ROSS DOUTHAT: The Media’s Abortion Blinders. “In many newsrooms and television studios across the country, Planned Parenthood is regarded as the equivalent of, well, the Komen foundation: an apolitical, high-minded and humanitarian institution whose work no rational person — and certainly no self-respecting woman — could possibly question or oppose. . . . Three truths, in particular, should be obvious to everyone reporting on the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. First, that the fight against breast cancer is unifying and completely uncontroversial, while the provision of abortion may be the most polarizing issue in the United States today. Second, that it’s no more ‘political’ to disassociate oneself from the nation’s largest abortion provider than it is to associate with it in the first place. Third, that for every American who greeted Komen’s shift with ‘anger and outrage’ (as Andrea Mitchell put it), there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified. Indeed, that sense of relief was quantifiable: the day after the controversy broke, Komen reported that its daily donations had risen dramatically. But of course, you wouldn’t know that from most of the media coverage. After all, the people making those donations don’t exist.”

UPDATE; Reader Tagore Smith writes:

I’m going to stay out of the argument about abortion, because I think other people are going to cover any point I might make. But I’d like to point out that advocacy for breast cancer research is not entirely (or should not be entirely) uncontroversial. It’s not that I want women to die of cancer- my mother died of a non-sex-specific cancer this year, and all I can say is that I wish she hadn’t. I’m still single, and I’m not ashamed to say that I loved my Mom more than I loved anyone else. Someone else very close to me had a breast cancer scare last year- a biopsy revealed that the growth was benign. So I am certainly not against saving women’s lives through research.

But I am male, and I seem to recall that men die of cancer quite a lot more than women do (I’m not an expert on this subject, so I could be wrong about this.) It seems to me that there is a limited pie available for cancer research, and that quite a lot of that pie is already going to breast cancer research. I think that advocating that more dollars ought to go to breast cancer research _should_ be controversial. The message sent, otherwise, is that men are expendable. I don’t see big blue-ribbon prostate cancer campaigns all that often. Maybe it’s just that the prostate is not as sexy as the boob….

Good point, and one that’s been made here before.