The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation's website appeared to be hacked briefly early Thursday morning.
A banner on the website was changed from "help us get 26.2 or 13.1 miles closer to a world without breast cancer" to "help us run over poor women on our way to the bank."
(Compare the images at The Atlantic Wire.)
The nation's leading breast-cancer charity halted its grants to Planned Parenthood affiliates Tuesday. Planned Parenthood said the grants totaled $680,000 last year and $580,000 the year before for breast-cancer screening and other related services.
The Huffington Post's Laura Bassett reported that the move came less than a year after the Komen foundation hired a new vice president, Karen Handel, who publicly stated her opposition to Planned Parenthood in her 2010 campaign for governor of Georgia. The foundation said that the cutoff comes as the result of new rules adopted by the organization barring grants to organizations under investigation by local, state or federal authorities. Planned Parenthood is the focus of an inquiry by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) over its handling of federal funding.
Within 48 hours of news breaking that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation was cutting grants to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America for its breast-cancer screening program, PPFA has more than made up for the $680,000 in funds lost.
Thursday afternoon, Planned Parenthood announced that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was making a $250,000 matching grant. That comes in addition to pledges to Planned Parenthood totaling $400,000 from 6,000 donors in the first day, and a $250,000 grant from the Amy and Lee Fikes’ Foundation of Dallas.
The Komen Foundation, too, reported a spike in donations Thursday – 100 percent in the past two days. No hard numbers were available.
But the real battle – between two powerful women’s organizations – has only started. Planned Parenthood maintains that the funding cut was political, based on longstanding pressure on the Komen Foundation by opponents of abortion. Komen says that’s not true, and that the decision resulted from the adoption of stricter criteria that bar grants to organizations that are under government investigation.
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