Republican lawmakers never pass up the opportunity to preempt access to abortion, even if that means hurting breast cancer sufferers. Thus, a vote on a bipartisan House bill that would have greenlit commemorative coins for breast cancer research – through donations to Susan G Komen for the Cure and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation – was shelved Tuesday and amended on Wednesday to exclude Komen entirely, because GOP members opposed the fact that Komen donates money to Planned Parenthood.

Let’s go over that again: a potential $8m fundraiser for the nation’s second-most fatal cancer in women was sidelined and then completely altered because one of the two proposed beneficiaries has given relatively small grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings, and Planned Parenthood spends about 3% of its resources on abortions. Apparently, some lawmakers aren’t above also penalizing breasts in the anti-abortion movement’s ongoing attempt to control the nation’s uteruses.

The 97% of Planned Parenthood resources that aren’t spent on abortion go mostly toward STD testing and contraception for low-income women – vital, sliding-scale health services. Contraception prevents the need to abort unwanted pregnancies in the first place, and affordable access to other women’s health services helps prevent pricey illnesses that end up on the public tab when poor people, lacking options in a country where the expansion of insurance access is blocked at every opportunity, use the ER for primary care or ignore conditions until they’re dire and expensive to treat. But that little bit that does go toward providing abortions – which are still legal here – repeatedly puts the organization in pro-life crosshairs.

This week, a conservative anti-abortion group released a misleading video that turned a secretly recorded conversation about tissue donation into a hit piece that was intended to leave viewers with the impression that the organization sells fetal parts. Let’s be clear: it doesn’t. And the deliberate misunderstanding gave abortion foes the fuel to protest a bill that would help raise funds for breast cancer research.

I shouldn’t have to add that the fact the funds would be dedicated to breast cancer research means that they couldn’t be earmarked for any non-research uses; they wouldn’t make it to Planned Parenthood. And even the Komen funds that do make it to Planned Parenthood don’t fund abortions anyway. But, apparently, any health issues that disproportionately affect women are all the same – valueless – to the men running the country when they’ve got a political point to make.

None of this is to say Komen automatically deserves to be a beneficiary of any fancy, government-backed initiative; the $4m the charity would’ve potentially gotten had the bill passed in its initial form would just be a tiny drop in its funding bucket anyway. And Komen is controversial among breast cancer advocacy communities for devoting the vast majority of its funds to “awareness” rather than scientific research; the group’s “early detection” mantra is misleading, because more mammograms find more early-stage breast cancers, which creates more “survivors” without lowering the death rate from advanced disease. Metastatic breast cancer, the fatal kind, remains incurable – and disproportionately kills black women in the US. Thus, the need for more research is vital – making it even more insulting to half the population that a deceptively edited video about abortion is being used to block money that Komen would have had to spend on vital breast cancer research.

Besides which, Komen’s own interactions with Planned Parenthood aren’t without controversy: in January 2012, an anti-abortion executive at Komen got the group to halt the organization’s annual contribution for breast cancer screenings to Planned Parenthood. It didn’t go well: the ensuing uproar forced Komen to backtrack three days later and 2012 donations dropped 22%.

But Komen’s shortcomings don’t change the fact that a fabricated narrative has now had real-life ramifications for women. The text of the bill that no longer includes them says that finding a cure for breast cancer “is a goal of the United States Government”, but apparently that’s only true as long as lawmakers can separate boobs from the rest of a woman’s body – which, unless they’re removed for being cancer-ridden, just isn’t going to happen.