes, conflict prevention, peacebuilding, transitional processes, and decisionmaking institutions in conflict-affected environments.

(c)  Protection from violence.  The United States Government will strengthen its efforts to prevent    and protect women and children from    harm, exploitation, discrimination, and abuse, including sexual and gender-based violence and trafficking in persons, and to hold perpetrators accountable in conflict-affected environments.

(d)  Conflict prevention.  The United States Government will promote women’s roles in conflict prevention, improve conflict early warning and response systems through the integration of gender perspectives, and invest in women and girls’ health, education, and economic opportunity to create conditions for stable societies and lasting peace.

(e)  Access to relief and recovery.  The United States Government will respond to the distinct needs of women and children in conflict affected disasters and crises, including by providing safe, equitable access to humanitarian assistance.

The National Action Plan is a significant addition to U.S. policy and long overdue.  The potential impact of this order is huge.  In an address at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said,

This is not just a woman’s issue. It cannot be relegated to the margins of international affairs. It truly does cut to the heart of our national security and the security of people everywhere, because the sad fact is that the way the international community tries to build peace and security today just isn’t getting the job done. Dozens of active conflicts are raging around the world, undermining regional and global stability, and ravaging entire populations. And more than half of all peace agreements fail within five years. At the same time, women are too often excluded from both the negotiations that make peace and the institutions that maintain it. Now of course, some women wield weapons of war — that’s true — and many more are victims of it. But too few are empowered to be instruments of peace and security.

Clinton went on to cite examples of why the NAP is so crucial, pointing in particular to recent attacks on women in Egypt by security forces in the aftermath of the Egyptian overthrow of the mubarek government,

“This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonours the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people,” she told an audience at Georgetown University.

She called the events of the past few days “shocking”.

Unfortunately, there is nothing shocking about what happened in Egypt.  Women’s human rights improved somewhat during the decade preceding the overthrow of Mubarek, but this State Department report from 2010 points to the still systemic misogyny in Egypt before the uprising.  Specifics about violence against women include,

The law prohibits rape, prescribing penalties of 15 to 25 years’ imprisonment or life imprisonment for cases involving armed abduction. The number of cases investigated was small because women were reluctant to report rape. Spousal rape is not illegal. According to a 2007 study by the National Center for Criminal and Social Research, there were approximately 20,000 cases of rape annually.

Although the law does not prohibit domestic violence or spousal abuse, provisions of law relating to assault may be applied with accompanying penalties. However, the law requires that an assault victim produce multiple eyewitnesses, which is a difficult condition for a domestic abuse victim…

…The law does not specifically address honor crimes, in which a man violently assaults or kills a woman, usually a family member, because of a perceived lack of chastity. There were no reliable statistics regarding the extent of honor killings, but observers believed such killings took place during the year, particularly in rural areas.

Sex tourism existed in Luxor and at beach resorts such as Sharm El-Sheikh. Most sex tourists came from Europe and the Persian Gulf region.

There is no specific law criminalizing sexual harassment, but the government prosecuted sexual harassment under existing law. Sexual harassment remained a serious problem. A 2008 ECWR survey found that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in the country had been sexually harassed and that approximately half of women surveyed faced harassment daily.

Also, significantly, while women were actively involved in the uprising, like so many social movements before, women’s human rights were not an integral part of the agenda.  In fact in the aftermath, as Foreign Affairs points out,  the blowback against those rights has been a serious issue,

After the revolution, conservative forces argued that women’s rights laws passed under Mubarak, like all remnants of his regime, were illegitimate and should be repudiated. For example, several thousand Salafis demonstrated outside of al-Azhar University in Cairo in May, demanding the return of educational authority solely to fathers. The general secretary of the High Council of Islamic Affairs, a government body, called for lowering maternal custody ages from the current age of 15 to age six for boys and nine for girls. Challenges came from supposedly liberal forces as well. In April, the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists’ Syndicate held a conference condemning the current women’s rights standards in Egypt. Three months later, Judge Abdallah al Baga, president of the Family Court of Appeal, submitted a draft bill to the prime minister that called for abolishing khula divorce and reinstating, under some conditions, a practice in which husbands can forcibly return “disobedient” wives to their homes – a practice that has been outlawed since the 1960s.

That Clinton finds the recent violence “shocking” is baffling given that her own State Department produced a report pointing to systemic misogynist violence and abuse less than two years ago. Regardless of the overthrow of Mubarek, at no point has there been any indication that an improvement in women’s rights was on the table and as the Foreign Affairs quote about makes clear, there has been a great deal of concern that things may become worse for women.

There are other reasons to be somewhat guarded in being optimistic about the NAP–The U.S. didn’t give a fig about women’s rights in Afghanistan until it was politically useful to the selling of our invasion.  Ditto Iraq.   It is also worth noting that the U.S. does not consider itself subject to the International Criminal Court, which has the power to prosecute rape and sexual assault as a war crime, yet, as I pointed out in November,  it was very supportive of of the ICC’s charges of rape by Libyan forces prior to the overthrow of Qaddafi, despite the fact that neither Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch could substantiate the charges.

If the U.S. is serious about implementing the NAP, one good place to start would be in our own military.  While more sexual assaults and rapes are being reported and more charges being brought, the rate of conviction is still extremely low.  The NAP could also be used to address the severe impact that the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq  have had on women in those countries.  It can also be used to address the ongoing violence against women in countries like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo where they U.S. has been all but silent regarding these ongoing atrocities.

So while there is cause to celebrate the creation of the National Action Plan On Women, Peace and Security, we should not do so through a rose colored lens.  The NAP has the potential of being a very potent addition to such existing women’s human rights tools as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 which addresses many of these same points.  But as the United States’ selective support of the ICC indicates, we need to be vigilant in insisting that it not be subverted as a tool of U.S. imperialism.